Transcript: Trump Tirade at Media Goes Awry in Strangely Revealing Way

Source: The New Republic · Bias: Left

Summary

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump is very angry with the news media for not treating his war against Iran as a series of world-historical triumphs. So he’s got his Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, threatening to use government power against media companies to keep them in line. Trump just let out a rambling tirade about this, hailing Carr’s work and in effect praising him for undertaking grotesque abuses of power.Truthfully, Trump’s whole authoritarian project would not be possible without underlings like Carr to help advance it for him. So what are the prospects for accountability for this sort of public misconduct later? We’re talking about this with New Republic staff writer Matt Ford, who has a great new piece laying out what a real reckoning for Trump and his accomplices should look like after this is all over. Matt, great to have you on.Matt Ford: Thanks for having me.Sargent: Okay, so this started when FCC Chair Brendan Carr put out a tweet recently threatening broadcasters. He said they must course-correct or potentially not get their broadcast licenses renewed. He insisted that the law dictates that they must operate in the public interest or lose their licenses. This not coincidentally came right after Trump attacked the media coverage of his war. Matt, this is confusing, but it’s really the local networks that have licenses—the big companies do have to worry about the locals losing licenses. But can you explain the basic legal case that Brendan Carr thinks he’s making here and why it’s so absurd?Ford: Sure. I mean, what he’s arguing here is that he will use the FCC’s power to regulate the airwaves to block license renewals for broadcast stations. There’s really no precedent for that in American history—certainly not for the censorious nature of what he’s calling for. But like you say, I mean, it’s a common misconception that ABC, NBC, Fox actually own these stations themselves. What they are instead are affiliates. And the stations are often owned by other companies—companies like Sinclair, companies like Nexstar. They are the ones who own them, and each of these licenses is held by an individual station. A station in New York City has a different one than a station in, you know, Albany or Washington, D.C., or Boston. So it would be a process to go and revoke these licenses one by one—that’s the bare mechanics.We can get into the First Amendment thing a bit later, but that’s the structural thing about how this works. It’s not as simple as rolling up to ABC and saying, hey, you air Jimmy Kimmel too many times—hand over your license. In the law, there is a public interest clause, but that’s sort of been interpreted expansively. I’m not aware of any cases where the FCC has really gone to the mat to try and deny a license on the grounds that it would be against the public interest. This is typically a much more pro forma process. And for Carr, it would introduce a lot of regulatory and legal uncertainty into a thing that’s been pretty normalized over the years.Sargent: Well, I want to get into that in a bit—about the public interest. But first, let’s listen to Trump talk about Brendan Carr for a little bit.Donald Trump (voiceover): I also want to thank FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, perhaps the most powerful man in this room. You are doing some job. He’s trying to keep the fake news—trying to make the fake news real and respect it again—which is not an easy job, but you’re doing a really amazing job. First time that’s happened in 25 years. So I congratulate you, and everybody in the room, everybody in this whole country is watching what you’re doing and we appreciate it.Sargent: Matt, that’s quite something. Everybody in this whole country supports government bullying of networks to turn them into propaganda outlets on Trump’s behalf, according to Trump. But seriously—note how Trump says Carr is doing a great job. Thing is, as far as I can tell, none of his threats have resulted in any real changes in coverage or any licenses lost, have they?Ford: No, and I think we’ve seen that from the Jimmy Kimmel example. What he has as FCC chair is a powerful perch—he can say things that get public attention and that draw a lot of scrutiny. But directly, he doesn’t have much power to do anything with the flip of a switch. And the Jimmy Kimmel example is a great example of that for another reason: it wasn’t even him that ordered Jimmy Kimmel off the air, per se. He didn’t go down to the Walt Disney Company and say, yank this guy off the stations. The affiliates like Sinclair declined to broadcast it, and they eventually relented amid public pressure and a lot of the backlash.

