from the censor's-gotta-censor dept

FCC Boss Brendan Carr Bullied Bay Area AM Radio Station For Telling Locals The Truth

Brendan Carr was dragged before Congress last week for some light questioning about all the terrible, illegal bullshit he’s been up to. While the hearing mostly focused on FCC independence and Carr’s failed bid to try and censor Jimmy Kimmel, it didn’t touch on the other extremist nonsense Carr’s been up to, including his assault on public media and destruction of consumer protection.

While his higher profile targets have gotten all the attention, the Associated Press has a very good story you should read about Carr’s efforts to bully a Bay Area radio station (KCBS) after it accurately informed locals about the goonish behavior of masked ICE agents.

Carr opened a fake investigation into the network last February, claiming the station had violated ambiguous public interest standards. The fake inquiries were tethered to a right wing antisemitic propaganda campaign attempting to link George Soros to these stations despite Soros’ limited investment involvement being both irrelevant and three or four layers deep.

As our already struggling, highly consolidated, and under-funded media outlets tend to do, KCBS immediately folded under federal existential threat, just as Carr hoped:

“KCBS demoted a well-liked anchor and dialed back on political programming, people said. For months, reporters were dissuaded from pursuing political or controversial topics and instead encouraged to focus on human interest stories, according to the current and former staffers.”

When staffers did try to cover more political fare, they say the tone was heavily scrutinized and the content was watered down to a bland gruel to avoid upsetting Republicans:

“Doug Sovern, a veteran political journalist at the station, said he was sidelined after Carr announced his investigation.

“‘Chilling effect’ does not begin to describe the neutering of our political coverage,” said Sovern, who retired in April. He said his retirement was not related to the controversy.”

As Carr was distracted by his other extremist projects, like failing to censor Kimmel, some of the scrutiny eased and the station regained the confidence to at least report on things like the No Kings protest. But the bullying appears to have had its intended effect. At one point, a KCBS reporter says he was denied the opportunity to interview Katie Porter because management felt it would upset Donald Trump:

“In the weeks after the immigration story, Seelig asked Sovern to cancel an interview he had set up with California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter out of fear she would say something negative about Trump, he said.”

For its part, feckless station management is trying to pretend that nothing happened:

“There has been no change in policy or editorial direction at KCBS,” the station added. “We remain committed to providing our Bay Area listeners with trusted news, including our political coverage, that is balanced and objective.”

KCBS, one of the first AM radio stations ever licensed, had already been steadily defanged by the same media consolidation Carr is looking to accelerate through the elimination of media consolidation rules.

Carr first targeted KCBS with a letter of inquiry, which prompted the station’s corporate owner, Audacy, to immediately shift into CYA mode, reviewing the political statements and social media posts of reporters for any hint of “political bias” (by which they of course mean criticism of right wing ideology and policy).

I’ll reiterate in case you forgot: Audacy (which owns most U.S. radio stations now) was targeted by the right wing earlier this year by a bigoted propaganda campaign that relied on antisemitic tropes to smear the company with lies. A campaign that featured the right wing pretending to care about the very media consolidation they encourage and enable at every step.

It’s another example of how journalism doesn’t really align particularly well with the goals of consolidated corporate power, which in turn weakens it to exploitation by bad actors (like, oh, authoritarians). That’s a major reason why the U.S. desperately needs independent media, worker-owned media, and publicly-owned media, the latter of which Carr is also trying to destroy through sham investigations.

Again, it’s important to step back and view this all as an incredible, generational, and extremely successful right wing and corporate joint project to dismantle real journalism, accountability, and informed electoral consensus. This isn’t something that just popped up with Trump, though it did help enable Trumpism.

The destruction of media consolidation limits. The replacement of journalism with lazy infotainment journalistic simulacrum. The demonization and dismantling of public media. The hijacking of the biggest social media networks for use for right wing agitprop. And now the ham-fisted censorship campaign by dim authoritarian zealots against the few remaining major broadcast networks Trump-allied right wingers don’t currently own.

None of it has been remotely subtle, and the campaign results in a U.S. press that’s utterly and comically incapable of being honest with itself (or its audience) about what’s actually happening. This is, to be clear, the exact trajectory seen in countries like Russia or Hungary that stumbled face-first into permanent autocratic rule.