Anna Gomez talks about her concerns regarding the concentration of media ownership, FCC censorship and interference in the exercise of First Amendment right to free speech, the future of public media and the expansion of broadband access.
SCOTT HARRIS: We’re very glad to welcome to our Counterpoint radio program today, Federal Communications Commissioner Anna Gomez, appointed by President Joe Biden, sworn into office in September 2023, and today is the lone Democrat serving on the FCC. Commissioner Gomez has 30 years of public and private sector experience in international communications and law policy.
Commissioner, I know you’re very busy, so I want to thank you so much for making time for our conversation. And I want to begin our conversation by asking you to talk about the concern you’ve expressed during a series of speeches and talks that you’ve called your First Amendment tour. Well, you’ve declared that the First Amendment, freedom of speech, is foundational to our democracy. You’ve also stated your belief that the greatest threat to that freedom is coming from our own government. I wondered if you’d explain that.
ANNA GOMEZ: Yes. Well, first of all, it’s good to be with you and I’m happy to talk about this issue because it does alarm me what this administration is doing to silence critics, pressure media companies into providing it positive coverage and retaliating against anyone it disagrees with. And this is inconsistent, to put it mildly, with our obligations to comport with the First Amendment and our Communications Act, which specifically prohibits us from censoring broadcasters. What this administration has done is it has weaponized any authority it has in order to control speech and control media. And the FCC has been doing this on its behalf.
SCOTT HARRIS: One example of this is what happened at 60 Minutes. So after the decision by CBS News Editor-in-Chief Barry Weiss, newly appointed to cancel, I believe it was the Dec. 21st 60 Minutes story critical of the Trump regime’s deportation of immigrants who were abducted out of the U.S. and flown to El Salvador’s brutal CECOT prison. You said in a statement, “Reports that CBS News interfered with the editorial judgment of 60 Minutes’ producers is deeply alarming and strikes at the heart of press freedom.” I think this is the kind of thing that people are fearful the most of. And we could talk about what happened in Hungary in terms of the takeover of media there with Victor Orban as the authoritarian president in Hungary. But I wondered if you’d address what happened at 60 Minutes and address the wider fear of how this could be repeated in the future.
ANNA GOMEZ: Yes. In traveling around the country, I’ve talked to broadcasters, both local broadcasters, community broadcasters, citizens, elected leaders and they all express the same fear. And that is that this administration is trying to chill speech and that it might be working. What I hear from broadcasters is they fear reporting on anything that’s going to infuriate this administration because they fear retaliation from the administration. Even initiating an investigation can be ruinous to a broadcaster that doesn’t have the resources to respond to it.
So what happened with 60 Minutes? 60 Minutes had a interview with Kamala Harris and it edited the interview basically for brevity, which everybody does. If you do an hourlong interview and you only show 10 minutes of it, you have to edit things out. Well, we got a complaint from a partisan organization that really does the will of this administration and that complaint said that the editing of the interview was done to favor then-candidate Harris prior to the election and that that was called news distortion.
It’s not news distortion. It’s really just editing for brevity and clarity. But what the FCC did was the expert staff dismissed that petition—that complaint, sorry. And it did so on First Amendment grounds and also because it failed to state a valid claim of news distortion. News distortion requires intentional distortion by the management of the local broadcaster that’s broadcasting the actual clip. So I’m going very long because it’s important to note that we did dismiss that, by the staff of the FCC dismissed it in, I believe, January of last year. Well, as soon as this administration came back into power, the FCC revived the complaint against 60 Minutes and it put out a public notice asking the public whether it thought there was a violation of the FCC’s rules. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think we should do law enforcement by mob.
I think we should do any enforcement by the experts that know the FCC’s rules, but that was not what this commission did. This commission then pressured CBS to turn over its video of its full video of the interview with the vice president and the transcript, which CBS eventually capitulated and did. And lo and behold, if you look at the video and you look at the transcript, you see there was absolutely no distortion of what was said. It was merely broadcast for brevity. And it was the clips that were shown in the previews that people were complaining about.
Meanwhile, the president had sued CBS for $16 million or no, he had sued them for, I forget, a billion dollars. And the FCC, meanwhile, also had a pending merger or really purchased by Skydance of then Paramount. And so this all was done in order to pressure then-Paramount to settle with the president the lawsuit.
