FCC chair Brendan Carr’s thuggish threat to crack down on media companies following late-night comedy host Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue about Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk differed from past instances only in that he said it out loud.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said in an appearance on a right-wing podcaster’s show. And Disney, Nexstar and Sinclair, all of which have significant regulatory issues before the FCC, wasted no time in making sure that Kimmel was banished from ABC’s airwaves.
Trump himself put it even more bluntly, saying that broadcasters who are “against me” should lose their licenses, reported Zoë Richards of NBC News.
The first comparison that comes to mind, naturally, is Richard Nixon’s threat in 1973 to take away the licenses of two Florida television stations owned by The Washington Post amid the paper’s dogged reporting on the Watergate scandal. “The difference here is that Nixon talked about the scheme only privately,” the Post’s Aaron Blake wrote about the scheme many years later.
At the time, the Florida licenses were challenged by Nixon allies, but the president’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, denied any White House involvement. Yet when the tapes that led to Nixon’s resignation came out, we learned that he was fully engaged, telling chief henchman H.R. Haldeman and his legal counsel John Dean: “The main thing is the Post is going to have damnable, damnable problems out of this one. They have a television station…. Well, the game has to be played awfully rough.”
The legendary Post publisher Katharine Graham later wrote in her autobiography, “Personal History”:
Of all the threats to the company during Watergate — the attempts to undermine our credibility, the petty slights, and the favoring of the competition — the most effective were the challenges to the licenses of our two Florida television stations. No doubt there was a mixture of motives among the challengers — the perception of blood in the water, easy pickings, and understandable thinking that the atmosphere was right given the Nixon-dominated FCC.
But I’d like to bring up another, more recent example, and one that arguably had more deadly consequences.
In February 2003, MSNBC canceled a prime-time talk show hosted by Phil Donahue. The program, according to Bill Carter of The New York Times, averaged a modest 439,000 viewers per evening, well behind the competition on CNN and Fox News but ahead of MSNBC’s other prime-time programming.
The real reason for Donahue’s cancellation was later revealed in an internal NBC memo: network honchos didn’t want Donahue on the air just as the war in Iraq was about to begin. The memo said in part: “Donahue represents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” Donahue’s senior producer, Jeff Cohen, talked about that in a 2006 interview with Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!”
So let’s follow the bouncing conflicts of interest. All three cable news outlets, as well as most of the media, became cheerleaders for that disastrous war. NBC’s then-corporate owner, General Electric, was and is a major defense contractor. (In 2003, MSNBC was co-owned by GE and Microsoft.) Donahue later himself told Goodman and her “Democracy Now!” co-host, Juan Gonzalez:
They were terrified of the antiwar voice. And that is not an overstatement. Antiwar voices were not popular. And if you’re General Electric, you certainly don’t want an antiwar voice on a cable channel that you own; [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld is your biggest customer.
But wait — there’s more. In May 2003, the Center for Public Integrity revealed that “the nation’s top broadcasters have met behind closed doors with Federal Communications Commission officials more than 70 times to discuss a sweeping set of proposals to relax media ownership rules.” Those media owners, the CPI, reported, most definitely included General Electric/NBC.
The chair of the FCC at that time was Michael Powell, the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Thus NBC and MSNBC’s corporate owner was currying favor with three different sectors of the Bush White House — the Defense and State departments as well as the FCC — while it was lobbying for deregulation that would have allowed it to gobble up more television stations.
In June 2003, the FCC came through, proposing to raise from 35% to 45% the share of the national audience that network could potentially reach with its local television stations; NBC at that time reached 35%. After a national outcry, Congress and the White House agreed to legislation raising the cap to 39%, as Frank Ahrens reported in The Washington Post.
Unlike Nixon, there wasn’t even a private threat in the case of GE and the Bush administration. Who knows if Bush himself even knew what was going on? But GE wanted to keep its military contracts and own more local TV stations, and its executives knew what the best course of action would be to maintain the sort of friendly relationship needed to keep the cash spigot flowing.
The difference between then and now was that the MAGA movement has no sense of shame, from the top down to ideologues like Brendan Carr, who actually wrote the media section of Project 2025.
Nixon and Bush also had to worry about Congress — not just Democrats but also Republicans who valued their independence and who had a conscience. Today there are no such elected Republicans, and thus the head of the FCC thinks nothing of threatening to use his regulatory power was a way of silencing free speech.
To be clear, Jimmy Kimmel does not have a First Amendment right to a late-night comedy show. But he does have a First Amendment right not to have the power of the authoritarian regime that’s now in control force him off the air lest the licenses of TV stations that carried him be taken away and handed to MAGA-friendly media companies.
Correction. The caption originally had an incorrect year for the photo of George W. Bush.
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