An Open Letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr

An unsolicited plea for dignity, from a former FCC Chief Counsel.

Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The following is an open letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, by Robert Corn-Revere, who served as Chief Counsel to former FCC Chairman James H. Quello. He is currently Chief Counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Checks & Balances is a newsletter of the Society for the Rule of Law Institute.

Dear Chairman Carr,

Pam Bondi’s sudden and ignominious end as Attorney General is an important cautionary lesson about what happens to officials in this administration who over-promise in order to curry favor with the man they see as their boss, but who under-perform because of the limits of their authority.

Bondi promised the President she would prosecute his political enemies and failed miserably. The President rewarded her misplaced loyalty by denying her the graceful exit she sought, and instead fired her during a cross-town limo ride to watch a Supreme Court argument.

You have recently threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who air what you call “fake news,” which apparently includes any skeptical reporting about the war in Iran—something you know you cannot do legally.

My advice? Don’t get into a car with the president anytime soon.

As you may recall, shortly after you were named to head the Federal Communications Commission, I offered you some unsolicited advice in the form of an open letter entitled “A Plea for Institutional Modesty.” I suggested you should be circumspect in your assertions of power over broadcasters because “you don’t have as much power as you may think,” and flexing your regulatory muscles would conflict with both the Communications Act and the Constitution.

But as was clear from your initial acts as chairman and statements you made while campaigning for the job, your quest for political advancement overrode any previous commitment to First Amendment values. Gone were the days when, as a commissioner, you said things like “a newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official, not targeted by them,” or that “inject[ing] partisan politics into our licensing process” is “a deeply troubling transgression of free speech and the FCC’s status as an independent agency.”

I never expected you would heed my gratuitous advice, but had no idea how thoroughly you would betray your former (professed) values. Instead, you emerged as a Bizarro World caricature of yourself, threatening owners of broadcast networks with summer stock Don Corleone impressions and devoting much of your social media activity to jawboning. It is as if you set out to prove that the real mental health crisis in America isn’t about teens on Instagram, but public officials on X.

Most of what you have done in your fourteen months on the job has been more performative than substantive. And, more often than not, your partisan posturing has actually undermined your transparent political objectives.

Take your much ridiculed threat that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way” and your directive that the Disney-owned ABC network should “take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” This, over a line in Jimmy Kimmel’s September 15, 2025 monologue about Charlie Kirk that you considered in bad taste and ludicrously labeled “news distortion.”

This may have achieved your immediate objective—after all, you crowed about it with goofy memes on X—when Disney indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! But then the bill came due.

People reacted badly to your thuggish tactics (and when I say people, I include Sen. Ted Cruz, Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, who called your actions “dangerous as Hell” before scheduling an oversight hearing), and Disney paid a price for caving in.

Protesters picketed outside the gates of the Magic Kingdom, and an estimated 7.1 million people cancelled subscriptions to Disney-owned streaming services Disney+ and Hulu over the controversy—at about twice the usual churn rate.

ABC affiliate group owners Sinclair Broadcasting and Nexstar Media Group, who had business before the Commission, and who dutifully followed your demand, also lost money. It turns out that advertisers will not pay as much for spots during reruns of Celebrity Family Feud as during Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Sinclair revenue dropped a reported 16 percent for the quarter. Nexstar also suffered losses, although the amounts were not disclosed.

The result? The suspension ended a little more than a week after it began and Kimmel triumphantly returned to the air to his highest viewership in over a decade. Kimmel’s comeback garnered 6.3 million broadcast viewers and roughly 20 - 26 million views on social media within 24 hours.

Your efforts to manipulate the equal opportunities rule, which applies to political candidate appearances on broadcast stations, produced a similar fiasco. In January, you caused the FCC staff to reinterpret whether candidate interviews on certain talk shows were exempt from the equal opportunities rule, reversing decades of precedent.

You apparently were miffed that candidate interviews on certain TV shows did not trigger “equal time” requirements for their opponents under exemptions to the rule Congress adopted in 1959. Yet mysteriously, you said there was no need to apply your reinterpretation to conservative talk radio interviews.

But your main target of this move, Stephen Colbert, outsmarted you. He ridiculed your reinterpretation of the equal opportunities rule on air, and gleefully transmitted his interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico on The Late Show’s YouTube channel, which is beyond the FCC’s jurisdiction. The interview got over seven million views overnight (more than three times the on-air viewership), Talarico immediately received $2.5 million in campaign contributions, and won his primary.

True, Stephen Colbert’s show is ending on CBS—something you bragged about in your list of “wins” over the media—but I am quite sure we have not heard the last of him. Meanwhile, CBS News, now under the yoke of a “news bias ombudsman” the FCC required under the terms of the Paramount Global-Skydance merger, continues to lose viewers at a record pace. CBS Evening News now has fewer than four million nightly viewers (compared to 5.4 million in 2024) and the network is hemorrhaging on-air talent.

In the face of these serial humiliations, you have only ramped up your censorial demands. On March 14, after the president railed against what he claimed was unfair newspaper coverage of his war, you fell into line, posting on X that “[b]roadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – otherwise known as fake news – have a chance to course correct before their license renewals come up.” Eschewing subtlety, you added “[t]he law is clear” that “[b]roadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their license if they do not.”

Unlike some of the comically unqualified appointees in this Administration, you know better. You have been an FCC commissioner for nearly a decade, and once upon a time you practiced communications law. So, you know your Bizarro World social media post gets what “the law is clear” about exactly backwards.

