In less than 100 days the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been converted from a media and telecom watchdog into a bizarre, rights-trampling grievance machine built for one purpose: to coddle and protect the ego of President Donald J. Trump.
Gone is the agency that used to occasionally care about whether broadband maps were accurate or if consumers are being ripped off by sneaky cable industry fees. Gone is the agency that sometimes cared about media consolidation, or had begun taking a closer look at decades of discrimination in next-generation broadband deployment.
In its place is an FCC custom-built to harass companies and organizations that fail to support Trumpism, usually via a rotating crop of publicity-seeking pseudo-investigations that often have a fleeting relationship to factual reality or the law.
Media and telecom policy experts have been taken aback by the quick transformation under Chairman Brendan Carr, who they say has abused agency authority and the law to harass journalists, cajole insufficiently deferential media companies, and bully telecom giants into taking an obedient knee to the administration.
“I have been shocked at the lengths that the Chairman will go to use the FCC as a vessel to address the president’s personal grievances,” says Gigi Sohn, a respected consumer advocate and former FCC staffer whose nomination to the agency was derailed by industry lobbying in 2023. “His implied threats over the DEI policies of major telecom and media companies have also gone beyond what I would have expected — but they 100 percent mirror what the president is doing with corporations, law firms, and universities.”
Donald Trump’s personal censor
Carr has lacked a voting majority for the first few months of his tenure, and in lieu of substantive policymaking, he’s focused on abusing FCC authority to bully companies seeking major merger approval — with the help of a right-wing media echoplex keen on amplifying manufactured offenses. The goal is supporting Trump personally — but also, civil rights leaders say, bolstering his administration’s effort to normalize discrimination and bigotry while reframing it as government efficiency.
“Carr is meddling into areas such as private contractual relationships between broadcast networks and affiliates for which the FCC has no jurisdiction,” says Andrew Jay Schwartzman, an expert on media law and senior counselor for the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. “While my trepidation quotient was high, he has far exceeded my worst expectations. Chairman Carr is out to prove he is the Trumpiest of all Trumpers.”
Paramount/CBS, which is planning an $8 billion merger with Skydance, has been a primary target for administration ire. Trump filed a legally dubious lawsuit against CBS last fall, claiming brevity edits of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris violated federal law. Experts across the ideological spectrum say it was an obvious effort to trample journalistic free speech.
Carr also claims, without evidence, that CBS’s edits violated the FCC’s broadcast news distortion rule, which is extremely rarely used to punish news outlets that falsify news reports, or take documented bribes in exchange for favorable or misleading news coverage.
Trump has called for CBS to lose its local broadcast licenses for 60 Minutes segments critical of his policies on Ukraine and Greenland. Carr has obediently launched a slew of new investigations into several local broadcasters, threatening the revocation of their broadcast licenses if they engage in journalism disfavorable to the administration.
Carr also recently threatened the local NBC broadcast licenses of Comcast, because the administration didn’t like Comcast-owned MSNBC’s coverage of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man illegally kidnapped by the Trump administration and sent to an El Salvador work prison.
A bipartisan collection of five former FCC officials recently told the FCC Carr’s actions are turning the FCC into the “White House’s personal censor.” Carr’s Democratic fellow FCC Commissioner, Anna Gomez, told attendees of a broadcaster conference earlier this month that the chairman is “weaponizing” the FCC’s licensing authority to “censor and control” journalism.
Carr, who has historically opposed meaningful oversight or scrutiny of telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T, has also launched multiple investigations into public broadcasters claiming, without evidence, they are violating rules restricting them from airing traditional commercials. The move comes as the administration looks to cut already modest NPR and PBS funding.
“Carr is carrying out Trump’s bidding to exact revenge and quell dissent in the media sector,” says Victor Pickard, professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. “The rationale for going after public media — purportedly because they’re airing commercials — seems especially disingenuous.”
Meanwhile, Verizon (which is seeking a $20 billion merger with Frontier) and Comcast (rumored to be eyeing a merger with T-Mobile) have both faced “investigations” by Carr for failing to embrace the administration’s assault on popular civil rights reforms. Legal experts suggest Carr has no solid legal footing on which to penalize either company. Carr has launched an equally dubious investigation into Disney for “violating FCC equal employment opportunity regulations by promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”
Even if the targeted companies aren’t actually guilty of anything, the accusations — repeated across Trump-friendly media sources, including Breitbart, The Daily Wire, OAN, Newsmax, Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, and countless others — cement the idea in the public’s head that they might be.
