Brendan Carr, newly installed as chairman of the FCC under the new Trump administration, is reviving a trio of complaints aimed at NBC, ABC and CBS content, ones that his predecessor dismissed for being “at odds with the First Amendment.”
The revived complaints come from the conservative Center for American Rights and generally align with Trump’s gripes about media coverage during the 2024 presidential campaign.
The complaints include one against ABC’s Philadelphia affiliate, WPVI-TV, alleging bias in ABC’s hosting of the September presidential debate; one against WCBS-TV in New York that accuses CBS of “news distortion” in the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris; and another against WNBC-TV in New York for alleged violations of the equal time rule when Saturday Night Live featured Harris in a cameo the weekend before the presidential election.
Just last week, before she resigned, FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, appointed by President Joe Biden, dismissed the three complaints, as well as another one filed by the Media and Democracy Project, which challenged the license of Fox-owned WTXF-TV in Philadelphia. That complaint alleged that the revelations from the Dominion Voting System defamation case against Fox News showed that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch lacked the “character” to hold a broadcast license.
Carr’s order, however, does not revive the Fox complaint.
In restoring the complaints today, the FCC said that the dismissals were “issued prematurely” and “based on an insufficient investigatory record for the station-specific conduct at issue.” The agency said that the complaints require “further consideration.”
In her statement last week dismissing the complaints, Rosenworcel said, “The facts and legal circumstances in each of these cases are different. But what they share is that they seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment. To do so would set a dangerous precedent.” She also warned that the agency “should not be the president’s speech police.”
When he took office on Monday, Trump signed an executive order on “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” Among other things, it says that “no taxpayer resources are used to engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” The order, though, calls out the Biden administration for “exerting substantial coercive pressure” on social media companies over their content moderation practices.
But as recently as earlier this month, Trump has threatened major media companies over content that he does not like. He warned that Comcast should “pay a big price,” as he was irate over something said by NBC’s late night host Seth Meyers.
Newsmax first reported on the restored complaints.
During the presidential campaign, Trump sued CBS for $10 billion over the way that 60 Minutes edited the Harris interview, under Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a novel application of a law typically directed at false advertising claims. A federal judge in Texas, where the lawsuit was filed, has given Trump until Jan. 24 to respond to CBS’ motion to dismiss the case. CBS’ attorneys wrote in a filing last month that Trump’s “attempts to punish” the network “for their editorial judgments is barred by the First Amendment.”
The Center for American Rights also has called for FCC conditions over news coverage to be placed on the pending Skydance-Paramount merger, and Carr has suggested that their 60 Minutes complaint would be “likely to arise” as the FCC reviews the transaction. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Paramount Global has had internal discussions about settling the 60 Minutes lawsuit as one of the options as it tries to secure approval. 60 Minutes has called claims that it deceitfully edited the Harris interview “false,” with a CBS News attorney denying that the network was being deceitful and instead had to truncate the segment for time.
The Center for American Rights and Carr have pointed to the FCC’s “news distortion” policy, in which broadcast stations are subject to enforcement only “if it can be proven that they have deliberately distorted a factual news report.” But the FCC has not attempted to enforce the policy in decades, per Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior counselor at the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society.
In a response filed earlier this month, attorneys for Skydance and Paramount Global wrote that news coverage conditions would be “blatantly unconstitutional.” They wrote that they were “foreclosed by the First Amendment and unequivocal Supreme Court precedent. All of the Center’s complaints about news coverage, debate moderation, and editing of interviews fall squarely within CBS’s “editorial discretion in the selection and presentation” of content protected by the First Amendment.”
Anna Gomez, one of two Democrats on the commission, said in a statement of the complaints, “The First Amendment is a pillar of American democracy, and our country needs a press free from interference from regulators like me. In fact, the Communications Act explicitly prohibits the Commission from censoring broadcasters. We must respect the protections of the First Amendment and the restrictions in the Communications Act.”
The ABC complaint is over the way that the network handled the September presidential debate against Trump and Harris. Trump had called for ABC to lose its license after he complained of fact-checking done during the debate by the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis.
The NBC complaint had to do with the FCC’s equal time rule, which requires stations to give candidates equal airtime on non-news programming if requested. The day after the SNL appearance, Trump was given time during NASCAR and NFL coverage. But Carr suggested that, given that Harris was given a cameo so close to the election, other candidates did not have an opportunity to request the time.