So finally, Paramount settles the lawsuit and pays him $16 million. Lo and behold, the FCC immediately grants the transaction between Paramount and Skydance. But as part of that grant, Paramount promised to do two things. It would eliminate any diversity, equity, and inclusion programs within Paramount, which is something this administration has insisted on with every transaction. And it would appoint an ombuds person, what I call a bias monitor that would report directly to the president of Paramount and would field any complaints about the content of CBS and bias in the news.
So this administration is now requiring companies to appoint monitors to make sure that anything that they’re doing is something the administration likes. And that’s worrisome. And it’s worrisome to hear that the management of the news is now interfering in the editorial judgment and deciding what is and what isn’t worthy of news to be reported. We need a free fourth estate because we need them to hold power to account. If we don’t have a free fourth estate, then that weakens our democracy.
SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely. And in the view of many freedom of speech advocates, it’s clear that unregulated media mergers now pose a real threat to U.S. press freedom. In August, CBS News parent company, Paramount, as you said, was taken over by David Ellison and his father, tech billionaire, Larry Ellison, who’s a Trump ally and they installed Bari Weiss at CBS to pursue what they called an anti-woke agenda in the news division.
And today, the Ellisons, the father and son have launched a hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers Discovery Company that could result in a transformation of one of their properties, CNN, the cable news network, into what many fear will become like Fox News, a Trump, MAGA megaphone, or propaganda platform. I wonder if you would just talk about the connection between these media mergers by Trump allies in particular, these oligarchs and what we may see in the future in terms of a press that no longer operates as the fourth estate, as you said, to hold those in power accountable.
ANNA GOMEZ: Yes. I have been very concerned about the really vast and unchecked consolidation in media. And what worries me is that that unchecked consolidation is going to lead to less community-driven news. We really need everyone to have access to news and a diversity of viewpoints in their communities so that they can become civically engaged. They can get local information about their school board or their city council. They want to know what the trash schedule is. They want to know what the weather is going to be for the day. The more we have this consolidation of media, the less you’re going to have these types of very focused community news. Couple that with the defunding of public media, which in a lot of areas, the only local broadcasts, whether they’re radio or television, are by their public media, you really are going to lose a lot of the civic engagement that we would like to have for our viewers and our listeners nationwide.
So all of this consolidation is only helping the billionaire corporations that want to control at a national level what the localities are seeing. And that is what I fear we will see with all of this consolidation.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you, commissioner. I wondered if you would discuss some of your views on controversial decisions and actions taken by FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who, as our listeners probably know, was appointed by Donald Trump. Back in September, FCC Chair Carr suggested that ABC Late Night Host Jimmy Kimmel should be suspended. And after comments he made about the suspect in the Charlie Kirk assassination with Carr saying, quote, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” ABC and its local affiliates soon after suspended Kimmel’s show indefinitely—a real stunning move that raised serious First Amendment concerns. And then there was a furious public backlash, people ending their subscriptions and it was a real powerful boycott and Kimmel eventually got his job back. What are your concerns about the direction that Trump FCC is headed towards when it comes to reigning in free speech? Or as they did in this case, target one or more commentators, comedians, news people, journalists—all that’s pretty concerning.
It seems like Brendan Carr maybe took a step back after that public backlash, but are you concerned we’re going to see more of that in the future?
ANNA GOMEZ: I’m concerned that this administration will continue to try to weaponize whatever levers of power it has in order to control the media and to retaliate against those that speak against it. What we saw with the Jimmy Kimmel episode was just very public. But we are seeing this day after day after day, whether it’s threatening reporters with jailtime or threatening to revoke licenses or pressuring local broadcasters to preempt programming that this administration doesn’t like. And it’s important that we keep in mind that our actions at the FCC have to be grounded in the First Amendment and the Communications Act prohibition on censorship of broadcasters. What this FCC is doing is it is sending a signal to all the local broadcasters that it must air programming that it likes and not air programming that it doesn’t like, or this FCC is going to retaliate against them.
The FCC is using this vague standard that they call the public interest standard, which by the way, there is a public interest obligation to the broadcasters to serve their local communities. The problem is the FCC’s weaponizing that standard and using it very vaguely to mean anything it doesn’t like. If a broadcaster broadcasts Jimmy Kimmel, then that doesn’t meet their public interest obligations. So I’m very concerned. I’m very vigilant of this. This is why I embarked on a First Amendment tour because I need everyone to see what is happening and to push back against this administration because we don’t want to see the fraying of our constitutional freedoms and the free press.
SCOTT HARRIS: Just a quick question on the congressional role here. Obviously, the Republicans control the House and Senate and they seem fully on board with this misuse of the FCC as you and others see it, but are there any guardrails that could be put in place in the future? Let’s say Democrats control one of the Houses of Congress. What would you suggest be put in place to prevent the FCC from being used as a political censor?