“Whether it has any ‘legal’ basis is beside the point,” Sohn says. “The point of these exercises is to intimidate regulators to see if they will bend to his will. So far, it’s working.”
Have your terrible cake and eat it too
To Carr, the FCC has all the power in the world or none at all, depending on who’s in charge and who stands to benefit.
The Trump administration hasn’t been subtle about its plan to hollow out the administrative state, giving large corporations carte blanche to misbehave. The Supreme Court’s Loper Bright ruling effectively destroyed U.S. regulators’ independence to enforce or create consumer protections without the explicit approval of a Congress widely viewed as too corrupt to function.
Combined with DOGE cuts and executive orders, the goal is to defang corporate regulatory oversight and consumer protection at unprecedented new scale. Many of Carr’s more bombastic efforts are providing cover for less headline-grabbing fare like ensuring the FCC can’t stand up to the whims of massive, unpopular U.S. broadband providers.
Data suggests that regional telecom monopolies have long discriminated against minority and less affluent communities when it comes to broadband repairs and fiber upgrades. Journalists have also found broadband providers charge minority, low-income neighborhoods more money for slower broadband speeds than their less diverse, more affluent counterparts.
Carr has already taken steps to unwind the FCC’s efforts to address discrimination in broadband deployment. He’s hinted at plans to end FCC oversight of issues like predatory usage caps, or the use of sneaky fees to covertly jack up the advertised price of internet access. He’s also made it clear he’d like to eliminate whatever’s left of U.S. media consolidation limits.
As part of his “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative, Carr has framed this as an act of government efficiency, though experts like Sohn and Pickard see it more as a symptom of corruption and regulatory capture. Everyone from telecoms to robocallers are lining up, demanding Carr dismantle popular consumer protections they’ve deemed harmful to their bottom lines.
Carr has indicated he’d also like to leverage authority the FCC doesn’t have to regulate social media companies like TikTok and erode Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a foundational cornerstone of free expression on the internet.
“Once he gets a majority, I expect that he may start to move on the items that he discussed in his Project 2025 chapter — deregulating media and broadband companies, attempting to preempt states’ and localities’ permitting processes, and seeing how far he can move to interpret Section 230 before the courts give him the Loper Bright treatment, which will not turn out well for him,” Sohn says.
This, it should be noted, is a dramatic and ideologically inconsistent shift from Carr’s time as a commissioner during Trump’s first term, where he repeatedly proclaimed that popular FCC efforts to protect consumers — from broadband privacy rules to net neutrality protections — were a dramatic abuse of agency authority.
The fight for the future is local
With competent federal consumer protection across agencies dead for the foreseeable future, and the FCC launching a frontal attack on American journalism, most experts agree the responsibility for protecting the public interest now shifts to the state and local level.
“Go to every state who will listen and get them to reinstate, or strengthen, their authority over broadband,” Sohn suggests. “Help unserved and underserved communities build their own broadband networks. The fight at the FCC is a losing battle, and while it should not be ignored entirely, putting too many eggs in the FCC basket is not a winning strategy for underfunded and undermanned advocates for competition and consumer protection.”
Seven states have passed net neutrality laws. Some states, like New York and California, have been eyeing laws requiring that broadband providers provide affordable broadband access to low-income residents. A growing number of states are passing “right to repair” reforms, all while highly localized, worker-owned independent media is gaining steam.
But states facing all manner of costly new legal fights across healthcare and immigration may not have the attention, staff, or resources to pick up the slack on corporate oversight and consumer protection. Courts and federal agencies may also try to further curtail state rights, like Trump’s first FCC did when its net neutrality repeal tried to ban states from protecting broadband consumers.
An informed electorate is a cornerstone of whatever comes next, something that can’t be attained without significant U.S. media reform, Pickard notes.
“We need to defend our media, especially public broadcasting, against Trump-inspired attacks,” he says. “But we also need to go on offense at the state and municipal levels to make public investments in local media institutions, which are rapidly disappearing.”
Pickard’s research has found the collapse of quality local journalism has resulted in vast news deserts where the American public is increasingly uninformed or misinformed. His university has also found that countries that invest heavily in publicly funded media tend to have healthier democracies, which explains some politicians’ interest in targeting them.
“For the long term we need something far more ambitious,” Pickard says. “For starters, we need to fund our public media in line with global norms and create structural alternatives — truly democratic and independent news outlets — to replace failing commercial models that are so easily captured and cowed by oligarchs.”
