Trump’s media enforcer is relishing his Jimmy Kimmel moment

Naming Brendan Carr to chair the Federal Communications Commission in November, President-elect Donald Trump heralded him as a “warrior for free speech.”

Now, after spearheading the Trump administration’s successful push for ABC to take comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air, Carr has become a gleeful avatar of what critics say is a sweeping government crackdown on speech — and his backers see as an overdue reckoning with an instinctively liberal broadcast industry.

A lawyer who served as the FCC’s general counsel before being nominated as a commissioner by Trump in 2017, Carr’s résumé until recently fit the bill of a career policy wonk at a federal agency whose work rarely seizes the spotlight. Yet there he was on Wednesday playing the role of political enforcer while speaking to the prominent right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson. “We can do this the hard way or the easy way,” he said, counseling Disney — and by implication its competitors across the media sector — to “find ways to change conduct” or else.

The threat he implicitly leveled at the Hollywood giant that owns ABC is one he has wielded before: that the FCC would pull local broadcast licenses — an extraordinary step with almost no precedent, and which First Amendment experts said is probably illegal.

Whether the threat was bluster or not, it worked: In response to pressure from Carr and affiliate station owners Nexstar and Sinclair, ABC preempted Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” on Wednesday night. It is unclear if and when Kimmel will return to the airwaves, and the network provided no further comment. Carr did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

While sidelining Kimmel might be Carr’s biggest victory to date, pressuring media companies has become the FCC chairman’s modus operandi.

Since taking over the chairmanship, Carr has criticized nearly every major media company. He launched a still-ongoing investigation of NPR and PBS over sponsorship practices, demanded answers from YouTube parent Alphabet over allegations that it discriminated against faith-based programming, threatened to block mergers of companies engaged in DEI practices, and approved Skydance’s $8 billion merger with Paramount with an ombudsman — who has been a Trump donor — installed at CBS News as a concession.

In the Wednesday interview with Johnson, Carr suggested his mandate came straight from Trump, who he said ran directly against the “legacy media establishment” and “smashed the facade that they get to control what we say, what we think, the narrative around events.”

“NPR has been defunded,” he said, cataloging his victories under Trump. “PBS has been defunded. Colbert is retiring. Joy Reid is out at MSNBC. Terry Moran is gone from ABC and is now admitting that they are biased. CBS has now made some commitments to us that they are going to return to more fact-based journalism.” (Congress stripped funding to NPR and PBS through a Trump-backed rescission targeting the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which mostly gave federal dollars to local stations.)

Before Trump’s election victory, Carr often advocated against government intervention in speech.

When a Democratic FCC commissioner called for a crackdown on electronic cigarette advertisements in 2019, Carr posted on Twitter, “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.’”

In 2022, Carr called political satire “one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech” because it “challenges those in power.” And in 2023 he called government censorship “the authoritarian’s dream.” People on social media resurfaced many of Carr’s old tweets Wednesday and Thursday.

Carr, a 46-year-old Washington native, began his stint at the FCC championing 5G wireless broadband infrastructure. During the Biden administration he emerged as a vocal critic of tech companies’ efforts to police misinformation, including about COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election.

Like many on the right, Carr argued that Biden officials were illegally pressuring tech firms to take down disfavored opinions from conservatives, a practice known as jawboning.

“The government does not evade the First Amendment’s restraints on censoring political speech by jawboning a company into suppressing it,” he posted in 2022.

Yet his growing sense that big social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (now X) had become a modern “public square” informed his view that the government could and should intervene to ensure Silicon Valley internet firms didn’t discriminate against conservative viewpoints.

In 2024, Carr backed Texas and Florida’s right to pass laws requiring social media companies to carry conservative speech, which the tech firms argued violated their First Amendment rights to editorial freedom. The Supreme Court sided largely with the tech firms. He was also among the early and most influential advocates for legislation to ban TikTok over concerns about its Chinese ownership.

When Trump chose him in November to chair the commission, Carr vowed to “smash the censorship cartel.” While still an FCC commissioner, he wrote the chapter of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report about reforming the commission. He advocated that the FCC eliminate “heavy handed” rules governing media ownership, and that Congress repeal Section 230 liability protections for social media companies that discriminate against political viewpoints.

