The 'Easy Way' to Crush the Mainstream Media

"The scandal that briefly made Brendan Carr a household name this fall was an outlier several times over. For one thing, FCC chairmen rarely make news. More than that, Carr usually knows better than to draw too much attention to himself. A seasoned bureaucrat, he has a knack for pulling the strings of power in ways that escape public scrutiny. But when he issued a mob-style threat over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue that Republicans didn't like-"We can do this the easy way or the hard way"-he made the Trump administration's appetite for censorship unignorable."

"Most of the administration's efforts to manipulate the media up to that point had retained at least a patina of deniability. Here, by contrast, was an uncomplicated threat of government interference-one that prompted Disney, ABC's parent company, to fall in line by suspending Kimmel's show. This was too much even for some of the Trump administration's biggest cheerleaders; Senator Ted Cruz called Carr's comments "dangerous as hell." After a few days of public outcry, Kimmel was back on the air."

"The whole episode was an unusual misstep by a skilled Washington operator. The hallmark of Carr's tenure as chair of the Federal Communications Commission has been the exploitation of bureaucratic procedure to consolidate ownership of communications infrastructure in Trump-friendly hands, while keeping those actions out of both the court of public opinion and the literal courts. To liberals, this is an obvious attempt to rig the media. To conservatives, however, it is a long-overdue unrigging. Why should the national networks devote airtime every night to liberal comedians who incessantly mock Republicans? "For those that benefited from a two-tier system of justice, today's even handed treatment feels like discrimination," Carr posted on X in March, paraphrasing the economist Thomas Sowell. The left, in other words, got so used to controlling the media that it doesn't even notice the bias."

Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, issued a mob-style threat over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue, saying "We can do this the easy way or the hard way," which prompted Disney to suspend Kimmel's show. Most prior media-manipulation efforts retained deniability, but this explicit threat forced public scrutiny and bipartisan criticism, including from Senator Ted Cruz. The episode revealed Carr's pattern of using bureaucratic procedures to consolidate communications ownership in pro-Trump hands while avoiding courts and public notice. Conservatives framed the actions as corrective; liberals saw them as rigging the media and entrenching bias.

Read at The Atlantic