NorthEast Radio Watch 2/10/2025: The FCC in Authoritarian Times

In this week’s issue… The FCC’s dangerous new path – ABC’s big NYC move – VT lawmaker buys stations – King’s remaining stations saved – Remembering Boston’s Bell, Toronto’s Donabie

By SCOTT FYBUSH

Jump to: ME – NH – VT – MA – RI – CT – NY – NJ – PA – Canada

*This is not an issue of NERW I ever wanted to write, but it’s one that has to be written, because these are not the normal times we’ve been chronicling in this space for 31 years. (Yes, we blew past another anniversary a few weeks ago while your editor was dealing with a whole bunch of non-NERW issues that are still causing some delays in publication.)

In the space of just a few weeks, an almost unfathomable swath of the stability of the American government’s structure has been ripped out with little to no regular process or accountability, and that very much includes the FCC, which is what we write about here.

It wasn’t really any secret what new chairman Brendan Carr had in mind; after all, he wrote the chapter about the FCC in the Project 2025 manual that the incoming administration disavowed during the election, mostly focusing on broadband issues with little mention of broadcasters.

Some of what’s happened at the FCC since January 20 has been a part of the larger priorities across the government: staffers are being ordered back to the office, even though many have been working very successfully (and less expensively) from remote locations for almost five years now; anything having to do with diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility has been purged from the Commission’s website, which likely means the end of EEO filing requirements, and there’s a push to repeal other regulations, too.

But that’s not what has us sounding an alarm this week. As a broadcast historian, I’ve spent a lot of time studying the ways that regulators try to influence the content of broadcasts, especially newscasts – and with Carr’s actions over the past few days, we’re seeing something almost without precedent in the Commission’s 92-year history.

It wasn’t just the high-profile decision, one of Carr’s first on taking office, to reopen the investigation into ABC, CBS and NBC over allegations that they misleadingly edited interviews and asked biased questions during 2024 election debates. It wasn’t just the way that Fox, which was also the subject of a bias complaint during the previous term, was left out of the reopening of those investigations.

It was unfortunate, but not unexpected, to see CBS comply with the Commission by turning over unedited footage of the Kamala Harris interview in question – usually a huge journalistic no-no. If you’ve studied broadcasting and regulatory history, you’ve seen some of this before: in the 1950s, when authoritarianism was similarly on the rise in Washington, the sordid history of the McCarthy-era blacklists found broadcast owners similarly caving under pressure from the government instead of standing up for the principles they claimed to protect.

And of course in the 1970s, Richard Nixon flexed his political power against the Washington Post Company, threatening its valuable (and government-issued) broadcast licenses because there was no direct line of attack against the newspaper itself.

What happened last week, in many ways, seems even worse for anyone who cares about the First Amendment and the country’s sudden slouch toward fascism.

(To make clear where your editor is coming from: even now, in 2025, I have family members who fled Germany days before Kristallnacht in 1938 in fear of what was approaching. They were the lucky ones. This is a topic I take incredibly seriously, and personally, and I’m fully prepared to lose readers over it, because it’s that important.)

The new, and much worse, threat was Carr’s direct attack on Audacy’s KCBS in San Francisco, one of several stations in the Bay Area that did what journalists are supposed to do: inform their audiences when there’s something going on that’s new and could affect them. In this case, the news story was about ICE agents conducting a raid on presumed undocumented immigrants, a story of unquestionable public interest right now.

Until now, there’s been no question that the First Amendment demands that an editor’s decision about news coverage is not something an FCC chair can use as a pretext into opening an investigation into that broadcaster’s public service.

Until now.

Emboldened, presumably, by the Commission’s continued inquiry into the investment by George Soros (an American citizen) into Audacy, Carr opened just such an investigation last week, framing it – exactly as right-wing media sources have been doing – as a question about whether KCBS put law enforcement officers in danger by reporting on the location of the enforcement action.

That’s certainly a question that industry organizations like RTDNA or the NAB can debate, and there are valid arguments about exactly where the coverage line should be drawn when there’s an ongoing dangerous situation.

But those are not arguments for government regulators to make, especially not at an unprecedented time like this one. The industry should be standing up, and loudly, to uphold the First Amendment and the established doctrine that in a free country with a free press, the government has no place at the editor’s desk.

That courage seems to be in short supply right now, not just among broadcasters but in so many areas that are simultaneously under attack from the new administration. We knew from Project 2025 that the new administration would go after the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but nowhere in Carr’s chapter was there any mention of another action of the last few weeks, the new inquiry into public broadcasters’ underwriting practices, something else that had been well established under regulators of opposite parties for decades.

For public broadcasters right now, the omens are actually even worse: many are run by universities, which are under serious budgetary attack at the moment from government forces far beyond the FCC. The only reason this column still exists is because “Mrs. NERW” had her life saved by a nonprofit teaching hospital a decade ago, and that’s one of many institutions facing devastating budget cuts for no clearly stated reason right now. The data your meteorologist depends on to give you a good daily forecast? That’s almost entirely publicly-funded data from NOAA/NWS, another agency that’s suddenly and inexplicably under attack.

The broadcast equipment industry isn’t part of the government, but it too depends on a stable financial environment for broadcasters. It’s a tiny niche business these days and a lot of its players are closer to the edge than many of us realize. If public broadcasters suddenly have no funding to buy gear, or if unpredictable tariffs suddenly get slapped on imports, those private companies and the Americans they employ are suddenly threatened – and so are the contract engineers and consultants and salespeople who work with that gear, and the conventions they attend, and… you see where we’re going here, right?

It’s destabilization all over, on a million fronts at once, which is exactly what fascism looks like when it arrives. The FCC is just one of hundreds of government agencies that each sit at the centers of huge ecosystems that extend far beyond Washington. Regulation, by its nature, brings stability to the way big systems function. In the specific case of broadcasters, we depend on steady regulation to protect our signals from interference, to protect the safety of the public around our facilities, and to know that when we’re making a business decision, the marketplace around us won’t shift suddenly based on a regulator’s whim.

That doesn’t mean that regulations can’t change, nor that even an ideologue like Carr can’t shape regulations to fit his ideology. But it does – or should – mean that the systems around those regulations have to remain stable, and that the way the rules change should be predictable and public.

That’s very much what’s not happening right now. Instability like this is a hallmark not of a free America but of authoritarian regimes like Turkey and the very China that Carr railed against so strongly in his Project 2025 chapter.

Even if the actions Carr is taking now happen to match your own personal political views, ask yourself: if the government can be allowed to take these actions right now against Audacy or CBS or your local public broadcaster, what’s to stop it from taking uncontrolled actions against you down the line? Authoritarian regimes aren’t known for their restraint, after all, and depend on the “in” group of those in power becoming narrower and narrower until, often enough, they collapse in on themselves.

I don’t want that for this industry and this country. Because this column operates entirely reader-supported and entirely independently of any larger company (and with a budget to match, unfortunately), I’m going to keep taking advantage of whatever freedom I still have in this space to speak out against what was wrong when McCarthy tried it in 1951 and Nixon in 1974. It’s even more wrong in 2025, and I hope the weeks and months to come will see more broadcasters standing up for the independence the Constitution is supposed to guarantee them. We’re on your side over here.

And having said all that – we have a lot of news from the last two weeks to catch up on, so keep reading.