Head of FCC threatens broadcaster licenses over critical coverage of Iran war

https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/2032855414233047172

by theahura • 4 months ago

266 101 4 months ago

twitter.com

https://xcancel.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/203285541423304717...

jmclnx• 4 months ago

A better link:

https://xcancel.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/203285541423304717...

BTW, the link is a waste of your time reading it, it is just the current US regime whining again.

g-mork• 4 months ago

I've read so much trump spam recently that on reading this my first thought was that you misspelled winning hehe

Planet announced last week there will be a 14 day delay on all commercial satellite imagery from the middle east. It shocks me how transparent we are about information war and voluntarily lying to ourselves at particular moments

decimalenough• 4 months ago

No, this is deeply disturbing. The person "whining" is the head of the regulatory body that gets to decide what can be broadcast, a supposedly non-partisan role, and yet he's just straight up threatened to cancel the licenses of everybody who's not vocally supportive of what you term the current regime.

theahura• 4 months ago

thanks, I should've used xcancel. @dang I would love if we could update to using this link instead

Jtsummers• 4 months ago

xcancel is like archive links, they prefer links to the original with bypasses/alternatives in comments.

allears• 4 months ago

Well there's a clear 1st Amendment violation. Wonder if he'll get sued, and if so, wonder if the plaintiff will win, and if so, whether Carr will abide by any judgment.

pstuart3• 4 months ago

The irony of this would be quite amusing if it wasn't so dangerous. Where are all the "free speech absolutists" now?

refulgentis2• 4 months ago

HN was such an interesting place in 2024, they’ve all disappeared, sadly.

I’ve been genuinely, deeply, curious where those posters went. It was the site at that point.

The most I’ve seen in months and months is a limp-wristed handwave at “but humans have gooned and been racist forever”, in response to someone saying they wouldn’t choose to work for X.ai because it accelerates those things.

My most substantive idea is it was an unsustainable coalition, and that’s why we’re not seeing it much. You need to be for an ugly conjunction of things instead of against “woke” and Columbia students, thus you won’t get coalition-wide social approval (upvotes) anymore.

So they’re almost certainly here, but, downvoted to the point of invisibility unless you scour every comment.

Another case study to ponder is our host’s CEO, Gary Tan. Full-on loud-throated American juche stuff at beginning of tariffs. Now he has his own political website he built with Claude. And it’s LLM-generated articles that are riffs on Free Press articles he liked and they’re really tediously boring niche stuff even if you’re full in on team red, even before the AI writing cringe effect on the reader. Ex. “Mackenzie bezos philanthropy is fake and destructive because one college that got money hired the college presidents son and also enrollment dropped the next year”

RiverCrochet• 4 months ago

Broadcast TV (and cable TV too) has been whithering on the vine for a long time. What a network couldn't broadcast on TV could simply be put on YouTube or other social network. TV could become state-owned media at this point and I don't think anyone would really care as long as the Internet is the way it is.

dlivingston2• 4 months ago

Right here, to name one. Needless to say I feel very bleak and despondent as I watch the America I thought I knew transform into something dark. I do not anticipate the next decade+ of life in America to be free and prosperous.

gjsman-1000• 4 months ago

Airwaves are not protected by the 1st amendment, due to the limited amount of bandwidth that physically exists. As such, the FCC has extraordinary powers, including enforcing watersheds, forcing children’s content hours (“E/I”), censoring the F-bomb, and enforcing a 7-second delay on live content to prevent another Timberlake Super Bowl.

The first amendment also does not apply to highway billboards; which is why you never see a vagina on the roadway. Not all government control of speech is oppressive or inconsistent.

SpicyLemonZest3• 4 months ago

The FCC has a number of extraordinary powers over the broadcast spectrum, but they do not include viewpoint discrimination, which has always been seen as uniquely odious and different than indecency restrictions. As held in Shurtleff v. Boston, even the much more limited medium of a government-owned flagpole in front of a government building cannot be subject to viewpoint discrimination. If the public is allowed to speak freely in a particular medium, the government may not rescind that permission based on whether their message is true or fair or in the public interest.

notyourwork• 4 months ago

Why do airwaves matter? I get cable over the internet. Technology constraints shouldn’t me what allows laws to undermine democracy.

stale20022• 4 months ago

Hey if you want to get rid of the FCC entirely so neither party can use it against anyone, I'll all for that!

throwaway1737383• 4 months ago

I’m excited about cell phones, pacemakers, and wifi no longer working.

rpcope1• 4 months ago

Honestly the world might be a better place if the vast majority of spectrum were just ISM bands anyways.

oooyay• 4 months ago

I find it amusing that your last comment is preaching to someone about what politics is and isn't.

