ANALYSIS: Brendan Carr Threatens to Revoke the Licenses of Broadcasters Covering the War in Iran

When Media Coverage Becomes “Treason”

Why now? Because the United States has been bombing Iran for two weeks, and the media coverage isn’t what the administration had hoped for. Trump complained on Truth Social that newspapers were portraying the situation in the Middle East as “pretty serious.” The fact that the situation in the Middle East is indeed rather serious—with the United States bombing a sovereign country—doesn’t seem to factor into the equation.

And yet, this shift is fundamental. We’ve moved from “the media is lying” to “the media is describing the reality of a war we started, and that description bothers us.” The difference between the two is the difference between disputing facts and demanding that the facts be presented in a favorable light.

The Term “Fake News” as a Categorization Tool

Carr uses the terms “hoaxes and news distortions” to describe the coverage of the war. He cites no specific examples. He names no false reports. He provides no evidence of distortion. He doesn’t need to. In the system he constructs, the term “fake news” does not refer to false information. It refers to information that displeases the executive branch.

It is a semantic redefinition that would make Orwell jealous. The term that was coined to describe deliberate lies is now being used to describe factual reports that show the real consequences of government decisions.

The “I’m Just Suggesting” Tactic

The A.V. Club article hits on something crucial. Carr has launched several “investigations” against his enemies in the television world, but he has generally been more cautious when it comes to directly using the FCC’s authority to impose political judgments. He prefers a threatening but slightly less confrontational approach.

It’s a technique as old as power itself. If you simply “suggest” to those under your regulatory authority that they comply in advance and “set things right,” it doesn’t quite look like authoritarian censorship. Does it? The distinction is the one that separates an order from an offer you can’t refuse. In both cases, the result is the same. Only the appearance changes.

The Gap Between Actual Power and Exercised Power

Let’s highlight an irony that Carr seems to ignore with remarkable determination. The Trump message that triggered his reaction concerned newspaper coverage. Yet the FCC has no authority over newspapers. It has no authority over what is printed on that thin, pale substance we call paper. Moreover, it has only very limited authority over cable networks like CNN, which do not require over-the-air broadcasting licenses.

And yet, Carr responds as if his jurisdiction covered the entire American media landscape. This deliberate confusion between what he can do and what he claims he can do is in itself a form of coercion. No one knows exactly where his power ends anymore. And that is precisely the point.

The Secretary of Defense Who Dreams of a CNN Takeover

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has publicly welcomed the prospect of CNN coming under the control of Paramount’s David Ellison. A defense secretary who openly rejoices at a news network changing hands during a war. Under normal circumstances, that single statement alone would trigger congressional hearings. These are not normal times.

The alignment is complete. Trump identifies the targets. Carr threatens the broadcasters. Hegseth celebrates the ownership changes. And local stations, caught between their obligation to broadcast and their fear of losing their licenses, do what any living organism does when threatened: they submit or they hide.

The President’s Tally

The “tally of victories” published by Trump on March 14 is a document worthy of being archived for posterity. In it, the President of the United States claims as personal achievements Colbert’s removal from the airwaves, the firing of anchors, and the upcoming change in CNN’s ownership. This is no longer a conflict between a government and a free press. It is a government that keeps score, names its victims, and celebrates its conquests.

And yet, perhaps the most revealing aspect of this picture is the caricature of Carr himself, depicted unflatteringly as the administration’s “attack dog.” It is no longer even a question of whether the regulator is independent. The president himself, with all the subtlety of a jackhammer, is telling the whole world that the FCC chairman works for him.

The Misapplication of a Constitutional Principle

The concept of “public interest” in U.S. communications law dates back to the Communications Act of 1934. It was designed to ensure that the airwaves—a limited public resource—are used to serve local communities, guarantee a diversity of viewpoints, and provide reliable information to citizens.

What Carr does is turn this principle against its very purpose. The public interest no longer means “informing citizens fully and honestly.” It now means “not upsetting the president while he is bombing a country.” This is a lexical distortion of rare conceptual violence.

When the Regulator Becomes the Censor

The history of American communications is replete with instances where the FCC has been tempted to use its licensing power to influence content. The Fairness Doctrine, abolished in 1987, required a form of balance in the coverage of controversial topics. But even that doctrine was never used to threaten stations with the loss of their licenses because their coverage of a war displeased the president.

What Carr is proposing is unprecedented. Not because presidents have never hated the press—Nixon had a list of enemies, Johnson yelled at the editors of The New York Times—but because never before has an FCC chairman so openly and publicly linked license renewals to the executive branch’s satisfaction with coverage of an ongoing armed conflict.

Station owners are not heroes

It would be comforting to think that local station owners will put up a fight. They won’t. Not out of personal cowardice, but out of economic logic. A local television station is an asset worth between $50 million and $500 million, depending on the market. License renewal is the sine qua non of its value. When a federal regulator suggests that this license might be at risk, the calculation is immediate and ruthless.

Station executives aren’t going to publish fiery editorials about freedom of the press. They’re going to call their lawyers. And their lawyers are going to tell them exactly what they already know: the risk isn’t worth it. So they’ll cut a report here, shorten an interview there, and no one will ever know what viewers in Tulsa or Tampa didn’t see.

Self-censorship: the real goal

This is the mechanism that all forms of soft authoritarianism seek to trigger. You don’t need to censor. You need people to censor themselves. You don’t need to shut down a newspaper. You need the editor to ask themselves, before every publication: Will this get me into trouble?

And yet, this self-censorship is, by definition, invisible. No one protests against a news report that was never aired. No one complains about an interview that never took place. Silence is the most effective and least detectable product of institutional coercion.

Who decides what constitutes a “distortion”?

