Even Traditional GOP Allies Are Urging The FCC To End Its Baseless Attack On CBS, 60 Minutes

Last October, Trump sued CBS claiming (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been “deceitfully edited” to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). As Mike explored, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and tramples the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and common sense.

CBS/Paramount is looking for regulatory approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance (run by Larry Ellison’s kid David). Trump and his FCC boss Brendan Carr quickly zeroed on on this, and began using merger approval as leverage to bully CBS into even more feckless coverage of the administration.

As CBS explores its options, the company is being pressured to fold like a coward (like Meta, ABC, or Paul Weiss) by incoming new CEO Jeff Shell. At the same time, the FCC under Trump sycophant Brendan Carr has launched a flimsy probe into CBS over the 60 Minutes non-violation.

Academics and free speech experts were quick to point out that Carr was radically abusing government power in unprecedented ways, ironically after years of Carr hypocritically claiming that any FCC consumer protection actions against shitty telecom monopolies were “radical overreach.”

Carr is trying to claim that the minor edits done by CBS violate a longstanding “Broadcast News Distortion” policy that’s almost never enforced by the agency, which has largely given up on media regulations under both parties. The policy in question says violations must involve clear distortion of “a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report.”

That means hard proof of something like a bribe by a company or politicians to change news coverage, and that clearly doesn’t apply here. Trumpism is just making baseless accusations against CBS, knowing that even if CBS isn’t actually found guilty of anything, it allows the vast GOP propaganda machine to generate entire news cycles suggesting that 60 Minutes did something nefarious.

But even Conservative groups have come out against Carr’s weaponization of government. Several groups traditionally allied with the GOP (and GOP loyal sectors like big telecom) including The Center for Individual Freedom, Americans for Tax Reform, and the Taxpayers Protection Alliance have collectively urged Carr to drop his sham inquiry, calling it “regulatory overreach”:

Many of these “taxpayer” nomenclature groups are traditionally used as lobbying tools by industry (and the GOP) to pretend there’s broad support for what are usually unpopular policies (like say approving a shitty merger, attacking community broadband, or killing net neutrality). Most of these groups receive donations from corporate giants (like AT&T) while pretending to be objectively independent.

In their letter, the organizations first prop up the bad faith Conservative pseudo-“censorship” victimization complex, but then suggest a better path would be to eliminate the (again, barely enforced) “Broadcast News Distortion” rule entirely. These orgs (alongside many other “free market libertarian think tank” brethren) generally like their captured regulators to be blindly feckless to corporate power without all the extra, unpredictable authoritarian zealotry.

A company like AT&T, Verizon, or Comcast is too chickenshit to criticize Trumpism directly (lest they have their merger approvals rejected or face new sham inquiries for not being racist enough), but the fact their policy puppet organizations are publicly complaining here is notable all the same.