‘We’re not done yet’ warns broadcasting watchdog as Jimmy Kimmel feels his bite

“The FCC should promote freedom of speech,” Carr wrote in his chapter on TV and tech regulation last year.

Carr had long made clear he was a free speech evangelist. “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not,” he wrote on Twitter, now X, in 2019. “The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest’.”

In December 2023, nearly a year before Trump’s election victory, Carr declared: “Free speech is the counterweight – it is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.”

This is the same Carr, now Trump’s handpicked chair of the FCC, who last week launched arguably the biggest governmental assault on freedom of speech in US history.

After late-night comedy host Jimmy Kimmel accused the “Maga gang” of weaponising the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to attack the left, Carr appeared on a rightwing podcast to explicitly threaten ABC and its parent, Disney, demanding that the comedian be forced off the air.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” warned Carr, 46, denouncing Kimmel’s remarks as “truly sick”. “[These companies] have a licence granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest.” Within hours, Kimmel was yanked off the air.

“We’re not done yet,” Carr said on CNBC on Thursday as he took a victory lap amid the political firestorm that followed. “If there are broadcasters out there that don’t like it, they can turn their licence in to the FCC.”

Former colleagues at the commission say they are “stunned” by the agency’s turn towards “outright censorship” under Carr’s stewardship. But, one added: “The warning signs were there.”

Carr joined the FCC as a lawyer in 2012 and ascended swiftly. He was appointed by Trump in 2017 to the board of commissioners, where his criticism of perceived liberal bias in the mainstream media was noted with approval by the president and Republican leaders. It is this belief, rather than free speech, that has driven his time in office.

Carr’s methods, using the FCC’s regulatory power as a cudgel, have increased the pressure on networks to fall into line. Since assuming the post of chair in January, he has launched investigations into nearly every big network.

He applauded CBS’s decision in July to cancel the late-night show hosted by comedian Stephen Colbert, another outspoken Trump critic. The move came days before the FCC approved an $8bn (£5.9bn) merger between CBS’s parent company, Paramount, and Skydance Media.

The implicit threat from Carr was again instrumental in Kimmel’s suspension last week. The Nexstar Media Group, which owns ABC affiliates across the US and has a $6.2bn merger with rival company Tegna awaiting FCC approval, announced that it was pulling Kimmel’s show on Wednesday night. When other companies followed suit, ABC buckled and confirmed it was suspending Kimmel “indefinitely”.

One former FCC official said the effect of the administration’s assault on the media has been “chilling”.

“People are seriously alarmed, particularly if they have business before the FCC,” he added. “People are taking legal advice and treading very carefully.”

The last surviving Democrat on the FCC board, Anna Gomez, has been more explicit, however. She attacked the Trump administration for encouraging “an inexcusable act of political violence to be twisted into a justification for government censorship and control”.

“This FCC does not have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to police content or punish broadcasters for speech the government dislikes,” Gomez added. But she also castigated ABC and Disney, condemning the decision to pull Kimmel’s show as “a shameful show of cowardly capitulation” that has “put the foundation of the first amendment in danger.”

Democrats in Congress have accused Trump of marching the US towards authoritarianism, using Kirk’s death as a pretext to muzzle free speech and bring critics in the media to heel.

“They aren't even hiding what they are trying to do,” said Connecticut senator Chris Murphy. “Any media actor that doesn't say what Trump wants them to say… is going to be silenced. That’s censorship. That’s state speech control. That’s not America.”

Trump has held long-running grievances with the press, which he has used as a foil, characterising the media as “fake news” and an “enemy of the people”. Since taking back the White House, however, the president has launched a personal barrage of lawsuits against media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, stepping up his attack on companies he accuses of treating him unfairly.

Others have bowed to mounting pressure from the White House, consenting to changes in editorial and diversity policies. Some, including ABC and CBS, have paid out multimillion-dollar settlements to the president.

One CBS worker said that the surrender to Trump had been greeted by many at the company with “despair”.

“Because people see where this is going,” she said. “Each capitulation makes it harder for the next company targeted to stand up to him [Trump].”

The president’s clashes with journalists at the White House have also been more aggressive in the wake of Kirk’s murder.

When veteran ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl asked Trump about attorney general Pam Bondi’s threat to prosecute supposed “hate speech” after Kirk’s death, the president threatened the journalist. “She’d probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly,” Trump snapped back. “It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart.”

The president is already eyeing new targets. Speaking to reporters onboard Air Force One as he returned from his state visit to the UK last week, Trump urged Carr – who has been seen wearing a gold lapel pin of Trump’s head in profile -to review the licences of any networks that are critical of his administration, denouncing the TV networks as “an arm of the Democrat[ic] party”.

“They give me only bad press, and they're getting a licence. I would think maybe their licence should be taken away,” he said. “It will be up to Brendan Carr.”

Photograph by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP. Other picture by John McDonnell/Getty Images