ANNA GOMEZ: I have called for the FCC to define what it means by what violates the public interest standard because we do have rules in the book. We have rules about children’s television, meaning that broadcasters have to have a certain amount of educational content for children and they have to limit the number of advertisements that they show during the children’s programming. That is pursuant to statute and we have those rules in place. The FCC could in fact come out with the rulemaking that says, “Here’s specifically what we want to see.” And then if that crosses the line on violating the First Amendment, then I imagine it would take its course through the courts and the FCC would lose. Which is what the FCC would do, by the way, if it actually fulfills its threats because the FCC is violating the First Amendment if it tries to revoke a license or to take action against broadcasters because of the contenttheir lawful content of their broadcasts.
But if the FCC won’t do that, Congress can do that. Congress can amend the Communications Act to tell us specifically how it is that they want us to wield our public interest authority in order to provide guardrails on the FCC so that it doesn’t abuse its authority in the future.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right. You’ve criticized the FCC’s improper use of its news distortion policy. You mentioned that earlier, saying that the FCC does not have the authority, the ability or the constitutional right, as you just said here, to go after broadcasters for their news content. I wonder if you explain what the news distortion policy says. I think it’s been in place for, what, some 50 years and it’s taken this really worrisome turn just recently.
ANNA GOMEZ: Yes. So the news distortion policy applies to significant news events and not just some incidental news. And it prohibits the intentional distortion of news. One example that’s given when you talk about this is when there was a broadcaster that exploded a … I don’t even remember what kind of car it was, and it was supposed to be about a risk of gas tanks erupting or something. And they actually exploded the car and made it look like that was in fact caused by whatever this defect they were saying was.
An intentional distortion in the provision of news. Now, the FCC’s reaction to that was just to admonish the station, not to threaten to revoke its license, but that’s neither here nor there. And the news distortion policy applies to the local stations. And like I said, it must be intentional by the management of that local station. It’s a very difficult standard to actually prove, because of that intentionality. Now, it’s been rarely invoked for that reason. And what it does not give the FCC the mandate to do is to delve into news editorial decisions by these broadcasters. It also, by the way, and I think it’s really important to say this, we hear a lot about bias.
The FCC does not have the authority to police bias. Bias is just another word for viewpoint, and viewpoint is protected by the First Amendment and by the Constitution and by our Communications Act against FCC actions.
So I do say the FCC’s threats to use this news distortion policy or the broadcast hoax rule against broadcasters is toothless because it would never survive judicial scrutiny because these are not violations of these rules or policies.
SCOTT HARRIS: Given some of the alarming ways in which the Trump administration’s FCC is attempting to censor political speech that it opposes, as we’ve talked about here, there’s a natural tendency for people in broadcast media to be fearful about lines they might cross that could end their careers, get their media outlets in trouble, incur huge monetary fines that nobody can afford. Do you believe that media producers and news reporters, commentators should respond to this new environment by self-censoring or consciously keeping a low profile to avoid public criticism that could result their popping up on the FCC’s radar and suffering penalties?
I see a lot of this firsthand being involved in community media where our budgets are tiny. We’re always on the edge of bankruptcy and there’s little or no capacity to hire high-priced lawyers to defend themselves, ourselves. There’s a lot of fear out there. And I’m wondering, in this very troubled time in terms of free speech and censorship in the Unitited States and the role the FCC’s taken, you accepting, of course, there’s a lot of fear out there.
And I’m wondering what your advice would be to broadcasters in terms of should they just avoid criticizing this administration until there’s a new administration in power?
ANNA GOMEZ: The threats are the point because that is exactly what the administration wants. The administration wants to bring every reporter to heel so that it can tell viewers and listeners what it wants to tell, and there is no pushback. And that is exactly why we have freedom of the press, and that is exactly why it’s important to protect the press. The press holds power to account. It’s very uncomfortable. I don’t enjoy it when I get probing questions from a reporter, but it’s important that we respect that for our democracy. And you’re exactly right that there is fear everywhere. The chilling is happening actively and that is why I’m conducting this First Amendment tour because I’m trying to inspire people to push back because if we don’t push back, then what we are allowing is our democracy to fray and we lose our constitutional freedoms.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you. With the federal defunding of National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is there a need in your view to restore that funding in the future if the political planets align, or do you envision new structures that might be necessary to sustain and strengthen independent public media so it’s not so vulnerable to the political wins going this way or that way? There might be new structures that could, in the long run, be more effective in ensuring there’s always going to be a viable alternative to for-profit news and entertainment programming. Public media does things corporate media doesn’t want to do and usually can’t do. Yeah. I wonder what your view is on public media and its future funding.
