Media

Uh Oh, the FCC Chairman Is Podcasting Again

To Brendan Carr, the ‘public interest standard’ means whatever helps King Trump

Craig Aaron

24 Oct 2025 — 7 min read

(Photo by Timothy Karr/Free Press)

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr went back on the obscure right-wing podcast circuit this week, inviting David Bozell of the Media Research Center — the old-line, far-right, pro-apartheid media watchdogs — for a sitdown at the agency.

In the interview, Mr. “Easy Way or the Hard Way” again rattled his saber at TV networks and broadcasters, twisting the FCC’s mandate to serve “the public interest” into a demand to root out what he considers to be anti-conservative bias and replace independent journalism with fealty to King Trump.

“I've said from the get-go: Broadcast licenses are not sacred cows,” Carr told Bozell. “If you think there's nothing you can do to lose a license, then it's not a license — that's called a property right.” He threatened the broadcasters could “very well end up losing their licenses” if they “run sort of a narrow, partisan circus.”

No, he doesn’t mean the clowns at Sinclair and Nexstar who gave the hook to Jimmy Kimmel and regularly use their stations to push pro-Trump propaganda.

Resetting the standard

Carr wants to warp the FCC’s lofty aims for explicitly partisan ends. “Licensed broadcast television is fundamentally different from any other form of communication,” Carr told Bozell. “They've been given a monopoly on the airwaves by the federal government, and in exchange for that, they need to serve the needs of their local communities.”

True enough. This line could have been taken straight out of any Free Press filing from the past 20 years. But Carr’s supposed efforts to “reinvigorate the public-interest standard” are really about bullying timid media executives and transforming their newsrooms into Trump propaganda outlets.

Carr downright relishes the doublespeak while betraying his totalitarian tendencies. He threatens to seize licenses from broadcasters that don’t serve the public interest. But what is Carr’s definition of that standard? Whatever he says it is!

While Carr wraps himself in the language of local service, his actions speak much louder: pushing for Kimmel to get yanked off the air, investigating journalists for covering ICE raids, insisting “bias monitors” be installed at CBS, cheering the defunding of public media stations and shaking down any media company that Trump decides to sue.

Jimmy jam

Carr actually tried to claim the Kimmel fiasco as a win, when in reality it was a disaster for him and the companies that capitulated.

Sinclair and Nexstar were inundated with public protests and thousands of angry calls and complaints from viewers, advertisers and subscribers for canceling Kimmel.

According to the subscription-analytics company Antenna, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, the rate of “customer defections” doubled for Disney+ and Hulu after their parent company suspended Kimmel in September. Antenna calculated a total of 3 million cancellations for Disney+ and 4.1 million for Hulu that month.

In one of the most high-profile setbacks for the Trump regime this year, Carr was widely mocked and even lost support in his own party for attempting to censor ABC. But he’s still trying to reward the companies that backed his threats, which want mega-mergers like Nexstar-Tegna approved and ownership rules eliminated.

Total control

Carr says in the interview that the public interest means “looking out for the needs of the local community” — which sounds great — but his actual record is doing the opposite.

His next move will be trying to erase the few remaining limits on local media ownership, meaning giant chains can swallow up even more local outlets — putting as many as three or four stations under the control of a single owner in the same market — and force-feed them crackpot Covid cures and scripted content about the mythological dangers of antifa and the “woke-mind virus.”

Carr may talk about local control of the public airwaves, but he’s only interested in the “control” part. His message to media executives is clear: You can have all the mergers you want, as long as you kiss Trump’s ring first. But if you don’t bow down, look out.

“The goal is to get the companies to capitulate in advance, to the point where the FCC or the administration doesn’t even need to speak,” FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the agency’s lone Democrat, explained to Politico in a September interview. “It’s the threats that are the point.”

The company Carr keeps

Seated in front of the FCC logo and the dais where the agency conducts its monthly meetings, Carr’s interview with Bozell itself is a rather tame performance. But context is everything.

Bozell’s father, L. Brent Bozell III, is the founder of the Media Research Center and Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to South Africa, despite his long history of trashing Nelson Mandela. His grandfather was a speech writer for Joseph McCarthy. His brother, L. Brent Bozell IV, was convicted and sentenced to nearly four years in prison for smashing U.S. Capitol windows and helping break down doors during the Jan. 6 insurrection before being pardoned by Trump.

And when Carr is not overtly threatening to punish broadcasters or brown-nosing Elon Musk in the interview, he’s tossing red meat to the conservative base. “More Americans have trust in gas station sushi than they do in legacy mainstream media,” Carr smirks before sharing a litany of stories “the legacy mainstream media missed” made up of conservative obsessions like Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Covid “lab leak” theory and the Jussie Smollett hoax.

Where once we had an FCC chairman who decried TV becoming a “vast wasteland,” the current occupant of the agency’s big chair just wants to clear cut and strip mine his way to more desolation.

Teamwork

Meet the Ellisons! The Free Press team just made this fabulous video explainer about the frightening ambitions of Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men, and his son David, who — after taking over Paramount/CBS — have set their sights on TikTok as well as the parent company of CNN, HBO and Discovery. When we said we wanted another season of Succession, this isn’t what we had in mind.

Over at the Free Press blog, Amy Kroin wrote an excellent rundown of how the defunding of public media is devastating local stations — and some of the people fighting to save these endangered outlets.