Donald Trump and Brendan Carr, the president’s choice to chair the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), seem intent on reinvigorating the Commission’s statutory authority to ensure that over-the-over broadcasters serve “the public interest.” That’s especially so when it comes to deploying the FCC’s news distortion rule to potentially punish stations—for example, CBS affiliates that aired 60 Minutes’ pre-election interview with Kamala Harris, sparking a Trump lawsuit—that edit stories in ways not serving Trump’s interest.
The president recently amended his complaint against CBS. He strategically added Amarillo-based US Representative Ronny Jackson as a plaintiff, helping to ensure the case remains in Texas before conservative US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. Trump also included Paramount Global (CBS’s corporate parent) as a defendant. Adding Paramount closely tethers the president’s lawsuit to the FCC’s ongoing investigation—once dismissed but restarted under Carr’s leadership, as I’ve explained—of Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media. That inquiry stems from a December petition filed by the conservative Center for American Rights that voices concerns about “Skydance’s ties to a company heavily influenced and invested in by the Chinese Communist Party” and Paramount’s CBS News division (think 60 Minutes) allegedly exhibiting “clear ideological bias.”
In short, the personal interests of a private litigant (the president) are now deeply entangled with the investigatory and enforcement powers a federal regulatory agency whose leader (Carr) the private litigant promoted. Trump views his personal interest as concomitant with the statutory public interest, and Carr might make such coalescence a reality. As the Wall Street Journal wrote last month, “Carr has wielded the threat of [the FCC’s] regulatory power expansively” during “the nearly three months since Trump picked him to lead the agency.” More bluntly put by The Verge, “Carr has started using [FCC] authority to punish broadcasters for speech Trump doesn’t like.” If only all private litigants were fortunate enough to have such friends in high administrative places to create seemingly seamless synergies between litigation and regulation.
There’s more involved here, however, than simply how the Trump-Carr alliance affects both the president’s CBS lawsuit and the FCC’s new-found vigor in policing broadcasters to serve the public interest. It’s a different investigation that places the nebulous public interest concept squarely in between First Amendment press freedom and the public’s right to know about matters of public concern, on the one hand, and law enforcement and public safety interests, on the other. It’s a situation that elicits slightly more, yet not complete, support for Carr’s beefed-up, public-interest enforcement efforts.
The FCC’s investigation involves San Francisco-based radio station KCBS’s live airing of details on January 26 about the locations, colors, makes, and models of unmarked vehicles of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents as they were about to conduct an undercover immigration raid. Carr called the broadcast “really concerning” during an interview on Fox News, explaining the ICE agents were:
doing operations in East San Jose –– a part of the town known for violent gang activity –– [and] you had this radio station broadcasting the live location, identifying the unmarked vehicles that they were in . . . against the backdrop of Democrat leaders in Congress saying “it’s time for people to take fights to the street against Trump’s agenda.”
Carr said the FCC wants KCBS to explain “how this could possibly be consistent with their public interest obligations.”
The answer likely rests in the First Amendment freedom of the press to publish, as the US Supreme court has held, lawfully obtained, truthful information about matters of public significance unless the government can demonstrate an interest of the highest order that eclipses the First Amendment. The Cato Institute’s Walter Olson contends there’s “an obvious public interest in . . . live media coverage of police street activity. Newsworthiness aside, such coverage can expose bad practices by police, and it can also reassure by helping to establish that police practice was proper.”
David Loy of the San Francisco Bay Area-based First Amendment Coalition adds that the FCC’s investigation is “very troubling because it’s possible the FCC is potentially being weaponized to crack down on reporting that the administration simply just doesn’t like.” In other words, by blowing the agents’ cover, the station’s reporting doesn’t advance Trump’s campaign promise to crack down on illegal immigration.
Compounding the public interest drama is the fact that KCBS 740 AM is owned by Audacy. Democratic donor George Soros’s Soros Management Fund obtained an ownership interest in Audacy in 2024 after bankruptcy restructuring. Last November, Carr promised “to take a very hard look” at the FCC’s approval (under the leadership of Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel) of the deal that resulted in Soros’s stake in Audacy. Carr vehemently dissented from that deal.
In sum, the public interest and politics aren’t mingling well these days at an ostensibly independent federal regulatory agency.
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