Brendan Carr, the new chairman of the FCC, discusses the actions he’s taking to align the agency with Trump’s agenda. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.
Chapter 1: How is the FCC aligning with Trump's agenda?
President Trump has been engaged in legal battles with legacy media outlets over claims of news distortion and partisan bias. The Federal Communications Commission, under its new chairman, Brendan Carr, is aggressively moving to enact Trump's priorities, among those promoting free speech and transparency, cracking down on censorship, and modernizing the communications landscape.
In this episode, we sit down with the chairman to discuss the flurry of actions his agency is taking to carry out Trump's agenda. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Sunday, February 16th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Joining us to discuss the aggressive plans for the FCC under Trump is its new chairman, Brendan Carr.
Chairman, first of all, thank you so much for joining us.
Yeah, great to be with you. Thanks so much.
Now, it's been a whirlwind for you guys. I know the FCC is involved in a lot and you're heading up a lot of initiatives in the upcoming weeks and months. And I wanted to ask you about many of them. So there's a lot of questions coming. First, during the presidential campaign, 60 Minutes famously aired an edited version of its interview with presidential candidate VP Kamala Harris.
Now they've turned over the full transcript and the unedited tapes. What is the FCC's review of that interview shown so far?
Well, the FCC's review is ongoing. To step back, there was a complaint filed at the FCC regarding CBS' 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Harris under something called the News Distortion Rule. This is a rule that goes back 50 years at the FCC.
The reality is it's sort of a one-in-a-million case if you can make out a news distortion complaint, because after all, we don't want the FCC to be authenticating news or to be superintending editorial decisions.
What happened at the end of the Biden administration, however, was that the Democrat-led FCC summarily dismissed the complaint without actually obtaining any evidence that would be relevant to making that decision. Now, again, usually you don't get out of the starting blocks with these, but there was extrinsic evidence here where CBS played
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Chapter 2: What actions is the FCC taking under Brendan Carr's leadership?
dei discrimination he did two executive orders right off the bat one that ends dei with respect to the federal government itself and we've followed that policy at the fcc we've now ended the fcc's own promotion of dei and i got to tell you people would be shocked If they knew how much both money and time and resources their federal government was spending on DEI.
The FCC alone, which is roughly a $350, $400 million a year agency, we were spending millions of dollars promoting DEI. It was in our budget. We had it listed as our number two strategic priority. and we were just way off course in terms of core missions.
Second, President Trump issued an executive order that asked the heads of agencies to look at the private sector businesses that we regulate and see if they're engaging in illegal DEI. Because after all, DEI has long been illegal in this country, in my view, because it's in violation of civil rights laws. At least some versions of DEI, you can have various forms of DEI policies, to be sure.
And so what I've done with Comcast is I've started there. I sent a letter to Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast, asking questions about both Comcast and NBC, which is part of this whole same suite of companies, and letting them know that we've started an investigation at the Enforcement Bureau because
They still very publicly on their website have a lot of substantial information there about DEI programs that they're promoting. We've also started with Comcast because they're in many, many different sectors that we regulate. They're a cable provider. They provide internet. They own broadcast TV stations. And we call it MVNO wireless provider. You can get wireless service through them as well.
But the key is that's just the beginning. My expectation is that every single entity that the FCC regulates, if they have any, of these illegal, discriminatory DEI policies. I'm hoping that by starting with Comcast, everybody gets the message. Again, we want equality. We want fairness. We want everyone in this country to have a fair shot. We want merit to rise to the top.
And maybe there's things that people are doing under the term DEI that are totally appropriate. But that's exactly what we're going to get to the bottom of here.
And you can't pick a more ubiquitous company for sure. Let's turn to NPR and public funding. Can you explain why you've launched an investigation into NPR for their commercials?
Yeah, this one's really interesting. So there's been a lot of attention on NPR and PBS recently for a couple reasons. One, there was sort of a former employee at one of these companies that spoke out about a lot of the editorial decisions that they had been making. And if you step back, NPR, PBS are taxpayer funded.
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