from the look-at-the-big,-tough-guy-doing-big,-tough-guy-things dept
Instead of doing things like protecting consumers or market competition, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent his first few months in office abusing agency authority to threaten companies that refuse to kiss the Trump administration’s ass. A cornerstone of those efforts has been to leverage merger approvals to get companies to support core administration policies like… being more racist.
For example, he’s launched phony inquiries into Verizon because the company wasn’t racist enough for Carr’s liking. He’s launched similar “investigations” into Comcast because the company still paid fleeting lip service to the value of diversity in hiring. And he’s harassed CBS/Paramount with fake investigations based on completely bogus accusations of being “biased against Conservatives.”
All three companies have something in common: they’re hoping the FCC approves planned mergers and further (usually harmful) market consolidation. Verizon’s looking for approval for its $20 billion merger with Frontier. Comcast is broadly rumored to be eyeing a merger with either T-Mobile or Charter (or both). CBS/Paramount is looking for regulatory approval of its $8 billion merger with Skydance.
Carr’s been pretty cocky since he got into office. Normally if you’re going to abuse government power like this you’d apply a little subtlety to it. But in this case Carr is openly crowing to the press that they have to bow to Trumpism if they want their (often pointless and shitty) mergers to be approved. Again, for now that mostly involves demands that they be more racist:
“Any businesses that are looking for FCC approval, I would encourage them to get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”
U.S. media giants, hopeful of getting tax cuts and deregulation and merger approvals (and afraid of losing access), are more than happy to oblige. That involves cheerfully couching a blatantly racist attack on popular civil rights under the nomenclature of “DEI”:
Trump authoritarians hijacked the “DEI” term because they’re hoping to conflate the elimination of bare-bones corporate inclusivity initiatives with the elimination of popular civil rights reforms. It allows them to normalize their bigotry and disguise it as an act of essential efficiency. And our biggest consolidated media companies, looking for favor, access, deregulation, and tax breaks, are more than happy to comply.
All three investigations into all three companies are utterly baseless harassment. Not a single one of the three have actually done anything wrong. But when you read through any major outlet story on this subject, that’s not made clear, and Carr and the Trump administration’s racism are framed as ordinary and valid complaints. The normalization is on display pretty much everywhere you look, and it’s embarrassing.
Carr of course tries to pretend all of this bullshit is serious, legal, adult policy making, and the press is generally happy to play along. See how Deadline frames the issue, for example:
“Under the law, Carr said, the FCC can only “move forward and approve a transaction if we find that doing so serves the public interest,” Carr said. “If there’s businesses out there that are still promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination, I really don’t see a path forward where the FCC could reach the conclusion that approving the transaction is going to be in the public interest.”
That’s where a useful journalism organization would indicate that Carr doesn’t really have a history of “serving the public interest.” He’s generally been the textbook definition of regulatory capture, constantly rubber stamping the policies of the giant companies he overseas (like AT&T) and undermining consumer protection. It’s also where a functional journalism industry would point out that Carr’s claim that civil rights reforms are “invidious discrimination” are bullshit, and the motivation is rank bigotry.
Instead, they cower like little frightened deer, much to Carr’s delight. It is a conscious choice for media organizations and journalists to parrot bad-faith clowns entirely unskeptically and frame their actions as “serious policy.”
As I predicted repeatedly, unconstrained by re-election and more fully propped up by our broken court system, Trump 2.0 is so much, much worse than Trump 1.0.
Trump 1.0 involved “boring” old captured regulators rubber stamping all manner of shitty mergers (usually without reading or caring about the actual market harms). Trump 2.0 involves approving those same mergers, but not before abusing the approval process to demand companies be even shittier than they already were. Feckless giants like Comcast will be particularly happy to oblige.
Filed Under: approval, bigotry, brendan carr, civil rights, competition, dei, fcc, journalism, media, mergers, racism, regulators
Companies: comcast
