The F.C.C.’s Brendan Carr Plans to Keep Going After the Media Following Jimmy Kimmel’s Return

Critics have recently called Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, dangerous and a national censor.

His response? Bring it.

Since “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” was temporarily yanked from the airwaves after Mr. Carr took issue with the ABC host’s comments about the man accused of shooting conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the 46-year-old regulator has been emboldened in his battle to stop what he sees as liberal bias in broadcasts, according to two people familiar with his thinking.

Mr. Carr has appeared on conservative radio talk shows and Fox News to defend his actions, saying local broadcasters were finally serving audiences tired of biased programming. He has suggested the F.C.C. should investigate ABC’s daytime talk show “The View” over its political content. He said he planned to continue the agency’s work to empower local TV stations to reject the shows they disagree with.

Some of his rhetoric about ABC has softened a bit since, but his overall message has remained the same: He will not stop. “There are a lot of Democrats out there that are engaged in a campaign of projection and distortion,” he said at a conference on Monday. “They are completely misrepresenting the work of the F.C.C. and what we’ve been doing.”

The F.C.C. will continue with its Congressional mandate to ensure broadcast TV serves the public interest, he said, adding, “If people don’t like it, they can go to Congress and change the law.”

Driven by the belief that liberal tech and media companies have unfairly silenced viewpoints on the right, Mr. Carr is working to transform the F.C.C. from a once sleepy agency best known for licensing local TV stations and expanding 5G cellular networks into a protector of conservative speech. In particular, he is working on broadening the agency’s mandate to referee what appears on televisions, according to interviews with 10 current and former F.C.C. officials.

Mr. Carr, who became the F.C.C. chairman in January, has argued in recent days that he has been a consistent champion of the First Amendment and said he was helping protect free speech by weighing in on local TV programming decisions that no longer serve the public interest.

As part of those efforts, Mr. Carr has reopened complaints that accuse ABC, NBC and CBS of biased programming during the 2024 election — including investigating “Saturday Night Live” for a pre-election episode in which then-Vice President Kamala Harris was a guest. He is investigating PBS and NPR over accusations that the public news organizations violated rules that prevented them from airing commercials. He has also warned that he can block media mergers that may harm local stations’ independence.

Now, Mr. Carr is leveraging the agency’s power to withhold local TV stations’ licenses if they do not serve the public interest by airing biased coverage.

When Mr. Carr last week criticized Mr. Kimmel, he suggested the agency could look into pulling local stations’ licenses for broadcasting “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Two major local TV station groups, Nexstar and Sinclair, later said they would not air the show. While Mr. Kimmel’s show returned on Tuesday, both station groups decided against broadcasting it. Mr. Carr praised their decision.

“Notably, this is the first time recently that any local TV stations have pushed back on a national programmer like Disney,” he posted on Tuesday on X. “And that is a good thing because we want empowered local TV stations.”

Mr. Carr’s actions have raised alarms from many lawmakers on the left as well as some on the right, including Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, for stepping on First Amendment rights, while winning praise from President Trump, who has been ramping up efforts to punish his enemies and critics.

“This is a level of censorship we haven’t seen in my lifetime,” said Chris Lewis, the president of the left-leaning public interest group Public Knowledge.

Mr. Carr did not respond to a request for comment. An F.C.C. spokesman declined to comment, pointing to Mr. Carr’s recent interviews.

Few people know as much about telecom law as Mr. Carr. A graduate of Georgetown University and Columbus Law School at Catholic University, Mr. Carr worked as a telecom lawyer and then as general counsel for the F.C.C. before Mr. Trump appointed him to the commission in 2017.

At the time, Mr. Carr was looking for a way to break onto the national stage, two former agency officials said. With the encouragement of his aides, Mr. Carr began flooding social media with critiques of the biggest tech companies, they said.

In April 2019, he made his first appearance on the Fox News show “Tucker Carlson Tonight” after criticizing an opinion piece by Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, calling on governments to regulate speech.

“Outsourcing censorship to the government isn’t just a bad idea, it’s a violation of the First Amendment,” Mr. Carr said to the show’s three million viewers. “So I’m a no on that.” The appearance helped him to become a rising conservative star.

In 2022, a right-leaning think tank asked Mr. Carr to write the chapter on the F.C.C. for Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint for reshaping the federal government. In the chapter, Mr. Carr called for the promotion of free speech, as well as the end of a legal shield that protects social media companies for their decisions on content moderation, known as Section 230. He also argued that tech companies should contribute to a federal subsidy for broadband internet in rural areas.

Before the 2024 election, Mr. Carr fiercely criticized CBS, NBC and ABC for their political coverage. He accused NBC of violating a rule that requires broadcasters to offer equal airtime to candidates when Ms. Harris appeared on “Saturday Night Live.”

“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct — a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election,” Mr. Carr posted on social media on Nov. 2.

Roughly two weeks later, President-elect Trump named Mr. Carr the chairman of the F.C.C.

Those investigations targeted “Saturday Night Live,” “ABC News” for its moderation of an early presidential debate and an edit of a CBS “60 Minutes” interview with Ms. Harris.

(Paramount, which owns CBS, later settled a lawsuit with Mr. Trump for $16 million over allegations that CBS favorably edited the interview. Mr. Carr approved an $8 billion merger between Skydance and Paramount soon after.)

Much of the F.C.C.’s power lies in its control over licenses for stations that lease access to airwaves. A license holder is “required by law to operate its station in the ‘public interest, convenience and necessity,’” according to the agency, which has rarely revoked licenses.

In his first F.C.C. meeting as chairman in February, Mr. Carr announced that the group would begin with the Pledge of Allegiance. He also said national networks faced a record low in trust and that he wanted to empower local broadcasters.

“They have something special that distinguishes them from lots of other speakers, which is that they have this right to use the federal spectrum, which is a scarce resource,” Mr. Carr said at the public meeting. “For a lot of years, the F.C.C. walked away from enforcing that public interest obligation.”

“The View,” ABC’s daytime talk show, may be Mr. Carr’s next target. The show, which has been critical of Mr. Trump, is classified as a news program. That means it is exempt from a rule requiring broadcasters to offer equal airtime to political candidates.

“I think it’s worthwhile to have the F.C.C. look into whether ‘The View’ and some of the programs that you have still qualify as bona fide news programs,” Mr. Carr told a radio host last week.

On Monday, the hosts of “The View” did not directly address Mr. Carr’s remarks, but defended the right to free speech.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.