Tom Wheeler

speaker

304 appearances 3 recordings 2 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 7 Feb

Tom Wheeler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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The MeidasTouch Podcast · Former FCC Commissioner Wheeler on Trump Attacking Media · 5 Oct 2025 podcast

My problem is that he's putting those

significant skills to work in efforts that are antithetical to the public interest.

And therein lies another interesting point that he justifies what he's doing because another part of the statute says that the FCC should act in the quote, public interest, convenience and necessity.

And Chairman Carr has been saying, well, I'm gonna define the public interest.

And he defines the public interest as things that are an agreement with President Trump and his agenda.

And I will enforce

the public interest, this broad term, where I determined that this disagreement with Trump is not in the public interest.

It's an interesting thing, Ben, that early in his tenure, he said, you know, we should probably have a rulemaking at the FCC that defines public interest.

And I...

was taking bets then and I will continue to take bets that we will never see anything like that because it is impossible for somebody to sit down and relate the First Amendment to the MAGA agenda.

that uh any effort that chairman carr would do uh to do that is is a mission impossible and uh and it will never happen but the problem is that right now this fuzzy term the public interest which we all want to support

is being interpreted in a quite unfuzzy way to mean things that agree with Donald Trump.

there has to be hope and you always you know you can't get up in the morning if there's not hope but uh you know i what i hope people take away is you know the fcc used to be the largest unknown agency in washington you know who could go around and name the fcc chairman and i was fcc chairman and i you know and uh and but boy everybody could sure name brandon carr right now

So the fact that there is an awareness of the power of the FCC, the fact that there is an awareness of the power of one individual to carry out the instructions of President Trump using the powers of the FCC.

is something that we all need to be aware of.

And as I said before, we need to be making sure that our voices are heard through the channels of the FCC, such as FCC.gov and filing comments and being ready to stand up for things that we don't agree with.

But there is an awareness.

Action begins with awareness.

And I'm just grateful for the fact that there is now some awareness because of this

ham-handed handling of the whole Jimmy Kimmel exercise.

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