ABC CBS NBC ARE FOOKED
FROM J C
Fox analyzed network coverage of two presidents’ pardons issued on the same day and guess what? The coverage was, shall we say, slightly imbalanced. ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted a negligible 6% of their pardon-related coverage to the Biden Crime Family, but a massive 94% to January 6th pardons.
Only CBS gave more than a minute to the Biden pardons, clocking in at 64 ungenerous seconds of total coverage which, to CBS’s credit, was twice as much as either ABC or NBC.
We’re used to this kind of bias. It was utterly predictable. But this time, it could be very significant. The networks may have finally gone too far. Let me explain.
see first comment
The Federal Communications Commission is managed by a five-member board. Its priorities are set by the Chairman, who is one of the five members and is appointed by the President. Among other things, the FCC Chairman wields power by controlling the Committee’s agenda, proposing new rules, and overseeing staffing, including the sub-appointment of various bureau chiefs.
Following his Inauguration last week, President Trump appointed as FCC Chairman a terrific Republican Commissioner, Brendan Carr. Mr. Carr, 46, holds a law degree —not from the Ivy League— and is often described as the Commission’s conservative firebrand. Mr. Carr did not sit on his hands last week.
While CBS, NBC, and ABC were busy filling the airwaves with totally biased pardon coverage, newly promoted Chairman Brenden Carr did magically revived bias complaints about all three networks (NY Post Headline):
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Specifically, Carr flipped a last-minute order issued by the outgoing Biden Administration’s FCC Chair. The order dismissed three key complaints filed by conservative nonprofit The Center for American Rights, one against each network.
Among other things the Center complained about, and this will shock you, was biased coverage in Kamala Harris’ favor during the presidential campaign.
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On one of her final days in the office, Biden’s appointed chairperson —Carr’s immediate predecessor— tried to ashcan the complaints. But once he assumed Chairmanship, Carr, trained in law, found a way to resurrect them. FCC rules provide a 30-day window following the end of a chair’s term, during which an incoming new chair can reconsider any last-minute orders. Had prior Chair Jessica Rosenworcel acted just a few weeks earlier, her dismissals would have been safe from Carr’s reconsideration.
But she waited to the last minute. It’s almost like Jessica didn’t think Harris could lose. For some reason. Oh well!
? The FCC enjoys a tenuous hold over content. The reason it has any say about content at all is that broadcasters like ABC, NBC, and CBS use publicly owned airwaves, some of the most valuable electromagnetic real estate along the entire radio spectrum. Thus, despite the First Amendment, the networks consent to some supervision, usually limited to things like obscenity, hoaxes, and “distorted news,” which nowadays they call “misinformation.”
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Last fall, a revolutionary idea related to DOGE and the national debt made the rounds. The Verge ran the story on October 30th, headlined “Why Donald Trump and Elon Musk are picking on broadcast TV.” Just one week before, on October 22nd, CNN ran a related story headlined, “Trump’s growing threats to strip broadcast licenses send chills across industry.”
You have to go back to October to find the discussion, since after Trump won the election, probably out of panicked self-interest, the media has clammed up about this issue tighter than Tony Soprano’s therapist during an FBI interrogation.
All last year, Candidate Trump repeatedly complained that the alphabet networks “should have their licenses or whatever they have taken away.” In late fall, an influential conservative thought leader floated a radical idea: strip the broadcast spectrum from the alphabet networks, auction it off for cutting-edge uses, and use the windfall to pay down the national debt.
That conservative thought leader, David Sacks, is now Trump’s brand-new AI and Cryptocurrency Czar. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who championed Sacks’ sell-the-spectrum proposal, now heads DOGE, with a mission to tackle the national debt. Musk argued passionately that the spectrum could be repurposed for transformative technologies like GPS and the “Internet of Things.”
Why would the alphabet networks even need the spectrum, in this age dominated by streaming anyway? Seriously, who—if anyone—is still using rabbit ears to watch the news?
Circling back around, consider how one of Brendan Carr’s first acts as the new FCC Chairman was to resurrect the three hastily dismissed complaints—one against each of the three major networks. It’s a move pregnant, as they say, with portentous possibility. But given the networks’ biased coverage of the two presidents’ pardons, it’s not even clear they’re smart enough to sweat bullets.
Very astute.
Never at all impressed with Jessica, who has been there for at least 30 years, since she was there and making some waves as I was leaving.
” strip the broadcast spectrum from the alphabet networks, auction it off for cutting-edge uses, and use the windfall to pay down the national debt.”
Yup. My friend Harold Furchgott Roth (FCC commissioner while I was there, now at Hudson Institute) would approve.
Rattle them bones.
Aha…Our pedro has FCC roots
Interesting
What roll did you play in DC ?
Do you still have your security detail ?
🙂
wireless competition reviews initially,
then office of general counsel in all telecom merger reviews
basically, applying the DOJ’s Horizontal Merger and related Guidelines to telecom.
This was right after the ’96 Telecom Act with broken up bells, the internet, and wireless technology all changing the landscape daily. I left when the OGC role shifted away from competition analysis toward political favoritism. Economics has a way of tying political hands.
Thanks for your service pedro