Abolish the FCC
President Donald Trump has displayed an exceptional ability to combine the separate civil liberties abuses of his predecessors into a more comprehensive toxic brew. The latest example involved the ABC television network’s decision to oust late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for insensitive, partisan remarks about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. If ABC’s management had made that decision without pressure from the government, there would be no valid First Amendment issue involved.
However, comments that Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi made pointed to government meddling or outright coercion. “They give me only bad publicity [and] press,” Trump said last week, speaking about late-night show hosts. “I mean, they’re getting a licence. I would think maybe their licence should be taken away.”
As for Bondi, her contention that some of the reactions to Kirk’s assassination constituted “hate speech” that must not be tolerated echoed the increasingly authoritarian stance of left-wing establishment officials in Europe and their admirers on this side of the Atlantic. Ironically, Kirk had repeatedly and emphatically opposed such a rationale for censorship.
An even clearer indication of government involvement in Kimmel’s firing and the proliferating examples of attempts to cancel the careers of other administration critics came from the menacing remarks of Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the powerful regulatory agency that licenses radio and television stations. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said last week. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Even conservative stalwart Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was so alarmed at Carr’s remarks he accused him of using mafia tactics.
The behavior of Trump, Bondi, and Carr poses an alarming threat to the First Amendment. But that regulatory Sword of Damocles has existed since the creation of the FCC in 1934, and it has been utilized (admittedly with greater subtlety) on several occasions. The mere establishment of the FCC was dangerous, since it made radio (and later, television) outlets grudgingly tolerated stepchildren of the First Amendment. No pundit or humorist who circulated their work in newspapers, magazines, or pamphlets had to worry about losing a “license” and being put out of business. Owners of radio and television stations and the communicators they sponsored always had to worry about that danger.
Trump and his appointees appear to be more blatant than their predecessors about using the FCC to censor or harass critics in the news or entertainment media. (The extremely thin-skinned Trump has expressed outright fury at any journalists who have been “unfair” to him.) Nevertheless, Trump and his hypersensitive minions are hardly the first officials to adopt a menacing posture and attempt to weaponize the FCC.
One of the more troubling episodes took place more than six decades ago, during the administration of President John F. Kennedy. Paul Matzko, author of The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took On the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement, vividly describes how Kennedy’s administration used bullying tactics in an effort to shut down right-wing radio broadcasts. For example, “Kennedy instructed the Internal Revenue Service and the FCC to target the offending broadcasters with tax audits and heightened regulatory scrutiny. Within a few years, this censorship campaign had driven conservative broadcasters off hundreds of radio stations….”
Matzko observes that many of those same broadcasters “complicated Kennedy’s push for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the USSR in 1963, forcing him to spend political capital on an issue that had seemed like a sure thing before the Radio Right had gotten wind of it.” Kennedy soon concluded that not only the fate of the treaty, but the prospects for advancing his overall legislative agenda and winning reelection “hinged on undermining these radio critics.” The president and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, adopted a two-pronged strategy against their critics. One, they pressured the IRS to conduct intrusive audits of both unfriendly radio stations and individual financial contributors to conservative broadcast programs. Two, they weaponized the so-called Fairness Doctrine to compel radio stations to “balance” conservative programing by airing administration-friendly material. A refusal to provide balanced programming—as defined by Kennedy’s appointees on the FCC—would jeopardize the station’s FCC license, potentially putting it out of business.
To say the administration’s campaign impeded media opposition to the test ban treaty was an understatement. Matzko warns that the same impulse of government leaders to stifle dissent, especially on foreign policy issues, still exists. He cites a July 2017 tweet from President Donald Trump: “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” Matzko notes that, on the surface, Trump’s comment “made little sense given that NBC itself does not actually possess a broadcast license—individual stations do—and the Fairness Doctrine is history.” (The Fairness Doctrine was rescinded in 1987.) But the same impulse of an administration to use executive power to suppress negative coverage, Matzko reminds his readers, “is precisely what led President Kennedy to order one of the most successful government censorship campaigns in U.S. history.”
Intolerant presidents have never hesitated to use the FCC as an implicit (or occasionally, explicit) threat to intimidate critics in the news media. In 2021, the Biden administration pressured social media companies to censor content related to the Covid pandemic.
Indeed, the federal government was taking similar actions on Biden’s behalf even before his victory in the 2020 presidential election. In 2020, the FBI led social media companies to believe that allegations surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop were part of a “Russian disinformation campaign.” They were urged by multiple U.S. intelligence agencies not to succumb to Moscow’s deception and to refrain from circulating accounts that might lend legitimacy to Russian propaganda.
When a powerful government agency (especially one as secretive and ruthless as the FBI throughout its long history) “suggests” that news outlets suppress a story the authorities want buried, it is not a “suggestion.” Nor did the bulk of the legacy news media treat it as a mere suggestion. The laptop story received surprisingly little attention during the home stretch of the 2020 campaign, which is precisely what the Democratic Party and its allies in the FBI, CIA, and other components of the national security bureaucracy wanted.
Trump and his associates are attempting to escalate and make more systematic the censorship abuses that previous administrations imposed. It is imperative that a bipartisan coalition strongly rebuff this latest attempted power grab. Restoring the First Amendment should begin with a concerted campaign to abolish the FCC, thereby preventing any White House occupant from using that agency as a partisan or ideological weapon.
A temptation for some conservatives and libertarians to indulge in a bout of schadenfreude is understandable. To see some of the left wing’s most arrogant proponents of cancel culture and punishment for alleged hate speech or disinformation be bitten by their own venomous creations offers some grim satisfaction. However, it is a temptation that must be resisted.
If genuine proponents of liberty and constitutional government stand by passively as the Trump administration implements new measures of intimidation and repression, America’s already wounded system of liberty will be weakened further. Indeed, it might not recover, since those new tools also will be available for future occupants of the White House to advance repression to even higher levels. It is imperative to halt this ominous trend in its tracks immediately.
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