When Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr took to X last month threatening license revocations over broadcasters not operating in the public interest, it became a case study for policy experts, educators and journalists alike.
How much government oversight is too much?
Commissioner Anna Gomez, currently the sole Democrat on the FCC, led a panel of experts who offered perspectives on the government’s role in ensuring that news outlets avoid bias, whether real or perceived.
A focal point was the concept of “jawboning” — government officials using informal pressure, public threats or social media to coerce media organizations into changing their coverage.
Threats raised on social media may not result in a direct policy change, said Joe Flint, entertainment business reporter for The Wall Street Journal, but may weigh heavily on a company looking ahead to its next license renewal.
“That’s where I wonder if the ultimate goal is to be in the back of an outlet’s mind, ‘Well, what lawsuit will this bring?’” Flint asked.
Casey Mattox, vice president of legal strategy at Stand Together, said the pressure can build gradually over time.
“People end up being slowly affected by this sort of accumulation of the gravitational force’s power,” he said.
But Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said jawboning historically has been difficult to prove in court.
“It is going to require a licensee that has had enough and said, ‘We are being affected adversely by all of this pressure being brought on broadcasters, and we would like to put that to the test,’” Corn-Revere said.
You cannot completely remove bias from media, Mattox said, because to be human is to have bias.
Flint referenced the controversies around Howard Stern in his Infinity Broadcasting days to show that pressure from regulators is nothing new.
Mara Gassmann, senior staff attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, pointed to two recent court decisions that are relevant though not directly involving the FCC.
U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss ruled in March that the Trump administration’s executive order to end federal funding for NPR and PBS was unconstitutional.
And District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled last month that the administration’s efforts to dismantle the Voice of America were “arbitrary and capricious.”
It is unclear where those decisions will lead, though Corn-Revere noted that the use of social media by Carr and others has caught the eye of federal courts.
Gomez pointed out that historically, the FCC has justified regulating broadcast content by arguing that spectrum was a scarce public resource and a “pervasive presence.”
Should that apply in today’s fragmented content landscape?
“We’ve got media literacy programs, media education, but at the bottom end of the day, I don’t think it’s the government’s role to sort out what’s true or what’s false,” said Clay Calvert, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“If everyone just took a little more time trying to listen and understand each other and not immediately go to ‘what is the agenda,’ I think we’d be a lot better off,” Flint said.
Local broadcasters, the panelists concurred, are uniquely positioned to push back and remain objective.
“All of this is sort of downstream of culture,” Mattox said. “You are in the best position, more than just about anybody, to do what is the most necessary thing to protect First Amendment rights going forward.”
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