Trump’s FCC Acts on Explicit Mission to Suppress Free Speech

And I can just go through a short list that I know people are well aware of. It includes, of course, the latest action by the ABC TV network to suspend Jimmy Kimmel from his late night talk show. Of course, he’s been reinstated as of today. Stephen Colbert, CBS canceled his contract. He’s still on the air, but not for long. And then of course we have lawsuits against the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and 60 Minutes. There have been settlements of lawsuits from CBS and ABC and others and then the Trump administration has blocked the Associated Press’ access to the White House. This administration is responsible for the most blatant attacks on the free press in American history according to Sen. Adam Schiff. And he asked the question, and I’ll ask you, what will be left of the First Amendment when Trump is done?

And so there’s just all sorts of grievances that people like Trump and Musk—and we can go on down the list—have and make about their supposed free expression. And of course, they’re free to say whatever they want. The First Amendment comes into play when government takes action and that’s exactly what we’ve seen from Trump so many times. I think we’ll probably talk mostly about the FCC tonight and current Chairman Brendan Carr’s words that led to the Kimmel suspension, as you said. Now Kimmel seems to be back on the air, at least at ABC. We haven’t heard yet as far as I know from the ABC affiliates, these giant conglomerates of those stations around the country. So we’ll see how it all plays out if indeed he does get back on the air on Tuesday, Sept. 23, which is where we sit right now.

But it’s not just the FCC, it’s not just there that we’ve seen these kinds of violations. Your list was great and there are many others we could talk about as well. There have been earlier on in the administration, threats against people who are trying to expose what Elon Musk’s DOGE was trying to do. There were tons of reporters injured and detained, targeted by ICE and by others in Los Angeles and now here in Washington D.C. And I’m sure Chicago, we’re seeing the same kinds of stories there. There’s a reporter named Mario Guevara that my organization has done a lot to try to support who was detained 100 days ago as of today simply for covering a protest. Now he has sort of an interesting immigration history. He’s legally in the country, but he was an immigrant from El Salvador at one point. And so he was in the process of trying to establish a different immigration status.

Again, though no question about his ability to be in the United States when he was doing this work. And yet he was detained now for several months on end, mostly because the government didn’t want him covering things. And they’re basically doing this to lots of dissidents or anybody who has a viewpoint they don’t like. If you’re not from this country—and even if you are—see threatening Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship kind of ridiculously. And yet Trump said that as well, “We’re going to put you out of the country. We’re going to put you outside of the protections of the First Amendment completely.”

So as I said, your list is great. It’s almost hard to keep your arms around all of them because there are so many of them. And it wasn’t even just once Trump was elected, it was before he was elected is when then chairman-in-waiting, Brendan Carr started on this path of trying to get every major television network to bend the knee to Trump and to stop saying anything that’s very fragile—and I would say very authoritarian —president doesn’t want to hear about himself.

But Matt, I did want to ask you to tell us about the connection between the federal approval of business deals such as mergers, big corporate mergers and the rush to cancel and censor Donald Trump’s critics. There’s certainly an unmistakable connection there. Tell us about it.

Well, those networks exist and they have business before the government, and as we’ve seen, they can be squeezed as well and threatened by the president or by Brendan Carr or other people that he deploys to do that. They don’t actually hold licenses though for their network operations. And the reason I’m being careful how I say that is ABC is a network and they distribute programming to lots and lots of affiliates. They do happen to own a few of them. So for your listeners there in the New York City, DMA as it’s called, Designated Market Area, they’re probably familiar with the ABC station, and that is actually owned by the American Broadcasting Corporation. So they do own a few television stations, but by and large, the vast majority of these network affiliates are owned by other companies. They’re not tiny. Brendan Carr has lately, in his position as the Trump FCC chair, tried to pretend that they’re just mom and pop local broadcasters, but these companies are quite massive on their own.

Sinclair is a pretty well-known one, and they were in on the party last week when they were telling the FCC and Disney that they would pull down Jimmy Kimmel. But another one that’s been less well-known up until now, but now suddenly it’s a lot more famous or even infamous, is a company called Nexstar. And they have, I think it’s something like 30 ABC affiliates already, depends on how you count. These companies tend to try to hide exactly how many stations they have and to do so to control more stations than they’re allowed to own under federal law. But they already have 164 stations around the country and they’re trying to buy what is the fourth largest television broadcaster, a company called Tegna, which owns another 64. Those are what President Trump and what people are talking about when they say, “Let’s yank their licenses.”

It’s not usually ones that are held by the big broadcast networks, although they do have a few in very large markets. It’s these other companies, too, that are if not more in the shadows, are less well known on the national stage because they tend to be companies that own lots and lots of local broadcast stations. And as I said, Nexstar and Sinclair last week were, I think, leading the charge before ABC and Disney even did anything. They were the ones trying to take down Jimmy Kimmel and whether that’s from their own politics, because some of these companies have decidedly conservative politics or whether it is to grease the skids for the merger approvals they need to get from the federal agencies controlled by Donald Trump’s appointees. Doesn’t really matter. Those are both bad motivations. They shouldn’t be bowing to government pressure or to this president being able to dictate coverage and punish those who disagree with him.

