It’s Time for Congress To End the FCC’s Escalating War on Free Speech
In 2019, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr declared that the agency had no “roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.’” But he backtracked on that claim in a big way last Saturday—reportedly while visiting the president’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Carr warned that broadcasters “running hoaxes and news distortions” should “correct course before their license renewals come up.” The threat came just after President Trump criticized press coverage of the war in Iran in a social media post. The message was unmistakable: Broadcast outlets that report on the conflict in ways the administration dislikes risk losing access to the public airwaves. The instrument of coercion was equally clear: the FCC’s “public interest” standard, a regulatory concept so vague and so routinely abused that it has become whatever the sitting chair says it is.
The Public Interest Standard Is No Standard at All
The public interest standard has governed communications policy since the Radio Act of 1927, and in the near-century since its enactment, neither Congress nor the FCC has managed to define it with any precision. In 1959, Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase argued that the phrase “lacks any definite meaning” and that the inconsistencies in agency decisions had made it “impossible for the phrase to acquire a definite meaning in the process of regulation.” That assessment remains true today. The public interest standard is an empty vessel into which successive generations of unelected bureaucrats have poured whatever political priorities happen to be ascendant at the time.
Carr’s invocation of “hoaxes and news distortions” is particularly misleading, as the FCC’s own rules define those terms far more narrowly than his rhetoric suggests. The “hoax” rule applies exclusively to false information concerning a crime or catastrophe, and only when the licensee knows the information is false and that the broadcast is likely to cause substantial public harm in some direct way. It is difficult to argue that criticizing a global military action meets this entire criterion.
So how does the FCC determine what constitutes “fake news”? Carr offered no criteria, no specific broadcast, and no standard by which a regulator could distinguish impermissible reporting from legitimate journalism. The absurdity of the exercise becomes apparent the moment one examines who is raising concerns about the war. The president himself campaigned against “endless wars,” calling his opponent “the candidate of endless wars” and vowing, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.” As recently as June 2025, Vice President JD Vance said he empathized with Americans “exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East.” He has since conspicuously avoided lending the current war his full-throated public support. Prominent conservative commentators have questioned the administration’s justifications, and the conflict has visibly divided the president’s own political base.
If reporting that reflects the skepticism of the administration’s own voters and allies constitutes “fake news,” then the term has no meaning beyond coverage the president finds inconvenient. This means that the public interest standard has been reduced to a loyalty test administered by the FCC on the White House’s behalf.
The rule against “broadcast news distortion” is impossible to wrangle. It applies only where there is evidence that a news report deliberately intended to mislead viewers or listeners. The FCC’s own guidance specifies that enforcement requires proof of deliberate distortion of a significant factual event, drawing a clear distinction between intentional fabrication and mere inaccuracy or difference of opinion—the latter of which is expressly not actionable. Nothing in Carr’s weekend broadside identified a specific broadcast, a specific falsehood, or a specific intent to deceive. He simply gestured at coverage he found unfavorable and invoked regulatory consequences.
Importantly, this not the administration’s first foray into bullying the media. It is one incident in a pattern of coercion that constitutes a clear danger to free speech. In September 2025, Carr pressured broadcasters into temporarily suspending a late-night comedy program after the host made remarks the administration found objectionable. By January 2026, the FCC had issued regulatory guidance reinterpreting the “equal-time rule” to cover both daytime and late-night talk shows—a move the commission’s sole Democratic member characterized as “an escalation in this FCC’s ongoing campaign to censor and control speech.” CBS subsequently refused to air an interview its own host had conducted with a political candidate, citing fear of regulatory reprisal.
As noted in a previous R Street analysis, the Federal Trade Commission’s recent letter to Apple about the curation decisions of Apple News reflects the same troubling impulse to use regulatory authority (or even the implication of it) to pressure private companies into altering their editorial choices. The pattern is consistent across agencies. Government officials leverage their oversight power not to enforce clearly defined statutory obligations, but to coerce private actors into producing speech outcomes the administration prefers. This is precisely the kind of government conduct that free-market proponents have historically opposed, and rightly so.
As a practical matter, these threats are largely unenforceable, which makes them even more nefariously coercive. The FCC has not denied a license renewal in decades. Television licenses do not come up for renewal until late 2028 at the earliest, and any government action against a licensee would trigger protracted litigation in which the station would mount a First Amendment defense.
But enforceability is beside the point. The real function of these threats is not legal, but atmospheric: to create a climate of self-censorship in which media companies—particularly those with pending business before the commission (e.g., mergers, license transfers, spectrum allocations)—preemptively soften their coverage to avoid regulatory friction.
Congress Should Act to Constrain the Powers of the FCC
The reason Carr and other FCC officials are able to abuse their authority in this fashion is because Congress has never taken steps to restrain the agency’s open-ended powers. Lawmakers have refused to provide any meaningful guidance regarding the amorphous “public interest” powers of the agency, preferring to delegate open-ended authority to the agency and castigate FCC officials when they overstep.
The last time Congress took up serious reform of archaic telecom and media policies was 30 years ago in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Unfortunately, not only did lawmakers fail to provide any meaningful guidance or limitations on the agency’s public interest authority, they ultimately expanded the FCC’s powers. As a recent R Street series on the Telecom Act’s 30th anniversary noted, this has left the door open to ongoing and unnecessary FCC meddling in markets and speech.
What makes this situation even more bizarre is that the FCC is now engaged in full-time harassment of news providers in one increasingly narrow segment of the media ecosystem while the disputed content is often available via multiple online and social media platforms. Essentially, the oldest electronic media are governed by a lesser First Amendment standard than the one applied to newer electronic media. This scenario is a veritable “telecom Twilight Zone” that creates bifurcated First Amendment rights with no grounding in modern realities.
Congress should have closed the book on this unfair regulatory regime when it passed the Telecom Act. Unfortunately, the system persists and allows continued FCC speech meddling that is wholly offensive to the First Amendment and the rule of law. It is not too late for Congress to end this by limiting FCC powers over free speech—or better yet, taking steps to eliminate the agency for good.