Your politics are clear. You have no problem with the modern Republican party embracing authoritarianism and fascism. In fact, you see it as an opportunity to erode trust in or otherwise destroy the institution responsible for regulating signals in the US. The very thing that makes it so that planes can safely fly or that things in space must respect terrestrial networks without disruption.

That is your politics, just an embarrassing set of politics. Not even a green account. Shame on you.

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

Maybe if we're going to name the department of defense the department of war we can go all the way and rename the FCC to the 'ministry of propaganda'?

A free press is worth its weight in gold. If you let go of that you're going to lose more than you bargain for. All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.

matthewdgreen2• 4 months ago

It would obviously be the Ministry of Truth.

tombert2• 4 months ago

I assumed it would the the Ministry of Trump. He likes putting his name on things.

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

You're probably right.

Bender• 4 months ago

That was already taken by the DHS and then dismantled in 2022.

Quekid5• 4 months ago

Ministry of Truth & Love.

skeledrew• 4 months ago

Is a free press even worth anything of the country is already otherwise lost?

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

Yes, because it is a backbone through which people trying to hold things together can communicate. Remember how the USSR supposedly held together and could not be defeated, and how the Nazi's overran Europe and there were many who figured the easy way out was to just give up and accept it? The free press held the line, in Western Europe through underground newspapers, which made a massive difference in keeping people informed and in the East between 45 and ~86 through the various - sometimes hand copied - smuggled literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_media_in_German-oc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_press

Soldarity would have never gotten off the ground without that network and speaking for my own country I suspect that without de Volkskrant and Het Parool the war would have gotten much closer to completely eradicating the Jewish population here. It was bad enough as it was but the network that coordinated the distribution of the underground newspapers was also instrumental in keeping the underground resistance network going. The one fed off the other and vice versa, both as a training ground and as a messenger service. Lots of those stories will never be told (unfortunately) but there were a ton of very brave people that knew full well they risked a one-way trip to the dunes if discovered.

markdown2• 4 months ago

What free press? The mass media is controlled by a handful of billionaires who kowtow to the government in order to earn more billions.

thrance2• 4 months ago

During a press conference yesterday, Hegseth, the secretary of war, received a question on Iran from CNN that he didn't feel the need to answer, and then went on a rant about how he can't wait for Ellison to buy the network and rid it of any opposition to the regime [1]. He literally spelt it out.

Free press in the US is already dead, all media belongs to conservative pedophile oligarchs who use it to manipulate the masses and push their warmongering narratives.

All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.

There are no principled free speech advocates on the right, only people who have an issue with the media not being completely controlled by their side. Their silence then makes perfect sense: they are getting exactly what they wanted.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/pentagon-chie...

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

Yes, they are no longer even pretending to hide, I think that's the thing that really changed. Up to a few years ago there would always be the figleaf. Now, they're just stating openly what they're up to and nobody bats an eye. It's an extreme case of the normalization of deviance. And in a way that is the answer to that age old question: "How could they let it happen?" when contemplating Germany ca. 1936.

stinkbeetle3• 4 months ago

Funny how many of the people who only a few years ago weregloating about how private companies can do what they want, and there's no issues with censoring people or spreading propaganda (in clandestine cooperation with the government) are now seeing it blow back in their faces. I mean everybody who isn't stupid knew it was coming, not everybody thought it would come so quickly.

thinkingtoilet• 4 months ago

And let us say out loud after all the whining about cancel culture it was Republicans, as expected, who are actually going after the first amendment.

CamperBob22• 4 months ago

They're Republicans. Every accusation is either a confession in disguise, a plan already in progress, or a fond wish.

jauntywundrkind• 4 months ago

It's deplorable that there's such empty silence on Carr and his incessant snowflake whining from the right. For a party that has crowed so much about 1A! It's unfathomable, just depraved, to have a party that will complain and whine so loudly, and then have nothing at all to say when you have a FCC commissioner asserting that broadcast rights means saying only what the government says is good.

Utterly deplorable. This man is a high traitor to the constitution and this nation. And the right: seemingly AWOL, on an issue they claimed was so important! It's so fallen. It's so unfortunate the nation haa to be sundered by people of so low moral and political regard, people who seemingly care so little about values and democracy and the nation.

suzzer99• 4 months ago

For a party that has crowed so much about 1A!

Just like the anti-war stuff, it was always convenient hypocrisy that they instantly abandon when the time is right.

650REDHAIR• 4 months ago

If it wasn’t for double standards they wouldn’t have any at all.

We’ve seen it every 4-8 years for decades.

curt15• 4 months ago

"Should the government censor speech it doesn't like? Of course not. The FCC doesn't have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the \"public interest\"." -- Brendan Carr 2019

matthewdgreen2• 4 months ago

So much of the last four years was watching fools and dishonest people pretend that the government was coming to take away your free speech and you'd better elect [people who routinely lied about everything and clearly had no principles] to protect you.

verdverm2• 4 months ago

Every accusation is an admission from the people running the united states right now

adrr• 4 months ago

Same party thats says they are against new wars.

tombert2• 4 months ago

Fucking Christ.