Carr routinely replies to people on social media and to reporters’ questions with GIFs. When one X user posted, “This was all in Project 2025, [by the way],” Carr responded with a meme of actor Jack Nicholson nodding mischievously.

Tom Wheeler, a former FCC chairman under Obama, told The Washington Post that Carr’s pressure on media companies is without precedent. “For an FCC chairman to get this far and this deep into the content judgments of those he regulates is unprecedented, a violation of the First Amendment, and a violation of the FCC’s own rules,” he said.

Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the FCC, criticized Carr and said that the agency doesn’t have the authority or legal standing to silence broadcasters.

“It is not the FCC’s job to judge what is and what is not funny,” Gomez said on MSNBC. “It’s not the FCC’s job to determine what content should be. It’s not even the FCC’s job to determine if there’s bias in a particular broadcaster. It is the FCC’s job to license broadcasters in the public interest, and then to step back, because anything more than that is a violation and infringement of the First Amendment.”

Under Carr, however, the FCC has become a pivotal player in the broadcasting business.

Nexstar, the largest television station owner in the country, said it would preempt “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Wednesday evening before ABC announced its own move to do so. Nexstar has active business before the FCC. The company needs the commission, controlled 2-1 by Republicans, to approve its $6.2 billion merger with rival Tegna. But to allow Nexstar to get any bigger, it also needs to raise the national ownership cap, which limits the number of stations one company can own across the United States.

“The companies have got this transaction that they’ve agreed to that is today, on its face, a violation of FCC rules,” Wheeler said. “The FCC is going to have to change those rules and then approve the merger — so there’s two bites of the apple. And it’s not hard to imagine why you would want to suck up to them in the process.”

The networks have to make a tough cost-benefit decision, said Mark Feldstein, a professor of broadcast journalism at the University of Maryland. On one hand is “the hard, largely measurable financial loss of capitulating to Trump,” he said; on the other are “the myriad incalculable ways his administration could retaliate against the corporation’s extended business interests.”

Not included, he added, is “the incalculable price of preserving free press in a democracy. But that’s a cost to be borne by the public, not the networks.”

Olivia Trusty, the other Republican member of the FCC, addressed Kimmel’s muzzling during an event held Thursday afternoon in Washington. She said Nexstar and Sinclair “made a business decision” to stop airing Kimmel’s show “because they do not believe it was in the public interest for their viewers.”

“Under the law, we have a responsibility to ensure broadcasters are complying with their public-interest obligations, and that’s what I’m committed to doing,” Trusty said.

When asked by The Post how the FCC determines which remarks made on television would be in violation of the public interest standard, Trusty said “everything is evaluated on a case-by-case basis.”

Randolph J. May, president of the free-market-oriented Free State Foundation that organized the event, praised the work that Carr has done to get rid of “outdated and unnecessary” regulations.

Carr and his fellow commissioners, May said, “have the right, like all of us, to express their views about programs, but they’ve got to be sensitive to not express their views in a way that interferes with the First Amendment rights of those that they regulate.”

A pair of 2024 Supreme Court rulings are likely to inform any constitutional challenges to Carr’s actions, legal experts said.

In one, the court ruled 9-0 that a New York state official probably violated the First Amendment by pressuring banks to cut ties with the National Rifle Association over its gun-rights advocacy. It was a win for conservative speech that could end up helping liberals push back against Carr and the Trump administration.

In the other, the court ruled 6-3 that conservative social media users had failed to show that the Biden administration’s interactions with tech companies led directly to their posts being taken down.

Carr is right that the FCC has some authority to ensure that broadcasters act in the public interest, said Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and a former legal adviser to an FCC commissioner under President Bill Clinton.

“But that has never been interpreted as allowing the FCC, much less a chairman of the FCC, to demand changes for a given program or a given personality,” he said. And telling ABC they could do things the easy way or the hard way is “not subtle,” he said, “and it’s not legal.”

Carr said things are just getting started. In an appearance on Fox News on Thursday, he said, “I don’t think this is the last shoe to drop.”