The Media Research Center is quite the fan of Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr — a Sept. 16 post by Tom Olohan, for example cheered that Carr “didn’t take the bait” when a “legacy media host” asked him “to join the chorus of calls for censorship following the assassination of Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk.” So it was perhaps inevitable that Carr would sit for softball questions on the MRC’s podcast — and that’s what indeed happened on Oct. 21. Tim Graham touted how the MRC’s nepo-baby boss stepped in and served up those softballs:
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr joins the NewsBusters Podcast to discuss protecting free speech over the airwaves and online, the future of broadcast licenses, and Operation Clean Carts—his push to block fraudulent Chinese hardware from infiltrating U.S. networks. David Bozell asks about the FCC’s “public interest” standard for broadcast TV affiliates.
At a time when the latest Gallup poll showed an all-time low in trust in the media — only 28 percent have at least “a fair amount” of trust, while 70 percent said little or no trust — is it time for a more energetic FCC to question if all this broadcast bias is in the public interest? Carr told Bozell the poll shows “More Americans have trust in gas station sushi than they do in legacy mainstream media. And it’s a problem of the media’s own making.”
Carr then demon stated how closely he has been following the MRC over the past few years:
The legacy mainstream media missed some of the most important stories of the last five or ten years. Hunter Biden laptop story, gone. Covid origins, total miss. Whips at the border – remember that story? There were all these stories about emergency rooms in the Midwest being shut down from Ivermectin overdoses. It ended up being complete hoaxes, not true. Covington Catholic [Nicholas Sandmann], you go down the line. Jussie Smollett. Major, major important stories. The reason why this news media should exist, and they’re 180 [degrees] wrong on it. So I think it’s a massive indictment on themselves.
In fact, a lot of these stories were ginned up and overblown by the MRC itself, like Smollett and Sandmann — and it outright lied about whips at the border being a media-manufactured story. The origins of COVID are still disputed and largely driven by conspiracy theories, and the MRC has been absolutely obsessed with Hunter’s laptop. We don[t recall anything about “emergency rooms in the Midwest being shut down from Ivermectin overdoses,” but ivermectin poisoning really is a thing and it has really happened.
Graham then whined:
While President Trump has talked about pulling licenses for broadcast TV stations, it’s a complicated process with hearings. It hasn’t been done in decades — although Carr pointed out that the Left wanted to start that process for broadcast stations owned by Sinclair, charging that they had a right-wing bias. In 2023, leftists pushed a petition seeking to revoke the broadcast license of the Fox-owned affiliate in Philadelphia over its parent company’s “promotion of falsehoods about fraud in the 2020 election.” The FCC denied it last year.
Neither Carr nor Bozell explained why having a right-wing bias did not disqualify the Sinclair station from having a broadcast license.
During the podcast, there was some discussion of Jimmy Kimmel’s brief suspension, but there was no mention of the fact that the two major TV ownership groups wanting to continue his suspension had ulterior motives for doing so — Sinclair is a right-wing company and Nexstar is seeking approval for a significant merger — and the fact that Carr encouraged Kimmel’s suspension was censored. There was also lots of talk about how Americans mostly don’t trust the media, but no mention of the fact that the MRC deliberately inculcated that mistrust. Further, Carr brought up Starlink a couple of times but didn’t disclose that it’s owned by Trump friend Elon Musk.
Also of note: The day after this interview was published, the MRC gave its “free speech” award to numerous government officials, including Carr. Funny how that works.