At some point, you have to stop calling it a pattern and start calling it a strategy. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr spent part of his weekend at Mar-a-Lago with President Donald Trump — and sure enough, the latest round of license-revocation threats wasn’t far behind. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think Carr was putting together an audition reel for a prime-time slot on Fox News, Newsmax, or OAN.
That’s not an insult dressed up as a joke. It’s an honest observation about where Carr’s priorities seem to lie.
On Saturday, Carr posted a warning on social media aimed at broadcasters, declaring that those “running hoaxes and news distortions — also known as the fake news — have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.”
Bold words. They’re also largely empty ones. The FCC hasn’t denied a license renewal in decades, and any government action against a licensee would trigger a protracted legal battle with First Amendment implications. Anna Gomez, one of Carr’s contemporaries at the FCC, said as much in a post on social media. “The FCC can issue threats all day long, but it is powerless to carry them out,” she said. “Such threats violate the First Amendment and will go nowhere. Broadcasters should continue covering the news, fiercely and independently, without fear of government pressure.”
Legal experts agree. “Chairman Carr’s threats are hollow,” public interest lawyer Andrew Jay Schwartzman told CNN.
But hollow threats, where the threatmaker seems like the big bad wolf, make for great television, and that seems to be the point.
Carr was at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort on Saturday and was seen talking with Trump there, according to a report from CNN’s Brian Stelter. Coincidence? Doubtful. Carr’s post on X came directly after Trump criticized The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and “other lowlife papers” for their coverage of the U.S.-Israel war in Iran.
The sequencing wasn’t subtle. Trump posts. Carr amplifies. That’s the arrangement, and Carr’s more than comfortable playing his role.
It’s worth being clear about what Brendan Carr is doing here. He’s not acting as an independent regulator operating in the public interest. He’s functioning as a mouthpiece — a more than willing and eager one — for the President of the United States. That might be acceptable if it came paired with meaningful regulatory work. It doesn’t. Instead, Carr’s chairmanship has been defined by headline-chasing and culture war theatrics. His bully-pulpit strategy has been evident for more than a year, as he’s railed against alleged media bias and welcomed disputes with the likes of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel.
Here’s the thing about the FCC — and really, about most regulatory bodies. Most Americans couldn’t tell you who chairs it. That’s not ignorance, it’s the way it’s supposed to be. Think about the referees working an NFL game on Sunday afternoon. You don’t know their names. You don’t notice them until something goes wrong or until one of them decides to make the broadcast about themself rather than the game being played. The best officials are invisible. They do their jobs quietly, competently, and without demanding attention.
The same should be true of the people running the FCC. The commission has real work to do. The problem is none of it is glamorous. Most of it won’t land you on a talk show. It won’t get your name trending on social media. But it matters, and it’s what the job actually requires.
Carr’s apparently not interested in that version of the job. He’d rather be the story than run the agency. Media advocacy groups have argued that Carr is trying to pressure media companies into submission and self-censorship — achieving what Trump wants without explicit government action and plausible deniability, even when the dots aren’t hard to connect.
That’s a damning characterization, but it’s hard to argue with given the evidence. Nexstar and Sinclair were accused of backing down before Carr when they pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show from their ABC affiliates — both companies had pending business before the FCC at the time.
There’s a reason people in broadcasting know Brendan Carr’s name. There’s a reason the general public has started to recognize it, too. It isn’t because he’s made a series of consequential regulatory mistakes. It’s because he keeps showing up on your timeline, echoing the president, threatening broadcasters, and making sure the cameras find him in the process.
That’s not what an FCC chair is supposed to be. Then again, maybe that’s not what Brendan Carr actually wants to be.
Barrett Media produces daily content on the music, news, and sports media industries. Sign up for our newsletters to stay updated and get the latest information right in your inbox.