The law is clear that the First Amendment bars the government from dictating news coverage or punishing editors or publishers for reports the president thinks are “false.” And it also is clear that broadcast licensees who operate under the public interest standard are shielded from this kind of government interference as well.

You have repeatedly referred to the Communications Act’s public interest standard as if it vests the FCC with authority to act as a super editor for the nation, but this is the very same law you used to say does not empower the Commission to be the broadcast speech police. And you never mention Section 326 of the Act, which prohibits the FCC from engaging in “censorship” or “interfer[ing] with the right of free speech.”

When you bother to cite any case law for your newly-discovered assertion of authority, the most recent decision you can find is Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, the 1969 decision that upheld the fairness doctrine based on “the present state of commercially acceptable technology,” and which even at the time cautioned the Commission not to overstep its bounds. But you neglect to mention that in key cases since then, the Supreme Court has cut back on the FCC’s assumed authority over broadcast programming.

These cases include CBS v. Democratic National Committee (1973), where the Court stressed that the FCC must accord broadcasters “the widest journalistic freedom consistent with their public [duties],” League of Women Voters of California v. FCC (1984), where it struck down a ban on editorializing on public broadcast stations because “the First Amendment must inform and give shape to the manner in which Congress exercises its regulatory power in this area,” and Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC (1994), where the Court made clear “the FCC’s oversight responsibilities do not grant it the power to ordain any particular type of programming that must be offered by broadcast stations.”

But you know all this. Just as you know the FCC eliminated the fairness doctrine four decades ago, which is the regulatory progenitor of the “news distortion policy” you now love to cite (but only against broadcasts you perceive as critical of this administration). A more principled Republican leadership rescinded the fairness doctrine after concluding the First Amendment did not permit the public interest standard to be used in this way to regulate programming.

The news distortion policy is like a phantom limb after the FCC amputated the fairness doctrine—it is not really there in substance, but you still seem to feel you can walk on it.

Your smug social media posts about how broadcasters will be held to their public interest obligations “on your watch” ignores this history, but your claim that “the opposition to holding broadcasters accountable to the public interest comes increasingly from those unfamiliar with longstanding FCC precedent” is even worse, because you know it is a bald-faced lie.

Last November, a bipartisan group that included seven former FCC commissioners (five Republicans and two Democrats), three of whom had served as chairman, as well as senior staff members, filed a petition for special relief, asking the FCC to end the news distortion policy officially because you had “weaponized” the FCC’s processes “for political purposes.” You responded with a smirk, a thumbs down emoji, and a terse “How about no.” You are aware that posting on social media is not the same thing as governing, right?

But of course, not governing is your point, because you know that if you issue any actual order that can be challenged in court your claims about “news distortion,” “hoaxes,” and the “public interest” will end up in a trash heap. You also know if you go too far with your threats, you will run headlong into the Supreme Court’s recent unanimous ruling that government officials “cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech” through informal pressure.

So you are stuck, left only with the option of ramping up your partisan rhetoric and hoping it will continue to be enough to placate your political benefactor. You have gone so far as to emulate his habit of coming up with dopey nicknames for perceived adversaries, as if that were a substitute for making an actual argument.

Your recent appearance before the Conservative Political Action Conference is a prime example, where you explained the president is “winning” against the media by listing several media personalities who have left their jobs, including (as you put it) “sleepy eyed Chuck Todd.” I should not have to remind you of this, but it is a poor and pathetic leader who measures “winning” by what he thinks he has destroyed rather than by what he has managed to build.

I understand that pointing this out to you means nothing because you are playing to an audience of one. And because you are running out of fresh ways to condemn the “mainstream media,” you now routinely stoop to heaping lavish praise on your boss, touting his narrow victory in 2024 as “a landslide,” and by referring to him as “the political colossus of modern times” and “the alpha in every single room.”

How mortifying. You really have no dignity left to surrender, do you? Worse still, as Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem learned to their sorrow, sucking up will not help you if the president wakes up one morning wondering why you haven’t taken any broadcast licenses yet. You may know why that can’t happen, but he evidently does not.

And there is still more left to lose than just your honor, which you relinquished voluntarily. As you may recall, upon entering federal service you took an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Likewise, as a member of the Bar, you swore to “support the Constitution of the United States of America,” and D.C. Bar Rule XI § 2(b) defines “misconduct” as encompassing “acts or omissions of an attorney … which violate the attorney’s oath of office.”

Federal officials who flout these promises may find themselves on the wrong side of ethics investigations. So far, that happened with Ed Martin, the former acting US Attorney for DC, who threatened Georgetown University if it failed to immediately “eliminate all DEI from your school and curriculum.” And complaints against Pam Bondi have been lodged with the Florida Bar. One way or the other, the rule of law will prevail.

I realize you may not care whether your current actions potentially put at risk your license to practice law. It has been a while since a former FCC chair returned to private practice after their gig at the agency. But whatever may happen in that regard, you still must contend with the judgment of history.

As I wrote in my first open letter, selling out your (professed) values represents short-term thinking. I noted that “officials who have tried to muzzle the press for short-term political gain have not been treated well by history,” and “if I were your adviser, this is not how I would want history to remember you.” Now, to the extent you will be remembered at all, it will most likely be mainly as a South Park character.

I wish you had listened.