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.
"This is not a role for the federal government or the chairman of the FCC to be playing," said Tom Wheeler, who served in that role under Barack Obama, "and the danger here is what we just heard in that segment, that the president has been now talking about, which is that maybe we ought to remove the licenses from anybody who doesn't agree with me, and that's authoritarian control of the media."
"People frequently ask me, would you have done something like this?" Wheeler added. "No, there's a basic thing here called the First Amendment, which says the government does not get involved in this, and if that isn't enough, the statute of the FCC says in section 236 that you won'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 roving mandate to police speech in the name 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 'the FCC should promote free speech.' My favorite quote, and I'll quote here, is he said in 2023, 'censorship is an authoritarian's dream.' I thought at the time that he was standing up for free speech. It begins to sound like it was a playbook."
"This is what authoritarians could do," Wheeler added. "Come in and say, he said on CNBC that we can do this, I'm sorry, yes, CNBC, he said we can do this because of the permission, quote, 'the permission structure that President Trump's election has provided.' I just said a minute ago, 90 years of [the FCC] standing up for diversity of ideas, and now the chairman says the permission structure created by Donald Trump says, I alone can decide what's the right idea, and I alone will determine what's in the public interest. That's not his job."
