Head of FCC threatens broadcaster licenses over critical coverage of Iran war | Hacker News Reader

Head of FCC threatens broadcaster licenses over critical coverage of Iran war

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266 pointstheahura126 comments

https://xcancel.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/203285541423304717...

Here's a crazy thought - if you're the president of the united states, or in his cabinet, and don't like news coverage that makes POTUS look bad regardless of the accuracy, how about you find some big boy pants and do better if you don't want to "look bad."

Propaganda state run networks are for dictatorships, not democracies.

The distinction between state and corporate media is generally a meaningless one. What matters is the power to shape and misshape public opinion. The American quibbling about “private/corporate vs. public/gov’t” consistently misses the point.

Your analysis is useless, irrespective of how correct it is. There are countries with a freer press that fare better. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's all pointless, only fools care about improving things" is detrimental to fixing this mess.

> Your analysis is useless, irrespective of how correct it is.

Generally, knowing the truth is more useful than the alternative.

> There are countries with a freer press that fare better.

That's a non-sequitur if I ever saw squirrel.

> Throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's all pointless, only fools > care about improving things" is detrimental to fixing this mess.

No one said that.

The distinction is important because at least private enterprises aren't directly controlled by the government. So they have the capacity for independence, and if they choose not to flex it then another private enterprise may.

That's not really accurate. I'd say in dictatorships you have one state run network ... and they grow very "confident". Most of the population doesn't believe the state network, but also doesn't have real other sources of information. Shit happens and nobody knows, like the surprise internet outages in Russia recently spreading to Moscow.

In a democracy, you essentially have 5 propaganda networks, each with their own agenda. Agendas go from pure government standpoint to business standpoint, some rich individual's standpoint, religious/ideology/political parties standpoint, ... Everybody knows the big events, because the networks know they have to have some kind of coverage, as it's everywhere.

This often goes right into ridiculous territory. Do you want to know the Socialist viewpoint on the recent strike in Brussels about pensions, and how in that strike the position of women compares to the position of children? Read all about it! Or don't, because of course it's 90% why all other political parties are so very, very wrong ...

Not true. Idea of democracy as best organisation of society is false, yet supported uncritically among state funded schools, media, etc.

Any suggestions for better system? What is best, is there an objective answer?

I don't believe in best. Point was that democracy by design allows censorship. It's just a matter of majority agreement if implemented to all.

To answer your question: Anything that abandons idea of centralised power with unknown electorate. History many times proves that it cause deaths of millions innocent people. Wars are possible only because idea of giving up personal responsibility for action in name of "safety, right, nation, greater good, you name it...", that centralised authority decide about.

The way I understand it you are not against centralized power in itself, but against the unknown electorate, or lack of personal responsibility when acting in official roles (i.e. immunity). The flaw seems to be in the execution (i.e. corruption) rather than the system itself. And there should be safeguards against those (again it's about execution). I'm probably limiting myself when I compare a "Democratic West" against an "Oligarchich Russia" and an "Autocratic China", but what other forms of government are there, that would better fit your description?

It depends how you define governance. We cannot morally justify system, that by definition supports involuntary money collection, right to oppress of minority when majority decide for or accept electorate without responsibility. It is possible to pretend that it is best system we can have just because we live in society, where state has monopoly to violence, thus unhealthy obedience to authority. And it is cultivated since our childhood in state funded schools as I mention earlier.

"Should the government censor speech it doesn't like? Of course not. The FCC doesn't have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the \"public interest\"." -- Brendan Carr 2019

So much of the last four years was watching fools and dishonest people pretend that the government was coming to take away your free speech and you'd better elect [people who routinely lied about everything and clearly had no principles] to protect you.

Every accusation is an admission from the people running the united states right now

I think it's something they're doing consciously, accusing the opposition of doing what they're doing. It puts opposition on the back foot, muddies the water, and provides justification for doing something you shouldn't be since "the other side already did it". This us partly why politics has become like a Choose Your Own Adventure book (more than it was before anyway).

Which is why we need to watch the polls closely this year. They’ve repeatedly accused everyone of massive voter fraud so they will most certainly try it themselves.

Slight tangent but the thought has crossed my mind that (the potential of) retaliation by Iran could be a pretense for taking broad executive action which normally wouldn't be permitted, perhaps under the guise of securing the election. They may even do something which will be ruled illegal after the fact by courts, but it could take months after the election to reach a verdict and there's really no precedent in America for broadly declaring a federal election invalid.

