WASHINGTON—During his monthly press conference, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr reiterated his controversial plans to enforce public interest rules on broadcasters who show "news bias" while describing the agency’s decision to approve the Nexstar/Tegna deal as being part of a larger policy to create a “healthy, thriving local broadcast TV market.“
Carr also provided new details about an ongoing an enforcement action against Disney relating to a violation of “equal time” rules.
Since becoming FCC chair in 2025, Carr has said the agency was investigating various Disney properties for a variety of alleged offences. Those include their DEI practices, "news bias" in ABC’s handling of a 2026 Presidential debate and potential equal time violations.
Article continues belowEarlier this year, the FCC Media Bureau under Carr issued guidance telling broadcast stations airing certain late night and daytime talk shows that they are required to give equal time to rival candidates if those shows air interviews with political candidates. This prompted a major controversy when Stephen Colbert said CBS refused to allow him to air an interview with Texas State Representative James Talarico, a Democrat running for the U.S. Senate in Texas on his late night show.
Subsequently the FCC said in early February it had opened an investigation into `The View’ on ABC, which aired an separate interview with Talarico.
During the March 26 press conference, Carr said that the equal time rules require that stations to file “an equal time notice” in their political file. This triggers a window during which other candidates can “seek out and obtain their comparable time and placement."
Carr added that “the Disney owned TV station…didn't make any filing indicating that there had been a legally qualified candidate for office” in their non-news programming. In contrast, “every single TV station other than the one owned by Disney that ran that program did, in fact, file a notice regarding the appearance by James Talarico," Carr added.
In response to what enforcement action the FCC has taken in the matter, Carr said “it's ongoing right now. So we have lots of enforcement tools that are available to the FCC. We have our version of subpoenas, which are letters of inquiry. At this point, I'll just say that. You know, we've taken some enforcement measures with respect to Disney and `The View’. So we're still in the midst of this enforcement proceeding. We've taken certain steps. We're going to be taking others here soon and [not] announced publicly on that, but it is an enforcement matter at this point.”
In terms of the FCC's approval of the Nexstar Tegna merger, Carr put the agency’s decision in the context of the ongoing problems of local journalism. If “you look at this massive, secular decline in reporters, and you look at the future of the broadcast TV industry, I think it's imperative as a national policy matter that we should want a healthy, thriving local broadcast TV market,” he said
In response to a question about whether the FCC was planning to overturn the ownership caps on broadcast stations, Carr said “I think we should give broadcasters, local TV stations in particular, a fighting chance in this new frothy media environment” but stressed that the agency hadn’t made a final decision.
He also hinted that approving waivers to the ownership cap in mergers on a case by case basis, as it did in the Nexstar/Tegna deal, might be an acceptable policy even if the ownership rules weren’t changed.
“This is a rule that the FCC has said over and over again, is a rule, and any rule can be waived when the waiver standard is met," he said. "And that's a case by case review in terms of application of the waiver standard.”
Strictly enforcing the rules without considering wavers “stops all transactions from being reviewed by the FCC, good transactions and bad transactions alike. So I think…being able to take a case by case look at transactions makes sense. Transactions that are in the public interest, we can let through and transactions that aren't, we can stop. Moving into that sort of a more refined approach is better.”
In a separate press conference, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, a Democrat, disputed Carr’s defense of the Nexstar/Tegna approval process with some of her strongest words to date.
“Last week's rushed closed door approval of the unlawful Nexstar/Tegna merger is just the latest example of what I call the billionaire bypass,” Gomez complained. If “you are a billionaire with business before a government agency and a perceived friend of the White House, your transaction will get fast track approval. We saw it with the Paramount Skydance transaction, where the FCC immediately approved the deal, after Skydance agreed to make CBS more friendly to this administration, and after CBS paid to settle [a Trump lawsuit]...We are seeing it play out again with the proposed Warner Brothers discovery and Paramount merger, and we saw it last week with a $6.2 billion deal that sailed through multiple levels of regulatory scrutiny in a single day.”
“[M]eanwhile smaller transactions from less connected companies filed months earlier are still waiting,” she said. “This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern, and it tells you exactly who this FCC is working for, and it is certainly not the vast majority of American consumers.”
Gomez also described the approval as “flatly illegal. Congress said the national broadcast ownership cap at 39% of American homes. It reaffirmed that limit three times over 20 years, most recent, recently in 2004 when it explicitly stripped the FCC of any authority to waive or modify it. The law is not ambiguous. The FCC cannot rewrite it. It cannot ignore it. Yet, that is exactly what the media Bureau did last week, under bureaucratic cover, with no open process and no public accountability.”
