A former Federal Communications Commission chairman suggested that President Donald Trump's choice for that role may have broken a specific federal statute in addition to violating the First Amendment.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr told a right-wing podcaster Wednesday that ABC and its parent company Disney should "take action" against talk show host Jimmy Kimmel for his comments about slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and hours later the companies put his program on ice indefinitely.
"Thisis not a role for the federalgovernment or the chairman ofthe FCC to be playing," said Tom Wheeler, who served in that role under Barack Obama, "and thedanger here is what wejust heard in that segment, thatthe president has been nowtalking about, which is thatmaybe we ought to remove thelicenses from anybody whodoesn't agree with me, andthat's authoritarian control ofthe media."
"People frequently ask me,would you have done somethinglike this?" Wheeler added. "No, there's a basicthing here called the First Amendment, which says thegovernment does not get involvedin this, and if that isn'tenough, the statute of the FCCsays in section 236 that youwon't do these kinds of things."
Wheeler accused Carr of using his leverage to approve corporate mergers to "bludgeon" regulated companies like Nexstar Media and Sinclair Broadcasting, both of which have corporate mergers awaiting his approval and pressured Disney to drop Kimmel, and he said the chairman's justification for getting involved was improper.
"The FCC does not have a rovingmandate to police speech in thename of the public interest," he said.
Wheeler next pointed out Carr's role in crafting the Heritage Foundation's right-wing Project 2025 blueprint for Trump's second term, and he highlighted one passage that signaled where he intended to take the agency he now leads.
"So he wrote the infamous Project 2025 chapter on the FCC," Wheeler said. "The first seven words are 'theFCC should promote free speech.' My favorite quote, and I'll quotehere, is he said in 2023, 'censorship is anauthoritarian's dream.' I thoughtat the time that he was standingup for free speech. It begins tosound like it was a playbook."
"This iswhat authoritarians could do," Wheeler added. "Come in and say, he said on CNBC that we cando this, I'm sorry, yes, CNBC,he said we can do this becauseof the permission, quote, 'thepermission structure that President Trump's election hasprovided.' I just said a minuteago, 90 years of [the FCC] standingup for diversity of ideas, andnow the chairman says thepermission structure created by Donald Trump says, I alone candecide what's the right idea, and I alone will determinewhat's in the public interest.That's not his job."