Donald Trump’s FCC chairman Brendan Carr is boasting to friends that he is having “the time of his life” after launching an all-out attack on the media, the Daily Beast has learned.
Carr has spread dread through top-ranked media executives since taking office at the same time as Trump. He has opened an investigation into CBS over its 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, threatening to upend its parent company’s merger with Skydance Media; reopened investigations into ABC and NBC over the Trump-Harris presidential debate and her appearance on Saturday Night Live; opened inquiries into NPR and PBS that questioned whether they deserved government funding; and sent a letter to a George Soros-owned California radio station over a report on immigration raids—and vowed not to stop.
Many of his actions parallel Trump’s own private legal cases—particularly the pursuit of 60 Minutes, which Trump is suing for $20 billion, claiming it “doctored” the Harris interview to help her, which CBS denies—and are amplified by a gleefully pro-Trump personal twitter account.
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The dizzying pace since Trump was sworn in has left television and media executives shaken. They fear that the FCC will pounce on minor errors to pursue lengthy and expensive investigations.
“It’s a stressful moment for everybody who’s just trying to do the good work that they’ve always thought they could do by recognizing that, if they do get it wrong, that the implications are—it used to be, you’d be embarrassed about a correction," one media executive told the Beast. “Now it can go into the stratosphere.”
There are also fears that the FCC will seek to find ways to target other legacy brands traditionally been part of its remit, said another executive. The FCC regulates outlets that operates on broadcast airwaves, whether on television or radio—not cable.
“We have to see what they end up proposing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if our legal team is looking into it,” they said.
The weekslong spree has achieved Trump’s desire to put media outlets on notice, prompting some media executives to work overtime to make sure they don’t become Carr’s next target.
“The change now is, it’s really, really important to, frankly, be near-perfect every day,” one media executive told the Daily Beast. “I think that’s kind of the the burden that exists, that we are under an incredible microscope.”
Carr himself—a 46-year-old communications lawyer who has been on the FCC since 2017—has set out his stall in a series of Fox News appearances. The FCC declined a request for comment from the Beast.
Fox & Friends anchor Brian Kilmeade asked Carr last week whether CBS' release of the 60 Minutes interview will prevent news organizations from editing interviews with high-profile figures.
“Are you worried about the precedent of asking for these transcripts?” Kilmeade asked.
“No, not at all,” Carr said. “It’s actually interesting. Here is a precedent we’re following is the precedent that the Democrat FCC set when it came to Fox. There was a complaint lodged against Fox, and so they opened up a public proceeding on that. And we’re simply applying that precedent.”
Carr appeared to refer to a 2023 complaint filed by the Media and Democracy Project to prevent Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp-owned Philadelphia station from renewing its FCC license.
The complaint, filed alongside ex-Murdoch official Preston Padden, claimed the Murdochs decision to broadcast lies about the 2020 election on Fox News, and the station’s airing of Fox News Sunday, should force it to lose its license. Former FCC chairperson Jessica Rosenworcel dismissed the complaint alongside those against ABC, CBS, and NBC last month.
Padden told the Daily Beast Carr’s claim about applying the law evenly was “bulls---.” He said the only reason Carr did not reinstate his FCC complaint was to appease Trump.
“Brendan Carr has one litmus test for the public interest, and that is whatever the Sun King of Mar-a-Lago wants,” he said. “Any FCC-licensed broadcaster who broadcasts anything that this president doesn’t like is going to be fair game for retribution by Brendan Carr. He is simply an agent of President Trump.”
Padden said a mutual friend told him that Carr was “having the time of his life.”
Perhaps the most pointed of his investigations is not the most high-profile.
Last week, the FCC sent a letter of inquiry to San Francisco radio news station KCBS 740 AM, asking it to justify reporting a statement from a pro-immigrant group that described the cars and locations of supposedly undercover Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers conducting raids in San Jose.
A news host had read out claims by the group, called the Rapid Response Network, saying, “The County’s Response Network says agents in San Jose were in unmarked vehicles,” and describing the color, make and models of the cars and the streets they were seen on. Carr told Fox News it may break the “public interest” test for radio licenses, then tied it to what he claimed were “Democrat leaders in Congress saying it’s time for people to take fights to the street against Trump’s agenda.”
What he did not say—although Kilmeade did mention—was that the station’s owner, Audacy, is majority owned by an investment fund controlled by Soros Fund Management, the investment vehicle for MAGA bogeyman George Soros. Republican senators condemned the FCC last year for approving the purchase.
Carr said in November he intended to “take a very hard look” at the Audacy deal, claiming the FCC “bent over backwards” to give Soros the stations. Last week he echoed another MAGA trope about double standards as he explained his shock and awe attacks on the media.
“There are a lot of people who have been on this sort of upper road of the two-tiered system of government,” Carr told Fox News on Thursday. “And what I’m here to do is apply the law evenly.”
