After he played a key role in getting late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show pulled from ABC “indefinitely,” Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, took a victory lap of sorts: He sat down with Fox News’s Sean Hannity — a symbolically significant choice, given Hannity’s alliance with the Trump White House.
Carr: They are now facing the consequences of the choices they have made to appeal to a very narrow audience. You can do that, you can start a podcast, but if you are going to have a license with the FCC, we expect you to broadly serve the public interest pic.twitter.com/fi2mpRM7xO
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 18, 2025
There was one phrase that Carr used over and over again during the relatively brief on-air appearance. With a broadcast license, the FCC chairman said, “comes a unique obligation to operate in the public interest.” As the interview progressed, he again said, “We at the FCC are going to enforce the public interest obligation. If there’s broadcasters out there that don’t like it, they can turn their license in to the FCC.”
Carr concluded, “Look, running a narrow partisan circus, whatever the public interest means, it’s not that. … If you’re going to have a license from the FCC, we expect you to broadly serve the public interest.”
As it turns out, however, the Republican regulator appears to have reached this conclusion quite recently.
“Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not,” Carr wrote in 2019. “The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.’”
Evidently, he was against his standard before he was for it.
In 2022, Carr also wrote, “President Biden is right. Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people in to the discussion. That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.” Three years later, Carr appeared on a far-right podcast and referenced his agency’s role in granting broadcast licenses. Referring specifically to a satirist’s comedic monologue, Carr added, “When we see stuff like this, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Before Senate Republicans agreed to make Carr the FCC chair, he wrote a chapter in the far-right Project 2025 blueprint. “The F.C.C. should promote freedom of speech,” he wrote in the first words of the chapter. The Trump administration’s aggressive campaign against the First Amendment would be less terrifying if Carr had meant any of it.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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