Liz’s view
Name a past head of the Federal Communications Commission. Bet you can’t. Brendan Carr is quickly on his way to being, if not a household name, then at least a boardroom name. This week alone, he spurred a giant spectrum-license deal by telling EchoStar’s Charlie Ergen to use his airwaves or lose them and waded into two big channel fights, Comcast vs. the Yankees’ broadcaster YES Network and Google vs. Fox. (“We love football too @brendancarrfcc!” YouTube’s corporate X account responded, promising it’s working to reach a deal that will avoid a fall NFL blackout.)
Carr has launched formal reviews of nearly all the major broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS — though not Fox. He has used his regulatory cudgel to force Comcast, Verizon, and other companies to walk back their DEI policies. He investigated a radio station owned by Audacy for airing the location of immigration raids in San Francisco.
Critics say he’s censoring free speech. He doesn’t see it that way, though has defended his actions less as neutral regulation than as a rebalancing of the Biden administration’s stance toward right-leaning media. He told Semafor’s Ben Smith earlier this year that few people paid attention to a decision by Biden’s PCC to release public comments on a bid to deny the license renewal of a local Fox News station, calling the move “the definition of media bias.”
His prominence is surprising given that the FCC’s authority is strongest over the withering parts of media — broadcasters that use publicly owned airwaves — and doesn’t touch streaming. But the dance between new and old media gives him levers to pull. Carr has proven facile at navigating both, sitting for a color-commentator breakdown of his ceremonial first pitch at Yankee Stadium and latching onto Silicon Valley’s “time to build” narrative to tout his plan to replace America’s copper-wire grid with new technologies.
Biden’s breakout star, Gina Raimondo, managed to turn the Commerce Department, the hall closet of government, into an expansive remit — and launch her own national political career in the process. As YouTube’s corporate X channel wrote in its bid to quickly placate Carr this week: Stay tuned.
Room for Disagreement
Carr may run into a buzzsaw of conservatives’ own making. The Supreme Court, partly thanks to Trump’s first-term appointees, last year overturned the doctrine that gave significant deference to federal agencies. Lawrence Spiwak, president of the center-right Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies, told The Washington Post that Carr’s efforts, for example, to narrow Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in an effort to police what he sees as progressive bias by social-media platforms would be seen as “hypocritical” by a conservative majority on the court bent on weakening the “administrative state.” (Spiwak expounded on those thoughts in a piece for the conservative Federalist Society.)
Notable
Yanni Chen, legal director at advocacy group Free Press, predicted that Carr’s FCC would prioritize “corporate giveaways at the expense of individuals.” It hasn’t worked out that way.
The conservative American Enterprise Institute cautioned Carr to “resist the temptation to lead the FCC as a happy warrior in America’s broader culture wars.”
Columbia Journalism Review noted Carr’s efforts to expand the FCC’s powers to social media and streaming from traditional broadcasters: “The discordance between Carr’s public grandstanding and the FCC’s actual powers has continued since his nomination.”
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