Writing Monday night for his site Status, liberal media authoritarian Oliver Darcy — who has called for conservative media to be abolished from cable providers — celebrated a letter from the Freedom of the Press Foundation demanding Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr be disbarred and investigated by the D.C. Court of Appeals for, well, existing and alleging he hates the First Amendment.
The subhead was a tongue bath: “The Freedom of the Press Foundation is turning the tables on Brendan Carr, filing a complaint to investigate and potentially disbar the FCC chairman over his moves to punish Donald Trump’s media critics.”
Darcy painted the head of a group supposedly built on freedom of expression and robust debate as some down-and-out underdog-turned hero:
For months, Seth Stern had weighed whether to take the extraordinary step of filing a disciplinary complaint against the country’s top communications regulator. As director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Stern had watched with alarm as Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr repeatedly blurred the line between law and politics—reviving baseless investigations into major news networks, threatening companies over their diversity initiatives, and slow-walking approval of Paramount Global’s merger with Skydance Media while Donald Trump pursued an absurd “60 Minutes” lawsuit against the company.
This Stern fella added to Darcy that what supposedly set him over the edge was the FCC approval of the Skydance Media merger with Paramount, the parent company of CBS: “Trump’s shakedown of Paramount could not have worked without a credible threat that the administration would not approve Paramount’s merger with Skydance unless it paid up..It seems obvious to us that a licensed attorney should not be able to help his boss make a mockery of the legal system by laundering bribes through the courts without consequence.”
This headline-grabbing complain demanded Carr face punishment for doing things they don’t like, arguing Carr has been “uphold[ing] the principles of competence, integrity, impartiality, and respect for the Constitution” and rather “engaged in egregious conduct” between the merger, demanding an end to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and floating other measures of accountability for networks who aren’t operating for the public’s benefit.
Darcy breathlessly quoted from the letter, including the eye-roll-inducing nonsense that Carr’s refusal to go-along and get-along with corporate liberals “brazenly violate legal and ethical standards that govern the practice of law and public officials, undermining the First Amendment, the FCC’s credibility and the laws he is trusted to administer” and marked an “abuse of his office.”
He concluded with the admission that this is about intimidation and embarrassment, not results:
[W]hat makes the Monday filing notable is not just the substance of the complaint, but the role reversal it represents…Stern and the Freedom of the Press Foundation are…asking for Carr himself to be investigated under the very professional standards he has long flouted.
(….)
Ultimately, the complaint is as much about seeking accountability as it is about drawing a red line: if Carr can use the powers of his office to intimidate newsrooms and tilt coverage toward Trump, then, Stern argued, lawyers in public office can act as political enforcers with impunity.
