FCC Chair Brendan Carr clashes with Democrats in Senate hearing

FCC Chair Brendan Carr clashes with Democrats in Senate hearing

STEVEN PORTNOY

Wed, December 17, 2025 at 8:05 PM UTC

5 min read

FCC Chair Brendan Carr clashes with Democrats in Senate hearing

In several tense exchanges with Democratic senators, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr denied accusations of censorship and defended his agency's actions against broadcasters.

"You're now the chairman of the 'Federal Censorship Commission,'" Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., told Carr in a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Wednesday. "And these broadcasters, they feel that censorship."

Carr maintained he is doing his job as Congress intended.

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"If broadcasters understand, perhaps for the first time in years, that they're going to be held accountable to the public interest, to the broadcast hoax rule, to the news distortion policy, I think that's a good thing," Carr told Markey.

Heather Diehl/Getty Images - PHOTO: Brendan Carr, commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission speaks at the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee oversight hearing in the U.S. Capitol Building, December 17, 2025 in Washington.

Markey accused Carr of making "mafia threats" toward station owners, after which two major national groups temporarily dropped ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" -- a charge Carr denied.

"If you look at the evidence, the express statements by every single company involved -- from Nexstar and Sinclair to Disney -- as recently as last week is that they made these business decisions on their own," Carr insisted.

Markey invoked the case of KCBS Radio in San Francisco, where a news anchor was reportedly demoted and ultimately left the station after the FCC initiated a review of a report on an ICE raid in January that depicted the types of vehicles the agents were driving.

"Well, guess what happened?" Markey said. "The station demoted the anchor who first read that news report over the air and pulled back on its political coverage. You got what you wanted."

Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, accused Carr of overstepping, wielding a regulatory power that threatens to encroach on the First Amendment rights of broadcasters.

Heather Diehl/Getty Images - PHOTO: Sen. Ed Markey attends the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee oversight hearing in the U.S. Capitol Building, December 17, 2025 in Washington.

Carr argued his predecessors have allowed his agency's historic role to become dormant.

"I think if you step back over the years, I think the FCC has walked away from enforcing the public interest standard, and I don't think that's a good thing," he told Klobuchar.

"My position, and I think the Trump administration position, is that we should be enforcing those rules and policies," Carr told Schatz. "Congress, you're free to change it."

Indeed, the committee's Republican chair opened the panel's first oversight hearing into the FCC in several years by saying it is "long past time" for reforms to the nearly-century old law under which the commission has initiated investigations into broadcasters. He also insisted the FCC not see itself as an arbiter of truth.

In his opening statement, Cruz called it a "simple truth" that Congress should bring an end to the FCC's public interest standard and what he called its "wretched offspring," the commission's news distortion rule.

Both, he said, "have outlived whatever utility they once had, and it is long past time for Congress to pass reforms."

In a brief back-and-forth with Carr, Cruz said that the public interest standard had been "weaponized against conservatives" during past administrations, and that threats of commission action against disfavored content amounts to "an unconstitutional coercion that chills protected speech."

"Democrat or Republican, we cannot have the government arbitrating truth or opinion," Cruz said.

In response, Carr said he agreed with Cruz, that the public interest standard should not be used to chill speech.

Heather Diehl/Getty Images - PHOTO: Anna M. Gomez, commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission speaks at the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee oversight hearing in the U.S. Capitol Building, December 17, 2025 in Washington.

But without addressing his own actions this year, Carr quickly pivoted to an example of the Biden-era FCC allowing a petition challenging the renewal of a Fox-owned TV station license to linger, based on complaints over election-related content that aired on the Fox News Channel.

"First and foremost, we have to make sure the FCC is hewing to precedent," Carr said.

But what government cannot do," Cruz said, "is force private entities to take actions that the government cannot take directly. Government officials threatening adverse consequences for disfavored content is an unconstitutional coercion that chills protected speech."

Since becoming chair of the commission in January, Carr has begun -- or threatened to begin -- several investigations into radio and television station owners and opened the first proceeding in decades examining the power dynamic in the business relationship between networks and their affiliates.

Carr has also signaled his support for eliminating or weakening the FCC's rules capping the number of stations a single company can own.

In his opening statement, Carr said his agenda includes "empowering stations to meet their public interest obligations."

The law requiring licensed stations to operate in the "public interest, convenience and necessity" dates to the Radio Act of 1927, though that term has never been defined in statute.

The hearing also featured the testimony of Carr's fellow commissioners, Democrat Anna Gomez and Republican Olivia Trusty.

Gomez accused the Trump administration of being on a campaign to control the media and silence its critics and using the FCC to accomplish those goals.

"We are hearing from broadcasters that they are afraid to air programming that is critical of this administration, because they're afraid of being dragged before the FCC," Gomez said.

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