To be clear I don't really expect this to happen but at this point I honestly wouldn't even be surprised.

I think they were hoping to provoke riots with ICE but since they didn’t happen they’re using Iran. If there’s a “terrorist” strike in November followed by a suspension of elections that’s likely what’s happening.

Accusation in a mirror, a strategy that is pretty much as you describe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror

Thanks, I had not heard of this.

Roy Cohn taught the man child well

Same party thats says they are against new wars.

Well there's a clear 1st Amendment violation. Wonder if he'll get sued, and if so, wonder if the plaintiff will win, and if so, whether Carr will abide by any judgment.

The irony of this would be quite amusing if it wasn't so dangerous. Where are all the "free speech absolutists" now?

HN was such an interesting place in 2024, they’ve all disappeared, sadly.

I’ve been genuinely, deeply, curious where those posters went. It was the site at that point.

The most I’ve seen in months and months is a limp-wristed handwave at “but humans have gooned and been racist forever”, in response to someone saying they wouldn’t choose to work for X.ai because it accelerates those things.

My most substantive idea is it was an unsustainable coalition, and that’s why we’re not seeing it much. You need to be for an ugly conjunction of things instead of against “woke” and Columbia students, thus you won’t get coalition-wide social approval (upvotes) anymore.

So they’re almost certainly here, but, downvoted to the point of invisibility unless you scour every comment.

Another case study to ponder is our host’s CEO, Gary Tan. Full-on loud-throated American juche stuff at beginning of tariffs. Now he has his own political website he built with Claude. And it’s LLM-generated articles that are riffs on Free Press articles he liked and they’re really tediously boring niche stuff even if you’re full in on team red, even before the AI writing cringe effect on the reader. Ex. “Mackenzie bezos philanthropy is fake and destructive because one college that got money hired the college presidents son and also enrollment dropped the next year”

You can be intelligent and believe the narratives.

You can be intelligent and see you were fooled, seeing the sponsors of the narratives don't share any of your ideals to begin with.

Many are confused, feeling betrayed, open for new perspectives. Some will double down as we know from group dynamics in sects.

Don't feel sad, it is a good sign of healthy progress. Project 2025 and the likes are a very destructive force, not something to gamble your democracy on.

You can be intelligent and believe the narratives.

But what's intelligence good for, if it doesn't equip you to see reality for what it is?

There is the difficult and energy consuming way of thinking with the ratio, and there is a cheap way of thinking, based on ingrained beliefs, vibes, tribes etc.

As humans we are quite fallible, but as long as mass media and "social" media don't hamper the process of eventual re calibration towards reality, we can come back from our mistakes. That imho also answers why autocrats immediately start a war on academia, they instinctively know where the danger lurks for them.

Well, we have a bunch of really problematic accounts on HN and I suspect that rather than to go into 'endless curious conversation' with those characters people just give up at some point. It's interesting in a way because one of PGs most famous post is the one about 'no broken windows'.

I'm all for having conversations with those having other viewpoints, but it doesn't seem to be possible when they don't argue in good faith (or even grounded in reality).

I take zero pleasure in saying this, but "the other side" is fucking insane. There's no arguing from first principles, let alone acknowledging that there are issues of concern with one's propositions.

In the case of "free speech", there's a failure to acknowledge the fundamental proposition of it when used in the US -- in that it's about the government not being able to prosecute you for speech that it doesn't like. This is literally the basis of the OP.

I'm a fan of Christopher Hitchens and he embodied that "free speech absolutism" argument convincingly (as otherwise its a pathway to censorship and oppression), but I think it's also important to recognize Karl Popper's Intolerance of Intolerance.

This stuff is no longer idle speculation -- it is an active facet of authoritarianism that is playing out around us right now.

Indeed, and it is interesting how all those countries that have seen this up close have reasonable upper limits and courts that will try to find a balance without falling over one way or the other. Obviously you won't be able to please everybody all the time but we're - as you so eloquently put it - no longer in a speculative domain but in one where you can see the consequences play out in realtime.

It's like toddlers with guns, they may not know exactly how the guns work but they're bloody dangerous all the same.

Popper has it right, far more so than most other philosophers because he's coming at it almost from a security perspective: the system will have holes and you need to be willing to be pragmatic about that, rather than dogmatic.

My solution for HN is simple by the way, I give up, but one account at the time and I simply block them. That doesn't help the site but it does help my blood pressure. The one I use is called 'Comments owl for HN'.

> It's like toddlers with guns, they may not know exactly how the guns work but they're bloody dangerous all the same.