ANNA GOMEZ: Yes. I was actually heartbroken at the defunding of public media and I’m watching very carefully what’s happening with the budget bills right now, because there are ongoing discussions among the Republicans to include funding for local media in the appropriations.
But apparently this administration is pushing back very hard on those discussions. So, what did we lose? We lost educational programming. We lost news, local news, national news and we lost our backbone for our emergency alert system that local public media provides. And there are communities that only have public media, very remote communities. And they’re not mom and pop shops. They’re small operations with maybe one reporter working half a day, but still providing such important local information, disaster and emergency information. Really, public media is extremely important. To me, if we are going to allow the consolidation of all the local broadcasters under national ownership, then that makes public media all the more important.
So we talk a lot about, well, commercial local broadcasters are facing all this competition by streamers, so we need to just let them do anything they want so they can compete in that environment. But streamers aren’t producing the local content. It’s the local broadcasters that produce that and it’s local media, it’s local broadcasters. Say you get your news on TikTok and you see a news video, it’s from a local station usually. We need local media. So we do need to have this conversation. It is very urgent that Congress refund public media so that communities do not lose this extremely important resource and the public doesn’t lose emergency alerts because of the loss of this funding.
SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time. I’ve just got one last question if you’ve got another minute or two.
ANNA GOMEZ: Sure.
SCOTT HARRIS: I’ve read that one of your priorities at the FCC is to support broadband access nationwide. And under the FCC’s current leadership, I understand that the goal of expanding access to fast and affordable broadband Internet has been really abandoned, scuttled. And I wondered if you can explain the current status of federal broadband policy and your views on broadband access and its importance and how you think that current policy should be changed.
ANNA GOMEZ: Thanks. Yes, that is one of my top priorities—it’s ensuring that everyone everywhere has access to affordable broadband. This administration seems to be focused only on deployment of broadband, although even that it has not gotten very far on despite severely criticizing the last administration for that very issue. But it seems to be having a, “If they build it, they will come” mantra of if we just give the providers the resources and they can provide broadband service, it will lead to affordable broadband for everybody. That’s just not true. And it’s the affordable piece that I really worry about, as well as ensuring that users know how to use the broadband. So we need affordable programs in order to support those who can’t afford it. And we need digital literacy so that people can actually take advantage of all of the benefits of broadband. This administration has done the opposite. Right?
It eliminated the funding that Department of Commerce had for digital equity programs, which were really supposed to be about digital literacy and affordability. And then it ripped away the funding that the FCC provides for hotspots by schools and libraries and for wi-fi on school buses so that kids can do their homework and to get the digital literacy skills needed in order to participate in the digital economy.
And then for hotspots from the library, that’s where seniors and people who can’t afford broadband at home are able to actually get broadband connectivity so they can schedule their healthcare appointments, so that they can apply for jobs. So all of the things that we have to do online now, because that’s where the world is. So if we’re going to succeed in being the leader globally in artificial intelligence, which this administration says is what it wants, then we need to make sure that every community and every household in this country has access to high-speed connectivity or those communities are not just going to have a digital divide, they’re going to have a digital chasm.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. Well, I want to thank you for spending time with us. And this conversation’s been a little bleak or just depressing. And I’m just wondering, as you sit there at the FCC outnumbered and all these votes that you take, what gives you hope that there’s something over the hill that’s going to be better?
ANNA GOMEZ: Well, in terms of the First Amendment, I get support across the ideological spectrum. There are many out there, the majority of people with whom I speak that agree with me and want to continue to ensure that we have a free press and freedom of speech and that that is inviolate.
In of my other priorities, we do take actions in order to support innovators with our spectrum policies in order to support national security and public safety. So it’s not 100 percent terrible. I am alarmed by some of what’s happening, but there are some things that we do on a bipartisan basis that I actually think are positive and I’m happy to support.
SCOTT HARRIS: Okay. Well, Commissioner Gomez, thank you so much for spending time with us and your important and lonely work at the FCC, and we’ll hope for that change to come at some point, so you won’t be so.
ANNA GOMEZ: Thank you.
SCOTT HARRIS: And very much appreciate all your important work and for, again, taking time to talk with us today.
ANNA GOMEZ:
Thank you. It’s good to be with you.
