New FCC Chair Revives Complaints Over Election Media Coverage
In the early days of the second Trump Administration, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has reopened several complaints against broadcast stations that had been dismissed by the previous administration days before President Trump took office.[1] The FCC, an independent federal agency, grants eight-year licenses to individual broadcast stations rather than to networks.[2] The agency is considering complaints alleging liberal media bias against local stations of CBS News, ABC News, and NBC News.[3]
The former FCC Chair, Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel, had dismissed these complaints on the basis that bringing these cases would infringe on the First Amendment.[4] She wrote, “The facts and legal circumstances in each of these cases are different, 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.”[5] She had also cautioned that the FCC should be careful not to turn into “the president’s speech police.”[6] However, the new FCC Chair, Republican Brendan Carr, found that the precious rulings to dismiss were “issued prematurely based on an insufficient investigatory record for the station specific conduct at issue.”[7] And Carr has vocalized his desire to see the FCC combat what he has branded a “censorship cartel.”[8]
The complaints all relate to media coverage of the 2024 presidential race.[9] They were filed by the Center for American Rights, which labels itself a “nonpartisan public interest law firm.”[10] The complaint against a local CBS station is related to a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris and the way in which it was edited.[11] Specifically, the producers had edited Harris’s response to a question about the Biden Administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war that made her answer appear more cogent and less jumbled than it actually had been.[12] The complaint against an NBC station centers around an “equal time” debate between Harris and Trump, as a result of Harris’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live” three days before the election.[13] Under the FCC’s “equal time” rule, rival candidates are allowed to request equal air time if they want it.[14] This does not mandate that stations grant rival candidates identical opportunities on air, but it does require that they offer comparable time and placement.[15] While NBC did not have Trump on SNL at this time, the network did air ads for him during a NASCAR playoff race and during the network’s Sunday Night Football coverage.[16] Finally, the complaint against a local ABC station targets the network’s handling of the presidential debate between the two candidates.[17]
Alongside these three complaints, there was an additional complaint that former FCC Chair Rosenworcel had dismissed against a local station of Fox News.[18] This complaint centered around this station’s coverage of the 2020 election.[19] In this complaint, the Media and Democracy Project had argued that the FCC should revoke the broadcast license of a local Fox News Station over the network’s coverage of the Dominion Voting System in the 2020 election.[20] However, unlike the other three complaints, FCC Chair Carr has decided not to revive this one.[21]
The move to reinstate the complaints comes as President Trump has called for the broadcast licenses of ABC, NBC, and CBS to be revoked for their coverage of the 2024 presidential race.[22] And indeed, these complaints highlight a partisan split within the FCC between a focus on the need to protect First Amendment rights and on the duty of the media to serve the public interest by avoiding bias in their coverage.[23] While Chair Carr has made clear that making sure the media fulfils this obligation is a top priority of his, FCC commissioner and Democrat Anna Gomez has responded that “We cannot allow our licensing authority to be weaponized to curtail freedom of the press.[24] The First Amendment is a pillar of American democracy, and our country needs a press free from interference from regulators like me.”[25]
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