Former FCC officials want to force a vote on the “weapon” Brendan Carr used against broadcasters

Several former Federal Communications Commissioners and staffers from across parties are urging a federal appeals court to force a vote on the FCC’s news distortion policy, which they say should be repealed after abuse by Republican Chairman Brendan Carr.

On Tuesday, a group of petitioners asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to ask the FCC to vote on a petition to overturn the news distortion policy. The petition was submitted by a group of former officials from both parties In November From 2025, after Carr invoked the rule to pressure ABC to temporarily suspend comedian Jimmy Kimmel. But only the agency’s head can bring it to the full committee for a vote, and Carr has so far failed to do so for some time Opposition to repeal. Now, the former officials are asking the court to grant an injunction, which would force the FCC to take action. The goal is to force the agency to respond, have each of the three commissioners go on record on the policy, and open a potential legal path to removing the tool that the group believes has been weaponized.

“The news distortion policy is a loaded weapon that Chairman Carr is using to threaten broadcasters,” Mark Fowler, a Republican who led the agency in the 1980s, said in a statement. “Until it is repealed, we will not have a free press.” Tom Wheeler, the former Democratic chairman from 2013 to 2017, issued a similar warning. “As long as the news distortion policy remains in place, the FCC Chairman can continue to abuse it to police perceived media bias, discourage broadcasters from covering controversial stories, and punish outlets that broadcast content that the Trump administration does not like.” The petitioners also include the Radio-TV Digital News Association and the former two Republican chairs of the Communications Commission. Federalists Dennis Patrick and Alfred Sykes, Republican Commissioners Andrew Barrett and Rachel Chung, former Democratic Commissioner Ervin Duggan, and four other former senior leaders at the agency.

the Policy of distorting news It is a previously little-used tool at the FCC that dates back to 1949 and enables the agency to take enforcement action against broadcasters who intentionally distort a fact-based report about a major news event. Because the FCC only regulates television and radio broadcasts, it does not apply to cable networks, online news outlets, or other forms of media, and according to the agency’s website, “the expression of opinion or errors caused by errors is not enforceable.” In their petition, the former officials wrote that some legal barriers to its use “ensured its sparing and judicious use for many decades.”

But under Carr, this policy has seen a revival. The president has repeatedly threatened to use it against broadcast stations he sees as favoring political opponents or showing bias against President Donald Trump — including CBS, which Trump has sued. Edit it From a 60 minutes An interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and ABC, which aired Kimmel making a joke related to the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. More recently, he appeared to threaten the broadcast licenses of stations that aired critical coverage of Trump’s war in Iran, even though he… He later denied it This was intentional. Carr’s invocation of this policy has drawn criticism even from Republicans such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who… Carr comparison to “Mafia member” after threatening Kimmel.

To rule in favor of the petitioners, the D.C. Circuit Court would need to find that the FCC failed in its duty to act, imposed an egregious delay, and no adequate alternative would remedy the matter. The petition argues that timing is of the essence — with the midterm elections approaching, “the abuse of regulatory power to shape voter perception and control the information voters have access to is a particularly pressing issue.”

If the court orders the FCC to hold a vote, the petition will likely fail. Democratic Commissioner Ana Gomez criticize She called the news distortion policy “vague and ineffective,” but Carr rejected the idea of ​​abolishing it. Republican Commissioner Olivia Trusty – the third and final member of The FCC is partially staffed – He may be reluctant to part ways with Carr over such a high-profile matter, and He said The policy “reflects a simple principle: a station cannot truly serve its community if it intentionally distorts news about important events.”

Attorney Andrew J. Schwartzman, who filed the petition along with former Biden FCC nominee Gigi Son, and advocacy groups Protect Democracy and TechFreedom, acknowledges that the entire commission may refuse to repeal the policy. But taking this step would at least open a legal path that has been blocked until now. “That would be acceptable to us, because we could then appeal this denial,” Schwartzman said in a statement. “The problem here is that Brendan Carr is sitting on the petition.”

The petitioners believe a new review of the policy should overturn it. The Supreme Court’s new opinions on the First Amendment “raised questions about whether the committee’s application of this policy was constitutional,” the suit says. This includes the SCOTUS decision in NetChoice Caseswhich dealt with a pair of state laws that sought to limit social media content moderation, and where “a Supreme Court group held that there is no legitimate governmental interest — and therefore no permissible application under the First Amendment — in ‘correcting the mix of speech’ in order to ‘better balance the market for speech,’” according to the filing by the former FCC officials. “Yet this is precisely the interest that the President and the Commission he controls actively seek to advance the policy of news distortion.”

“When unlikely allies share an opinion, that opinion obscures partisanship and ideology,” Chung, one of the petitioners for the former Republican commissioner, said in a statement. “You cannot find a group of petitioners with more disparate political beliefs than this group. However, we all agree on one thing: the policy of distorting the news must be abolished.”