And it is that combination of both the political and then the business interests that we have no other word for, but corruption, where they’re very willing to silence themselves and others all in exchange for getting a deal approved or for getting some kind of payout. Or frankly just for getting the Trump administration off of their back. It’s really not all that much hyperbole to call. A lot of what we’ve seen as what it is, is bribery. And that’s where we’ve seen at least some members of Congress in some states saying, “Hey, we’re going to investigate these kinds of deals when they go down and are basically used to win government approval by promising something to Trump or to his appointees.”

That statistic is a popular one, about 5 companies owning 90 percent of the media. We don’t exactly use that one at Free Press. We did do a study just over the summer. It’s by a colleague of mine named Tim Karr, not the same as the FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, but Tim Karr, K-a-r-r, and we called it the Media Capitulation Index.

And there we’re tracking, it’s more like I would say 30 companies or so. And the issue with the stat use site is that it’s kind of hard to denote what counts as the media. Are we talking about local broadcast stations? Are we talking about networks these days? Are we talking about all the platforms that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta own? Are we talking about traditional print broadcasting, which today is often owned by hedge funds—or even people like Jeff Bezos at Amazon owning the Washington Post.

So the picture is bleak, as you say. That statistic maybe flattens out what we’re actually seeing. But you’re right, the trend has been over especially the last 30 years, and ever since the last time we had a major overall of the Telecommunications Act, that’s what allowed a lot of these broadcast and radio station mergers to really kick into high gear.

And you saw companies like what used to be called Clear Channel and then was called iHeartRadio, gobbling up radio stations all around the country. Now, radio is not quite the business it once was. So some of those chains are actually a little smaller than they were. But as I mentioned, Nexstar is already the largest TV chain in the country. And if this deal that they have before the FCC now—or I should say about to be before the FCC, they haven’t even filed their paperwork yet—then they would have stations in 44 states and the District of Columbia. That’s how big they would get if they’re not forced to divest and they would reach something like 80 percent of the country in their own telling. So these kinds of deals still have regulatory hurdles to clear. It’s just that all too often we’ve seen regulators willing to clear those away, especially in the Republican administration.

And while a company like Nexstar, as I said, hasn’t been that well known before, they certainly got a lot of recognition over the past few days. They always like to talk out of both sides of their mouth. They go to the federal government and they say, “Well, we don’t really control too many stations.” Or, “Pay no attention to us. Google’s a lot bigger.” They go to their investors though and they say, “Local broadcasting is a great business, the political ad dollars still flow. And if we let this deal go through, if we can get it through, we’ll reach 80 percent of U.S. television households.”

So that’s just one company able to have that much of a megaphone and then frankly, when told to by this president to use that megaphone to spout his agenda or to try to silence critics or even people who make any jokes about him. And that’s why it’s so dangerous. We see consolidation as a danger to viewpoint diversity and the fewer companies that you have to squeeze to do that the easier it can be for an authoritarian government to do so and exercise that dangerous power.

And what Brendan Carr said that precipitated a lot of this last week, it was only five days ago. As of the time you and I are talking here, Brendan Carr said, “Well, we don’t like what Jimmy Kimmel said. The president doesn’t like whoever he is pretending to speak for, doesn’t like it. And so if these stations don’t take action and rein in his conduct, then we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said, trying to sound tough. And he said, “If they don’t change their behavior, then there’ll be more work for the FCC to do. So, there’s really no mistaking the threat there, even though in trying to cover their mistakes, cover their overreach, there was some backpedaling from at least Brenda Carr, not from Trump himself, who can’t help but crow about these things. And Carr said, “I had nothing to do with it,” which is plainly the opposite of the intent he wanted and got in the middle of last week.

So you’re right, I mean, I don’t see this stopping anytime soon. At Freepress.net, that’s our website, we have different call tools, so you can call your local ABC station and express your disapproval of this kind of maneuvering and censorship. We’re talking about what Congress can do about this. So they said there’s been a lot of great energy in Congress. I don’t think it’s really coalesced around any one action and I’ll finish here. The reason this is sometimes hard to fight—even though it’s my job, that’s what we’ve been doing at Free Press for a long time, not just this administration but previous ones too—is what we’re seeing is this corruption now is just out there in plain sight. There’s no hiding it. They’re actually quite proud of it. And so I think a really important thing is just to stand up and say no and call it out.

And what we can do to change the law or prevent these kinds of things from happening in the future is sometimes tough to answer because this is already unlawful. There are already provisions in the Telecommunications Act that say the FCC can’t exercise the power of censorship or try to dictate content on television and radio stations just because it grants some licenses. So this stuff is already outside of the norm. It’s already beyond the pale. And that’s why I think sometimes it’s hard to even know where it’s coming from or what we can do about it. First step is just calling it out and refusing to comply in advance or comply on the basis of threats coming from the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.