Alarmed about government officials acting as state censors? All Rise News informs you how to fight back.
After temporarily knocking Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show off the airwaves, Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission attack dog Brendan Carr may try to hand MAGA’s media allies a big favor at the agency’s next public meeting.
In a Substack Live, preeminent political scientist
unpacks all the ways Trump’s FCC has been working to punish critics and reward loyalists with “monopolies,” before and after Kimmel’s suspension.“Monopolizing the media, every historian of the rise of autocracies and tyranny will tell you, is high on the list of must-dos,” Ornstein told All Rise News, adding that many of these trends could be coming to a head later this month.
“Modernizing”
On Sept. 30, the FCC will hold its monthly open meeting at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., and one of the items on the agenda includes the consolidation of local media markets.
Two media conglomerates, Sinclair and Nexstar, loomed large over Kimmel’s suspension. Those companies own or operate 38 and 28 local ABC affiliates, respectively, and both pulled Kimmel’s show from their stations before ABC’s suspension. Nexstar is seeking to expand its constellation of local TV stations through a $6.2 billion merger with TEGNA, which would require eliminating a 39 percent cap on dominance of local TV markets.
Sinclair and Nexstar also have been lobbying to eliminate a rule that restricts companies from owning more than two stations in a local media market, and Donald Trump’s FCC is eager to oblige.
The FCC just released notice for the proposal, which is the fourth item on the FCC’s meeting agenda under the seemingly innocuous heading “Modernizing Broadcast Ownership Rules.”
“They can call this modernization,” Ornstein said. “They can call this deregulation, but it is far more insidious than those terms that on their surface seem either innocuous or positive.”
“This is really an effort to open the door to an easier way of jawboning, influencing, pressuring, and threatening major sources of media to do the news the way the administration and the government want them to do the news,” he added.
Possible action item: Notice and comment
The FCC and other agencies that issue drafts of proposed rules for comment must consider the public’s feedback before taking an action. You can send emails reacting to these proposals to ecfs@fcc.gov, citing docket number 22-459.
“Shed light on it now”
Although the FCC must allow the press and public to attend the meetings, the regulations only allow observation.
“Frankly, it wouldn't hurt for this meeting to have a large group of demonstrators outside the FCC that might get some news coverage about how dangerous it is to allow even more huge corporations and billionaires to monopolize our news,” Ornstein said.
Though no such demonstrations have yet been announced for Sept. 30, the public outrage about Kimmel’s suspension and the FCC’s role in it has been swift and multifaceted. More than 400 celebrities signed a petition released today denouncing it, and calls for boycotts have sparked mass cancellations of Disney+ streaming services.
The 50501 Movement, which helped organize several massive protests during Trump’s second term, endorsed those boycotts. They also called for protests outside of the corporate offices of ABC, Nexstar, Sinclair and affiliated stations. The advocacy group Free Press created a tool to call local ABC affiliates across the country, and the most popular topic for calling lawmakers on the app 5 Calls last week was “Stop the Assault on Our Freedom of Speech.”
“We need to make sure that people understand what Brendan Carr is doing that is authoritarian and wrongheaded and ought to be illegal in nature, and what the consequences are if they take the action that we expect them to take,” Ornstein said. “It's not that we can stop it, but we ought to be able to shed light on it now before it's going to be impossible to shed light on anything.”
After this interview aired on Substack Live, but shortly before the publication of this newsletter, the public pressure apparently achieved results: The Walt Disney company announced that Kimmel will be back on air Tuesday.
You can watch the full video of the interview at the top of this story.
