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The congressional hearing at which Ruddy recently spoke was not your typical partisan food fight. Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, and who won headlines last year for likening Carr’s comments about Kimmel to the language of a Mob boss, sounded distinctly unimpressed by the idea that the F.C.C. could simply override the will of Congress to change the ownership cap. But otherwise, he didn’t take an overt position on the merits of such a change; Steven Waldman, the founder of the media-policy group Rebuild Local News, who also testified, told me that Cruz’s opening remarks—in which he traced the history of broadcast media from “I Love Lucy” through our modern era of media fragmentation—were “almost journalistic” in their evenhandedness. Most of Cruz’s Democratic colleagues were nuanced, too. In Waldman’s testimony, he said that he sympathized, to an extent, with both proponents and critics of raising the cap—even if evidence shows that corporate mergers certainly do not guarantee greater investment in local journalism, as industry lobbyists have suggested.
At one point, Waldman had a strikingly friendly exchange with Todd Young, a Republican senator from Indiana. Young’s statement “was among the most eloquent things I’ve heard recently on the importance of community media,” Waldman told me, adding that, in his experience, Republican politicians often have “a real sense for not just the accountability aspects of journalism but the community-cohesion aspects.” This mirrored another trend that I wrote about last year—of Republican lawmakers in certain states quietly pushing bills to help revive flagging local outlets, beneath the fray of their party’s national-level war on the mainstream media. Efforts to reinvigorate local journalism are often focussed on print media, but local TV news is more widely consumed—and generally more trusted than its national counterparts. (A surprising number of local-news anchors have used that trust as a springboard to launch political careers.)
Swarztrauber claims that Carr, too, values local news. “There are people right now arguing that we should just shut down all broadcasters and sell their spectrum to wireless carriers,” he told me. “Carr’s not talking about that. He’s saying that there’s a public good here.” Certainly Carr has long talked about deregulating the airwaves, including in a chapter that he wrote for Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s infamous blueprint for a second Trump term, in which he advocated “eliminating many of the heavy-handed FCC regulations that were adopted in an era when every technology operated in a silo” and “creating a market-friendly regulatory environment.” (Swarztrauber recalled a trip Carr took to visit a radio station in Wyoming “that was a Dell laptop essentially playing music,” and yet couldn’t merge with a local news outlet owing to ownership rules.) After Trump returned to office, the F.C.C. invited comment on all agency regulations as part of an initiative titled “In re: Delete, Delete, Delete.” Last week, I tuned in to the agency’s monthly open meeting, and the agenda sounded conventional, technical (“Proposing Application Limit in Upcoming NCE Reserved Band FM Translator Filing Window,” anyone?), and, at least to my untrained ear, dull.
Carr’s most attention-grabbing maneuvers, however, have been anything but. Since taking over the F.C.C., he has revived and reinterpreted regulations, or weaponized the threat thereof, in ways that have bent the arc of broadcast TV toward Trump, or sought to—not least in the Kimmel case. At a glance, then, his approach appears to be inconsistent. But a coherent project comes into view if you see his primary currency as leverage, over beneficiaries and targets alike. Craig Aaron, the co-C.E.O. of Free Press, a media-advocacy group that strongly opposes lifting the ownership cap, told me that the divergent strands of Carr’s approach are best understood “less as a contradiction and more as a merger.” The F.C.C. did not respond to my e-mail inviting Carr to comment, but he has described ending the ownership cap not only in free-market terms but as a means to “empower” smaller competitors to stand up to the major networks whose programming they carry, such that next time, perhaps, they have the leverage to keep a Kimmel off air permanently. (In the fall, Nexstar and Sinclair ended up reinstating his show, following talks with Disney, which owns ABC.) More overtly, Carr told the Times Magazine that a “realignment” is under way in how right-wingers conceive of using government power to achieve their objectives. “Conservatives have complained about media bias forever,” he said. “We’ve always relied on the idea that the free market would address it.” But “this sort of libertarian free-market answer isn’t working.”
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Jon Allsop
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