Federal Communication Course Correction | 2.16.25
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How is the FCC aligning with Trump's agenda?
President Trump has been engaged in legal battles with legacy media outlets over claims of news distortion and partisan bias. The Federal Communications Commission, under its new chairman, Brendan Carr, is aggressively moving to enact Trump's priorities, among those promoting free speech and transparency, cracking down on censorship, and modernizing the communications landscape.
In this episode, we sit down with the chairman to discuss the flurry of actions his agency is taking to carry out Trump's agenda. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Sunday, February 16th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Joining us to discuss the aggressive plans for the FCC under Trump is its new chairman, Brendan Carr. Chairman, first of all, thank you so much for joining us.
Yeah, great to be with you. Thanks so much.
Now, it's been a whirlwind for you guys. I know the FCC is involved in a lot and you're heading up a lot of initiatives in the upcoming weeks and months. And I wanted to ask you about many of them. So there's a lot of questions coming. First, during the presidential campaign, 60 Minutes famously aired an edited version of its interview with presidential candidate VP Kamala Harris. Now they've turned over the full transcript and the unedited tapes. What is the FCC's review of that interview shown so far?
Well, the FCC's review is ongoing. To step back, there was a complaint filed at the FCC regarding CBS' 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Harris under something called the News Distortion Rule. This is a rule that goes back 50 years at the FCC. The reality is it's sort of a one-in-a-million case if you can make out a news distortion complaint, because after all, we don't want the FCC to be authenticating news or to be superintending editorial decisions. What happened at the end of the Biden administration, however, was that the Democrat-led FCC summarily dismissed the complaint without actually obtaining any evidence that would be relevant to making that decision. Now, again, usually you don't get out of the starting blocks with these, but there was extrinsic evidence here where CBS played
one version of a response or portion of a response in one broadcast and then a separate portion or separate answer in another portion. And so that created the extrinsic evidence that would allow the FCC to need to obtain the underlying transcript or video which we've done. And now we've determined that it's in the public interest to let the American people express their own views. People feel passionately about this. They feel like CBS did something wrong. Other people feel like CBS did normal editing. And everybody now has an opportunity to make their voices heard at the FCC. And in terms of where our process is, we're just taking input at this point. We haven't reached a final decision on the merits, but we will eventually when the record is complete.
And what have you heard from the public so far? What's the public response been like?
Yeah, there's been some interesting reactions. I think you have everyone from Catherine Herridge, who is a well-known reporter and very diligent on these issues. I think her view that she's expressed on X is that, to her, this looked like it went beyond normal editing. We've heard from other people that say this is just normally shortening up an answer, run-of-the-mill things. But look, I think there's a lot of lack of trust right now in media, and that's part of why I wanted to open this proceeding was so that nobody feels like There's a decision that's being made behind closed doors where something's been swept under the rug. And again, stepping back, trust in media right now is at an absolute all-time low. And that's not just my opinion alone. Look at Jeff Bezos.
He had that op-ed out there where he said that the news industry has fallen from actually one of the most trusted institutions many years ago to now being less trusted than even Congress itself, which is not good. You're sort of in the basement at that point. And at least with respect to broadcast media...
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