The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has launched investigations over the past two weeks into three news outlets and reinstated complaints against three others.
Earlier this week, CBS News complied with an FCC request to hand over the raw footage and transcript from an October interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
The FCC’s request for the material was “unusual,” according to Harold Furchtgott-Roth, a Republican who served as an FCC commissioner under President Bill Clinton. “The commission doesn’t usually ask for transcripts,” he said.
That interview is at the center of one FCC complaint — and a $10 billion lawsuit from President Donald Trump — that says CBS doctored the interview. CBS denied any wrongdoing when Trump filed the lawsuit, but its parent company, Paramount, is now considering a settlement, according to media reports.
The FCC complaint against CBS is one of four that former FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, dismissed earlier in January, saying the complaints “seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.”
Rosenworcel’s successor, Trump-appointed Republican chair Brendan Carr, revived the CBS complaint, plus complaints against NBC and ABC. He did not revive a complaint against Fox News, which Rosenworcel had also dismissed.
In an interview with CNN, Carr defended the inquiry into CBS.
“I don’t see how the FCC can reasonably adjudicate this claim of news distortion without seeing what was actually said,” Carr said.
On Wednesday afternoon, CBS published the unedited transcripts on its website, showing that the shows “60 Minutes” and “Face the Nation” used slightly different parts of the same answer from Harris, which is common practice in journalism.
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, a Democrat, has said the move against CBS was “designed to instill fear in broadcast stations.” On Wednesday, she called on the FCC to “dismiss this fishing expedition to avoid further politicizing our enforcement actions” because the transcript and footage showed “no evidence” that CBS and its affiliates had violated FCC rules.
The “news distortion” complaint against ABC claims fact-checking by the moderators in the preelection Harris-Trump TV debate favored Harris.
The complaint against NBC claims Harris’ appearance on the comedy show “Saturday Night Live” shortly before the election violated “equal time” rules that govern political programming. Soon after, NBC provided Trump with equal time by giving him a chance to directly address voters following a NASCAR race.
ABC, CBS and NBC did not reply to VOA’s email requesting comment.
The Center for American Rights, which filed the three complaints, told VOA it applauded Carr’s decision to reopen them.
“Broadcasters are required to serve the public interest in exchange for their access to the public airwaves,” Daniel Suhr, the group’s president, said in an emailed statement.
“Free speech does not include blatantly distorting the news or violating long-standing commission rules,” Suhr added. “We are encouraged to see Chairman Carr addressing these serious issues.”
But Kim Zarkin, a professor of communication at Westminster University in Utah who has researched the FCC for three decades, told VOA she believes the three complaints don’t have any merit because NBC eventually gave Trump equal time, and the CBS and ABC complaints pertain to content.
“It’s the idea that the FCC would punish news organizations for editorial decisions,” she said. “It challenges almost the entire history of the FCC and how the FCC looks at content.”
The FCC has also launched investigations into National Public Radio (NPR), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and radio station KCBS, which is based in San Francisco, California.
“It is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements,” Carr wrote in a January 29 letter notifying the two outlets about the investigations.
The FCC does not directly regulate NPR, PBS or other major networks. But the independent government agency does evaluate the actions of public broadcasting stations around the U.S. that hold FCC licenses to use public airwaves.
If an FCC investigation finds wrongdoing, the agency can impose a fine or revoke a station’s broadcast license.
Public broadcasting stations are not allowed to run commercials, so they run corporate underwriting spots, which are similar to commercials but don’t include a “call to action” urging listeners to do things such as buy a specific product.
Both NPR and PBS have rejected any wrongdoing.
What stood out to Zarkin about the NPR and PBS investigations is how broad they are, she said. These kinds of investigations are typically directed at specific member stations and refer to specific incidents, she said, but that’s not the case here.
“The idea that they’re sweepingly investigating NPR and PBS just in general — that’s not how the FCC has historically done business,” said Zarkin, who has written two books on the FCC.
On Monday, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene invited the CEOs of NPR and PBS to testify at a subcommittee hearing on what she considers “systemically biased news coverage” from the outlets. NPR and PBS receive a small amount of federal funding from the U.S.-chartered Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Their reporting should “serve the entire public,” Greene said, “not just a narrow slice of like-minded individuals.”
In his letter to NPR and PBS, Carr said he was sharing it with lawmakers because he thought it could inform the debate about whether to cut funding to the two outlets.
“For my own part, I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS given the changes in the media marketplace,” Carr wrote.
During his campaign, Trump threatened to revoke broadcasters’ licenses if elected. The recent flurry of FCC investigations and complaints has raised press freedom concerns among media experts and current and former Democratic FCC commissioners.