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Transcript: Trump Tirade at Media Goes Awry in Strangely Revealing Way
The New Republic

Transcript: Trump Tirade at Media Goes Awry in Strangely Revealing Way

Left

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump is very angry with the news media for not treating his war against Iran as a series of world-historical triumphs. So he’s got his Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, threatening to use government power against media companies to keep them in line. Trump just let out a rambling tirade about this, hailing Carr’s work and in effect praising him for undertaking grotesque abuses of power.Truthfully, Trump’s whole authoritarian project would not be possible without underlings like Carr to help advance it for him. So what are the prospects for accountability for this sort of public misconduct later? We’re talking about this with New Republic staff writer Matt Ford, who has a great new piece laying out what a real reckoning for Trump and his accomplices should look like after this is all over. Matt, great to have you on.Matt Ford: Thanks for having me.Sargent: Okay, so this started when FCC Chair Brendan Carr put out a tweet recently threatening broadcasters. He said they must course-correct or potentially not get their broadcast licenses renewed. He insisted that the law dictates that they must operate in the public interest or lose their licenses. This not coincidentally came right after Trump attacked the media coverage of his war. Matt, this is confusing, but it’s really the local networks that have licenses—the big companies do have to worry about the locals losing licenses. But can you explain the basic legal case that Brendan Carr thinks he’s making here and why it’s so absurd?Ford: Sure. I mean, what he’s arguing here is that he will use the FCC’s power to regulate the airwaves to block license renewals for broadcast stations. There’s really no precedent for that in American history—certainly not for the censorious nature of what he’s calling for. But like you say, I mean, it’s a common misconception that ABC, NBC, Fox actually own these stations themselves. What they are instead are affiliates. And the stations are often owned by other companies—companies like Sinclair, companies like Nexstar. They are the ones who own them, and each of these licenses is held by an individual station. A station in New York City has a different one than a station in, you know, Albany or Washington, D.C., or Boston. So it would be a process to go and revoke these licenses one by one—that’s the bare mechanics.We can get into the First Amendment thing a bit later, but that’s the structural thing about how this works. It’s not as simple as rolling up to ABC and saying, hey, you air Jimmy Kimmel too many times—hand over your license. In the law, there is a public interest clause, but that’s sort of been interpreted expansively. I’m not aware of any cases where the FCC has really gone to the mat to try and deny a license on the grounds that it would be against the public interest. This is typically a much more pro forma process. And for Carr, it would introduce a lot of regulatory and legal uncertainty into a thing that’s been pretty normalized over the years.Sargent: Well, I want to get into that in a bit—about the public interest. But first, let’s listen to Trump talk about Brendan Carr for a little bit.Donald Trump (voiceover): I also want to thank FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, perhaps the most powerful man in this room. You are doing some job. He’s trying to keep the fake news—trying to make the fake news real and respect it again—which is not an easy job, but you’re doing a really amazing job. First time that’s happened in 25 years. So I congratulate you, and everybody in the room, everybody in this whole country is watching what you’re doing and we appreciate it.Sargent: Matt, that’s quite something. Everybody in this whole country supports government bullying of networks to turn them into propaganda outlets on Trump’s behalf, according to Trump. But seriously—note how Trump says Carr is doing a great job. Thing is, as far as I can tell, none of his threats have resulted in any real changes in coverage or any licenses lost, have they?Ford: No, and I think we’ve seen that from the Jimmy Kimmel example. What he has as FCC chair is a powerful perch—he can say things that get public attention and that draw a lot of scrutiny. But directly, he doesn’t have much power to do anything with the flip of a switch. And the Jimmy Kimmel example is a great example of that for another reason: it wasn’t even him that ordered Jimmy Kimmel off the air, per se. He didn’t go down to the Walt Disney Company and say, yank this guy off the stations. The affiliates like Sinclair declined to broadcast it, and they eventually relented amid public pressure and a lot of the backlash.

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