FCC chair Brendan Carr is a weapon in Trump’s war on free speech

I’ve been the editor-in-chief of The Verge for over 10 years now, and a tech journalist for about 15 — and until recently, it felt pretty safe to assume that there was a zero percent chance that the US government would punish me for doing my job. There’s that whole First Amendment in this country, after all — we don’t usually tolerate government interference with speech, and we have a high bar for how public figures like politicians and celebrities can use defamation law to shut down reporting they don’t like.

So it’s been fairly disconcerting these first few weeks of the second Trump administration to realize, suddenly, there’s a nonzero chance the government will punish our work. All that talk about the media being the enemy of the people is turning into concrete legal action against publishers, broadcasters, and platforms that don’t do what the Trump White House wants.

There are new examples popping up basically every day. This week, for example, The Associated Press was barred from a White House event because the AP Stylebook says reporters should refer to the Gulf of Mexico by its original name, and not the “Gulf of America,” like President Donald Trump wants. It sounds silly, but as AP executive editor Julie Pace said, the government punishing a company for speech it doesn’t like “plainly violates the First Amendment.”

And there are bigger, deeper attacks on free speech coming from Brendan Carr, the new Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC is pretty much the only government agency with some authority to directly regulate speech in America because it controls the spectrum used to broadcast radio and television. Carr has started using that authority to punish broadcasters for speech Trump doesn’t like or even for having internal business practices that don’t align with the administration. He’s opened investigations into ABC, CBS, and NBC in a way that no previous FCC would ever do, and he’s even launched an investigation into NBC’s parent company, Comcast, over the existence of DEI policies.

I have to disclose here that Comcast and NBCUniversal are investors in our parent company, Vox Media, but it doesn’t even really matter in this context, as Carr is hell-bent on punishing every media company unless they fall in line. In the course of my work, I’ve talked to virtually every FCC chair going back to the Bush administration, and Carr’s interpretation of what the FCC is for and what authority it has over speech is completely out of line with any of his predecessors and is as autocratic as it gets. He wants to be America’s chief censor, and so far, he’s getting his way.

This is really serious stuff, and it could have far-reaching consequences on how journalists try to report on the Trump administration — primarily by creating a real and sustained culture of fear, one that’s already ripping through the corporate parent companies of media organizations. They’ve begun rolling over and settling various lawsuits instead of fighting for our First Amendment rights.

It’s dire out there, so to help understand the scope of the problem, I brought on Matt Wood, general counsel and VP of policy at Free Press (not the Bari Weiss publication, but the much older First Amendment advocacy group). Matt has been a fixture of the open internet and press freedom movements for decades now, and his expert analysis of the history of speech in America can help us see the context of what’s happening today and why the Trump administration’s unprecedented attack on free speech is such a big deal.

If you’d like to read more about what we discuss in this episode, check out the links below: