Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr threatened broadcasters with cancellation of their licenses if they did not \u201ccorrect course\u201d on news coverage.<\/p>\n
\u201cBroadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions \u2014 also known as the fake news \u2014 have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,\u201d Carr said in a social media post Saturday. \u201cThe law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carr posted his warning on top of a post from President Donald Trump complaining about coverage of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has also criticized news outlets for war coverage that he said \u201cmakes the president look bad.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s Carr\u2019s latest threat against television broadcasters after Trump has expressed displeasure with coverage, or with a particular reporter or late-night talk-show host. Trump has suggested that networks should lose their broadcast license due to unfair coverage. Such licenses don\u2019t apply to cable, streaming or print outlets.<\/p>\n
The FCC didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Even before Trump began his second term, he urged the FCC to \u201cimpose the maximum fines and punishment\u201d on CBS for alleged \u201cunlawful and illegal behavior\u201d when it edited a 60 Minutes interview with 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.<\/p>\n
In September, Carr suggested that local stations risked their broadcast licenses for airing ABC\u2019s \u201cJimmy Kimmel Live!\u201d after the late-night host accused Trump supporters of using conservative activist Charlie Kirk\u2019s murder to \u201cscore political points.\u201d<\/p>\n
The FCC doesn\u2019t directly license the national networks themselves, and therefore can\u2019t bring enforcement actions against them directly. Individual local stations \u2014 including those owned by the networks and independently owned affiliates \u2014 do hold FCC licenses and are legally responsible for complying with the agency\u2019s rules.<\/p>\n
Revoking licenses for content the administration doesn\u2019t like would be an unprecedented expansion of the FCC\u2019s powers and some attempts have been successfully challenged in court.<\/p>\n
After Carr\u2019s remarks on Kimmel, Nexstar Media Group Inc., the largest owner of local TV stations in the US, pulled the show from its 32 ABC stations. Sinclair Inc. also dropped the show from its ABC affiliates. Both companies restored the program to their stations in late September.<\/p>\n
The FCC launched an equal-time investigation into ABC\u2019s daytime talk show \u201cThe View\u201d after it had Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico as a guest in February when he was competing in the primary. CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert said his network said he couldn\u2019t air an interview with Talarico out of concern that Carr would consider it a violation of federal fairness rules.<\/p>\n
Colbert posted the interview on YouTube, where it got more than 9 million views.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr threatened broadcasters with cancellation of their licenses if they did not \u201ccorrect…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":524023,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,28,3092,10815,31776,22942,3,111,74,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-524022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-business","tag-fcc","tag-media","tag-media-bias","tag-national-politics","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-technology","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/524023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}