At the heart of Carr’s threat lies a question he is careful never to state explicitly: who determines what constitutes a “distortion of information”? In the system he proposes, the answer is simple. It’s him. Or more precisely, it’s the president who tells him what is “fake,” and it’s him who threatens those who spread it.

There are no objective criteria, no independent court, and no due process in this scheme. One man, appointed by the president, decides what is true and what is “distortion,” with the power to economically destroy those who disagree. If that sentence doesn’t send a constitutional chill down your spine, nothing will.

War reporting is not an opinion

There is a fundamental difference between an editorial writer offering an opinion on a war and a reporter showing footage of bombings, counting the dead, and relaying statements from military officials. What Carr calls “fake news” seems to include both. This means that showing the actual consequences of a U.S. military campaign is now considered contrary to the public interest.

Think about that for a second. Showing what the U.S. military is doing. With images. With numbers. With eyewitness accounts. That’s what constitutes “distortion.” Reality itself has become subversive.

CNN, MSNBC, and Carr’s Blind Spot

The FCC has direct authority over over-the-air broadcasters—ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and their affiliate stations. It has much more limited authority over cable networks like CNN and MSNBC, which do not use the public over-the-air spectrum. That is why Hegseth is approaching the CNN case from a different angle: a change in ownership.

The strategy is therefore two-pronged. For over-the-air networks: the threat of regulation. For cable networks: pressure on the owners. For digital media: yet other tools. The intended result is the same: a media landscape where coverage of an American war resembles a Pentagon press release.

What History Teaches Us

During the Vietnam War, television coverage of the conflict’s horrors—images of napalm, the bodies of American soldiers, and testimonies from Vietnamese civilians—played a decisive role in shifting public opinion. This is exactly the scenario the Trump administration is trying to prevent with Iran. If Americans don’t see the war, they won’t oppose it.

Every war America has lost in the court of public opinion, it has lost on television screens. Carr isn’t threatening the media to protect the truth. He’s threatening them to shield a war from its most brutal exposure.

A 90-year-old constitutional paradox

The First Amendment prohibits the federal government from restricting freedom of the press. But the Supreme Court has ruled, in several landmark decisions, that over-the-air broadcasters—because they use a limited public resource (the electromagnetic spectrum)—may be subject to regulations that print newspapers would never face.

It is within this legal loophole that Carr operates. He is not technically violating the First Amendment. He is exploiting an exception created decades ago, in a completely different context, for a purpose that the authors of that exception would never have imagined: to allow a president to control media coverage of a war he started.

Will the courts go along with this?

If Carr were to actually carry out his threats and deny a license renewal on the grounds of “distortion of information” related to coverage of the war in Iran, the case would end up in court. And there, the question would become: Would the current Supreme Court, with its 6-to-3 conservative majority, protect freedom of the press against the executive branch?

The answer to that question is less reassuring than it would have been ten years ago. And Carr knows it.

When America Sets an Example of Censorship

Since 1945, the United States has been the global model for press freedom. What Carr is doing—threatening to revoke broadcast licenses to influence coverage of a war—is exactly what Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Egypt do with their own media regulators. The method is identical. Only the vocabulary changes.

The next time an autocrat in a developing country shuts down a critical radio station, he’ll now be able to cite the United States of 2026 as a precedent. Is the U.S. FCC threatening to revoke licenses from media outlets that provide poor coverage of a war? So why shouldn’t we? American exceptionalism when it comes to press freedom is dying, and it’s a president-appointed official who’s holding the pillow.

Democratic allies are watching

The European Union, Canada, Australia, Japan—all of the United States’ democratic allies are watching what is happening with a mixture of astonishment and strategic calculation. If the United States no longer protects the freedom of its own press, what credibility does it retain when it denounces censorship in Russia or China?

The answer is: none. And this loss of credibility has geopolitical consequences that go far beyond the fate of a local station in Alabama.

When Censored Information Kills

This is not an abstract debate about freedom of speech. American bombs are falling on Iran right now. Civilians are dying. Infrastructure is being destroyed. If the American media, under pressure from Carr, reduces, softens, or suppresses its coverage of these events, American citizens will make electoral decisions without having the necessary information.

Censorship in wartime is not a crime against the press. It is a crime against democracy itself. A people that does not know what its government is doing in its name is not a sovereign people. It is a manipulated people.

Silence comes at the cost of human lives

Every report that is suppressed, every image that is not broadcast, every testimony cut during editing is a fragment of truth that disappears. And when enough fragments disappear, what remains is no longer information. It is propaganda by omission—the most effective and hardest-to-detect form of all propaganda.

Brendan Carr isn’t threatening companies. He’s threatening the right of 330 million Americans to know what is being done in their name. And he’s doing it on a Saturday, on social media, with the casual tone of a man who knows that no one has the power to stop him.

This is no longer a one-off—it’s a pattern

The pattern is now too consistent to be accidental. Threats against The View. Jimmy Kimmel’s removal from the air. Investigations into critical shows. And now, explicit pressure on coverage of an ongoing war. This isn’t a regulator doing its job. It’s a censorship apparatus being built in real time, right before our eyes, using the tools of democracy against democracy.

Carr doesn’t need to revoke a single license. He just needs everyone to believe he could do it. And judging by how quickly local stations caved on the Kimmel issue, that belief is already firmly entrenched.

The Remaining Question

The question is no longer whether Brendan Carr is using the FCC as a tool for political pressure. That is a established fact. The question is how long it will take for American institutions—the courts, Congress, civil society—to respond. And whether, when they finally do respond, there will be enough free press left to report on it.

Because the very nature of a system that censors coverage of war is that it always ends up censoring coverage of the censorship as well.

Signed, Jacques PJ Provost