President Donald Trump's chair of the Federal Communications Commission began going after the media deemed "unfriendly" to the president straight away. Now he's picking "norm-busting fights with the mainstream media," according to Politico.
In a Monday report about Brendan Carr, Politico noted that the first investigations began into NPR, PBS and Comcast on Jan. 20. Since then, Carr has taken the agency from "an independent regulator in favor of an openly personal embrace of Trump."
FCC members are picked from both sides of the political aisle, with the president choosing the chair. In the past, political experts explained that the FCC had an "independent course" where it operated "at a distance from the White House."
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That isn't happening anymore, the report said, showing a photo of Carr wearing a gold lapel pin of Trump's face.
"As he picks those norm-busting fights with the mainstream media, Carr is more quietly delivering on big deregulation promises to business interests. These moves are less headline-grabbing, but possibly more transformational," said the report.
These decisions have the power to impact billions of dollars in U.S. business, Politico said.
In a recent comment, Carr indicated a new business for the FCC could be in regulating online speech. The move would turn the commission into "a major enforcer against the content moderation decisions of the Big Tech platforms like Meta and Google. And despite his stepped-up scrutiny of some legacy networks and shows, he also wants to scale back government restrictions on the owners of individual radio and TV stations."
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) told Politico that there may have been past administrations that used the FCC as a kind of good-cop-bad-cop, but now, it has gone beyond that, "rewarding favored players and lending their weight to Trump’s highly personal fights," the report said.
“It may have been done under previous administrations, but not to this extent,” Blumenthal told Politico about Carr's pressure on the media. “It is the cumulative effect here that is so striking, the number and frequency of these efforts to intimidate and threaten, which is deeply dangerous to the broadcasters, the print outlets — they all have a stake here.”