If President Donald Trump really “loves” the First Amendment as much as he claims to, he’s got an odd way of showing it.
Trump and his cronies have been waging a war against the press for years now. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that members of his new administration want to help him destroy the Fourth Estate.
On Wednesday, Brendan Carr, the new chair of the Federal Communications Commission, said it would again consider three complaints levied toward ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News after a conservative group alleged the networks were biased against Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign.
The Center for American Rights, a right-wing nonprofit law firm, initially filed the three complaints against the outlets. One accused ABC News of bias toward former Vice President Kamala Harris after one of the network’s moderators fact-checked Trump during their September presidential debate. Another alleged that CBS News engaged in “significant and substantial news alteration” relating to the editing of a preelection interview with Harris. And a third charged that NBC News had violated the equal-time rule when Harris made a guest appearance on “Saturday Night Live” the weekend before this past November’s presidential election.
Shortly before Trump’s inauguration this month, the outgoing FCC chair, Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel, dismissed four pending petitions and complaints before the FCC, including one regarding Fox News.
“The facts and legal circumstances in each of these cases are different,” Rosenworcel said in her order dismissing the cases. “But what they share is that they seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.”
Carr, a Project 2025 contributor Trump picked to lead the agency, reversed her decision.
The new FCC chair has made clear his desire to see the agency fight Big Tech’s supposed “censorship cartel.” But it’s clear that partisanship is motivating his latest moves. Unsurprisingly, he did not revive the complaint against a Fox-owned television station. The complaint argued the station should lose its license for promoting baseless lies and conspiracy theories regarding the results of the 2020 presidential election.
With this move, Carr will put the three cases back into pending or active status, meaning the complaints can be adjudicated on their merits, according to right-wing outlet Newsmax.
As expected, the announcement was praised by conservatives.
“Glad to see that our campaign for truth and transparency through the [FCC] won’t be stopped by the prior chair’s last minute attempt to excuse the networks from accountability,” Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights, said in a social media post on Wednesday.
Rosenworcel may harbor some blame for Carr’s latest stunt, though. Had she acted a few weeks earlier, she could’ve prevented the reversal from happening since there is usually a 30-day buffer period, according to a source who spoke with the New York Post.
Still, this surely won’t be the last time the Trump administration goes after the press. Throughout his 2024 campaign, journalists expressed fear that he and his allies would use the court system to punish or silence his critics on the grounds that bad coverage of Trump was defamatory.
Since his win this past year, the president has said he wants to “straighten out” the press, which seems to mean icing out or silencing reporters who offend him. But Trump’s compulsive hostility toward the press has gone beyond blacklisting journalists who ask tough questions. He’s now attempting to quash entire news networks.
The president’s revenge tour is already off to a great start for him.
In December, he scored a win by reaching a settlement in his lawsuit against ABC News over host George Stephanopoulos saying on-air that Trump was found “liable for rape.” (What he was actually found liable for was “sexual abuse.”) That same month, Trump himself sued Iowa-based pollster Ann Selzer over a survey she released days before the election in which she predicted Harris would carry Iowa by 3 percentage points. (Trump went on to win the state by roughly 13 points.)
It’s not surprising, then, that Trump is now floating the idea of shutting down MSNBC. Reacting to news that CNN would lay off about 6% of its workforce, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, “MSDNC is even worse than CNN. They shouldn’t have a right to broadcast—Only in America!”
The post was a clear shot at the left-leaning network, with “MSDNC” being a portmanteau of the network’s name, MSNBC, and the Democratic National Committee’s initials.
These statements, coupled with the latest moves by Carr, make it easy to wonder just how far Trump will take his grievances against those who dare to cross or question him.
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