I still don’t understand how anyone heard Trump bragging about how he’s going to “open up those libel laws”, in addition to all the other idiotic shit that he said, and still decided to vote for him.

I am sure people had their reasons, and maybe some of them even weren’t racist, but I am still having trouble comprehending how anyone didn’t see all this shit coming.

https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/donald-trump...

bathtub365• 4 months ago

They rightly assumed the laws wouldn’t be used against them by this admin

Anamon• 4 months ago

Why "rightly"?

Smoosh• 4 months ago

The tweet/meme about the face eating leopards seems to be entirely applicable to our current times.

foogazi• 4 months ago

They can’t take your license away if you don’t have one

bananatype• 4 months ago

Feels eerily similar to Rodrigo Duterte's threats to Philippine broadcaster ABS-CBN (and in that case, he really made good on the threat and shut down its transmitters).

brandensilva• 4 months ago

Propaganda state run networks are for dictatorships, not democracies.

lo_zamoyski• 4 months ago

The distinction between state and corporate media is generally a meaningless one. What matters is the power to shape and misshape public opinion. The American quibbling about “private/corporate vs. public/gov’t” consistently misses the point.

thrance2• 4 months ago

Your analysis is useless, irrespective of how correct it is. There are countries with a freer press that fare better. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's all pointless, only fools care about improving things" is detrimental to fixing this mess.

paulryanrogers• 4 months ago

The distinction is important because at least private enterprises aren't directly controlled by the government. So they have the capacity for independence, and if they choose not to flex it then another private enterprise may.

spwa4• 4 months ago

That's not really accurate. I'd say in dictatorships you have one state run network ... and they grow very "confident". Most of the population doesn't believe the state network, but also doesn't have real other sources of information. Shit happens and nobody knows, like the surprise internet outages in Russia recently spreading to Moscow.

In a democracy, you essentially have 5 propaganda networks, each with their own agenda. Agendas go from pure government standpoint to business standpoint, some rich individual's standpoint, religious/ideology/political parties standpoint, ... Everybody knows the big events, because the networks know they have to have some kind of coverage, as it's everywhere.

This often goes right into ridiculous territory. Do you want to know the Socialist viewpoint on the recent strike in Brussels about pensions, and how in that strike the position of women compares to the position of children? Read all about it! Or don't, because of course it's 90% why all other political parties are so very, very wrong ...

t0bia_s4• 4 months ago

Not true. Idea of democracy as best organisation of society is false, yet supported uncritically among state funded schools, media, etc.

dudefeliciano2• 4 months ago

Any suggestions for better system? What is best, is there an objective answer?

abdelhousni• 4 months ago

It was already done before and now Trump and Israeli lobby are doing the same with Social networks and US media

"The Nazi assault on the press, publishing, and scholarship was more than censorship. It was an attempt to monopolize reality." https://brewminate.com/words-under-siege-hitlers-assault-on-...

dlivingston2• 4 months ago

This article feels very AI generated to me.

wewewedxfgdf• 4 months ago

YouTube is a problem, people speaking their minds.

vizzier• 4 months ago

Youtube is also a problem of unverified non-journalistic information. Presents a very double edged sword.

replooda• 4 months ago

So is mainstream media, though. Maybe with a few more allegedlys thrown around.

t0bia_s4• 4 months ago

Not true. Thoughts are shifted by trends. If not politically correct, spreading is limited.

_heimdall• 4 months ago

Here's a crazy thought - if you're the president of the united states, or in his cabinet, and don't like news coverage that makes POTUS look bad regardless of the accuracy, how about you find some big boy pants and do better if you don't want to "look bad."

GianFabien• 4 months ago

The Gaslighter in Chief wants to abolish the First Amendment.

zimpenfish3• 4 months ago

The Twitter Files contingent are awfully quiet all of a sudden.

Analemma_• 4 months ago

What do you mean? “all of a sudden”? They’ve been dead silent ever since the election. Their mission was accomplished successfully; nothing more to do.

zimpenfish3• 4 months ago

They’ve been dead silent ever since the election. Their mission was accomplished successfully; nothing more to do.

A fair point, well made.

xtiansimon2• 4 months ago

So it's a Tweet allegation-- Do we know what specifically what the Chaiman objects to?

ouraf• 4 months ago

Have someone already brought the "reinstate the Fairness Doctrine" talking point for this issue? The best back and forth arguments happen under it.

Head of FCC threatens broadcaster licenses over critical coverage of Iran war

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