"At least 895 children aged 5 and under have managed to find a gun and unintentionally shoot themselves or someone else from 2015 to 2022"[0] (over 100 per year on average)

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/children-fire-guns-toddlers-uni...

On coarser sites (Elon’s, now) I’d say “1st amendment sez muh tweets MUST be published!!!”, never quite figured out a less coarse way to say it, but you just showed me.

Every time I see news about Brendan Carr's latest threat leveraging FCC licenses to enforce approved administration speech I search for the corresponding HN post and half the time it's a graveyard.

Wasn't that long ago an article about Mark Zuckerberg claiming someone in the Biden admin made some vague request about state-sponsored disinformation brought every so-called 1A defender out of the woodwork, but apparently the actual regulator of news orgs publicly threatening their business is shrug worthy by comparison.

I've been on HN since 2010 (different account) and honestly used to take the libertarian/right-leaning types at their word about being free speech advocates and not simply partisans using it as a rhetorical weapon.

But, lesson learned...

I applaud your optimism.

It really does feel like the tech right has disappeared over the last year, at least as a more grass roots thing outside of the actual billionaires themselves.

The early crypto and tax victories were presumably the impetus for many, and that's already been realized. There's not much incentive to stick around and be a bad faith advocate for incompetence and graft when you've already got yours.

In my impression the billionaire worship is just another form of fundamental respect and enforcement of hierarchy that has been part of conservative politics forever. We are back to transparently the "right" leaning being wanting to keep the absolute monarchy.

They've switched to "A Democrat told me to shut up once so free speech is over."

>HN was such an interesting place in 2024, they’ve all disappeared, sadly.

Likely because once you've seen your opponent mask off there is no longer a point trying to maintain a facade of politeness. You are in full adversarial waters. Either those people weren't actually for it and were talking a game until they got into power, or there's no longer a point in talking about it until we can get the current numb nuts out of the picture. One shouldn't tip their hand in an enemy controlled medium on their current plans for activism. That's how you go from unrestrained, to controlled opposition. Savvy? Here on HN, you damn well know you're in the SV types territory, and you know to whom'st they've aligned by their actions. Only conversations left to be had is needling those remaining until either they out themselves as part of the opposition, or as part of the sympathetic group. Turns out there's a lot of HN'ers more than happy with how things are going.

Game theory/low trust environs are a bitch like that.

Broadcast TV (and cable TV too) has been whithering on the vine for a long time. What a network couldn't broadcast on TV could simply be put on YouTube or other social network. TV could become state-owned media at this point and I don't think anyone would really care as long as the Internet is the way it is.

I largely agree, but I think we have another 5-8 years before TV’s candle light is really extinguished. I hope they fight this nonsense to the bitter end.

Right here, to name one. Needless to say I feel very bleak and despondent as I watch the America I thought I knew transform into something dark. I do not anticipate the next decade+ of life in America to be free and prosperous.

It's a weird world where one's hopes are in the incompetence of their leaders.

Airwaves are not protected by the 1st amendment, due to the limited amount of bandwidth that physically exists. As such, the FCC has extraordinary powers, including enforcing watersheds, forcing children’s content hours (“E/I”), censoring the F-bomb, and enforcing a 7-second delay on live content to prevent another Timberlake Super Bowl.

The first amendment also does not apply to highway billboards; which is why you never see a vagina on the roadway. Not all government control of speech is oppressive or inconsistent.

The FCC has a number of extraordinary powers over the broadcast spectrum, but they do not include viewpoint discrimination, which has always been seen as uniquely odious and different than indecency restrictions. As held in Shurtleff v. Boston, even the much more limited medium of a government-owned flagpole in front of a government building cannot be subject to viewpoint discrimination. If the public is allowed to speak freely in a particular medium, the government may not rescind that permission based on whether their message is true or fair or in the public interest.

I think "odious" really undersells it. A free press is an important part of a functioning democracy. What's the use in being able to vote against people doing wrong, if no-one's allowed to tell you about the wrong?

It's important not to concede the premise that First Amendment protections are subordinate to the public interest at all. Carr argues in his statement, after all, that the FCC has to take action because the public is losing faith and confidence in the media altogether. But even if the FCC can produce a detailed, convincing explanation of how American democracy will suffer if they're not allowed to block certain viewpoints from the airwaves, they still can't do it.

Why do airwaves matter? I get cable over the internet. Technology constraints shouldn’t me what allows laws to undermine democracy.

The licenses in question here are only relevant to the airwaves. An FCC license isn't required to send you news over cable or the Internet.

Hey if you want to get rid of the FCC entirely so neither party can use it against anyone, I'll all for that!

I’m excited about cell phones, pacemakers, and wifi no longer working.

Honestly the world might be a better place if the vast majority of spectrum were just ISM bands anyways.

I find it amusing that your last comment is preaching to someone about what politics is and isn't.

Your politics are clear. You have no problem with the modern Republican party embracing authoritarianism and fascism. In fact, you see it as an opportunity to erode trust in or otherwise destroy the institution responsible for regulating signals in the US. The very thing that makes it so that planes can safely fly or that things in space must respect terrestrial networks without disruption.

That is your politics, just an embarrassing set of politics. Not even a green account. Shame on you.

So... to be clear... you dont want to get rid of the FCC? You can have that position but you are kinda missing the point here.

I was responding to someone who is claiming that the org is some infringement on free speech. This is an ignorant position, in that the FCC has had the power to regulate airwaves for quite some time. So if it is some free speech infringment now, then it was infringement a long time ago, especially with things like the fairness doctrine.

But you can have either position. Either you think it is all some huge infringement of free speech or you don't and you cant really complain about the stuff happening now. Your choice.

> The very thing that makes it so that planes can safely fly

So... Imagine for the sake of argument that you were capable of steel manning my position.

When someone brought speech related stuff regarding the FCC and I responded to it, did you actually believe I was talking about laws related to airplane communications?

Or.... was it possible that I was only referring to other speech related stuff that the FCC does? Just steelman it for a second if you are capable of doing so.

It's deplorable that there's such empty silence on Carr and his incessant snowflake whining from the right. For a party that has crowed so much about 1A! It's unfathomable, just depraved, to have a party that will complain and whine so loudly, and then have nothing at all to say when you have a FCC commissioner asserting that broadcast rights means saying only what the government says is good.

Utterly deplorable. This man is a high traitor to the constitution and this nation. And the right: seemingly AWOL, on an issue they claimed was so important! It's so fallen. It's so unfortunate the nation haa to be sundered by people of so low moral and political regard, people who seemingly care so little about values and democracy and the nation.

> For a party that has crowed so much about 1A!

Just like the anti-war stuff, it was always convenient hypocrisy that they instantly abandon when the time is right.

If it wasn’t for double standards they wouldn’t have any at all.

We’ve seen it every 4-8 years for decades.

They can’t take your license away if you don’t have one

The Twitter Files contingent are awfully quiet all of a sudden.

What do you mean? “all of a sudden”? They’ve been dead silent ever since the election. Their mission was accomplished successfully; nothing more to do.

> They’ve been dead silent ever since the election. Their mission was accomplished successfully; nothing more to do.

A fair point, well made.

A better link:

https://xcancel.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/203285541423304717...

BTW, the link is a waste of your time reading it, it is just the current US regime whining again.

I've read so much trump spam recently that on reading this my first thought was that you misspelled winning hehe

Planet announced last week there will be a 14 day delay on all commercial satellite imagery from the middle east. It shocks me how transparent we are about information war and voluntarily lying to ourselves at particular moments

No, this is deeply disturbing. The person "whining" is the head of the regulatory body that gets to decide what can be broadcast, a supposedly non-partisan role, and yet he's just straight up threatened to cancel the licenses of everybody who's not vocally supportive of what you term the current regime.

thanks, I should've used xcancel. @dang I would love if we could update to using this link instead

xcancel is like archive links, they prefer links to the original with bypasses/alternatives in comments.

So it's a Tweet allegation-- Do we know what specifically what the Chaiman objects to?

Have someone already brought the "reinstate the Fairness Doctrine" talking point for this issue? The best back and forth arguments happen under it.

Fucking Christ.

I still don’t understand how anyone heard Trump bragging about how he’s going to “open up those libel laws”, in addition to all the other idiotic shit that he said, and still decided to vote for him.

I am sure people had their reasons, and maybe some of them even weren’t racist, but I am still having trouble comprehending how anyone didn’t see all this shit coming.

https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/donald-trump...

They rightly assumed the laws wouldn’t be used against them by this admin

Why "rightly"?

The tweet/meme about the face eating leopards seems to be entirely applicable to our current times.

YouTube is a problem, people speaking their minds.

Youtube is also a problem of unverified non-journalistic information. Presents a very double edged sword.

So is mainstream media, though. Maybe with a few more allegedlys thrown around.

Not true. Thoughts are shifted by trends. If not politically correct, spreading is limited.

Maybe if we're going to name the department of defense the department of war we can go all the way and rename the FCC to the 'ministry of propaganda'?

A free press is worth its weight in gold. If you let go of that you're going to lose more than you bargain for. All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.

It would obviously be the Ministry of Truth.

I assumed it would the the Ministry of Trump. He likes putting his name on things.

You're probably right.

That was already taken by the DHS and then dismantled in 2022.

Ministry of Truth & Love.

Is a free press even worth anything of the country is already otherwise lost?

Yes, because it is a backbone through which people trying to hold things together can communicate. Remember how the USSR supposedly held together and could not be defeated, and how the Nazi's overran Europe and there were many who figured the easy way out was to just give up and accept it? The free press held the line, in Western Europe through underground newspapers, which made a massive difference in keeping people informed and in the East between 45 and ~86 through the various - sometimes hand copied - smuggled literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_media_in_German-oc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_press

Soldarity would have never gotten off the ground without that network and speaking for my own country I suspect that without de Volkskrant and Het Parool the war would have gotten much closer to completely eradicating the Jewish population here. It was bad enough as it was but the network that coordinated the distribution of the underground newspapers was also instrumental in keeping the underground resistance network going. The one fed off the other and vice versa, both as a training ground and as a messenger service. Lots of those stories will never be told (unfortunately) but there were a ton of very brave people that knew full well they risked a one-way trip to the dunes if discovered.

What free press? The mass media is controlled by a handful of billionaires who kowtow to the government in order to earn more billions.

PBS/NPR?

The billionaire media owners won't allow that to continue. Defunded.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/endi...

During a press conference yesterday, Hegseth, the secretary of war, received a question on Iran from CNN that he didn't feel the need to answer, and then went on a rant about how he can't wait for Ellison to buy the network and rid it of any opposition to the regime [1]. He literally spelt it out.

Free press in the US is already dead, all media belongs to conservative pedophile oligarchs who use it to manipulate the masses and push their warmongering narratives.

> All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.

There are no principled free speech advocates on the right, only people who have an issue with the media not being completely controlled by their side. Their silence then makes perfect sense: they are getting exactly what they wanted.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/pentagon-chie...

Yes, they are no longer even pretending to hide, I think that's the thing that really changed. Up to a few years ago there would always be the figleaf. Now, they're just stating openly what they're up to and nobody bats an eye. It's an extreme case of the normalization of deviance. And in a way that is the answer to that age old question: "How could they let it happen?" when contemplating Germany ca. 1936.

Funny how many of the people who only a few years ago weregloating about how private companies can do what they want, and there's no issues with censoring people or spreading propaganda (in clandestine cooperation with the government) are now seeing it blow back in their faces. I mean everybody who isn't stupid knew it was coming, not everybody thought it would come so quickly.

Are you sure that these people were "gloating" about private companies moderating arbitrarily? In the US, this is simply an obvious consequence of the first amendment, as many people have indeed pointed out.

The same people may personally hold wildly different beliefs as to whether this legal situation is desirable or not.

And in European countries, where there is no first amendment preventing the government from interfering with social media moderation policies, the situation is often different, and courts have required social media companies to publish speech which they had intended to moderate; see for example:

https://www.tribunaux-rechtbanken.be/sites/default/files/med...

No it wasn't that they were moderating arbitrarily, it's that they were censoring opinions and discussions that were deemed verboten and the gloatees agreed with shutting it down. They of course changed their tune about it when something did not go their way.

arbitrary, adjective:

2 a: not restrained or limited in the exercise of power : ruling by absolute authority

  b: marked by or resulting from the unrestrained and often tyrannical exercise of power

I know. That's not what they were gloating about.

And let us say out loud after all the whining about cancel culture it was Republicans, as expected, who are actually going after the first amendment.

They're Republicans. Every accusation is either a confession in disguise, a plan already in progress, or a fond wish.

It was already done before and now Trump and Israeli lobby are doing the same with Social networks and US media

"The Nazi assault on the press, publishing, and scholarship was more than censorship. It was an attempt to monopolize reality." https://brewminate.com/words-under-siege-hitlers-assault-on-...

This article feels very AI generated to me.

The Gaslighter in Chief wants to abolish the First Amendment.

Feels eerily similar to Rodrigo Duterte's threats to Philippine broadcaster ABS-CBN (and in that case, he really made good on the threat and shut down its transmitters).

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