US Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) is calling on Brendan Carr to resign after accusing the FCC Chairman of threats to revoke broadcasters’ licenses over the US conflict with Iran unless they functioned as “state media,” which Markey called an “extraordinary abuse” of authority.
On Saturday, President Trump used his Truth Social platform to decry print and digital outlets for what he called deliberately misleading coverage of an Iranian military strike on US Air Force tanker planes in Saudi Arabia. The Wall Street Journal originally claimed that the five aircraft had been damaged to varying degrees of operability.
In contrast, the President said that the planes had, in fact, sustained minimal damage and accused the outlets involved of wanting the US to lose the war with Iran. None of the outlets Trump named were radio or television operators.
Despite this, Carr reposted Trump’s complaint on X hours later and appended his own warning: “Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”
He also added, “The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves.” While broadcasters do not bid for spectrum the way wireless carriers do, Carr’s figure is unsourced, and the framing omits that broadcasters pay annual FCC regulatory fees.
In a letter sent to Carr on Sunday, Sen. Markey argued that Carr had directed a license threat at broadcasters in response to a presidential complaint about outlets the FCC does not regulate, and that the move fit a pattern of using the commission’s statutory authority as a tool of political pressure.
“You are effectively demanding that broadcasters become state media and echo the Trump administration’s false talking points on this reckless, unconstitutional war. This threat is just your latest authoritarian attempt to weaponize the FCC’s statutory authority to censor the media. It is a stain on the FCC’s storied history, and you should resign,” wrote Markey.
He went on to cite Carr’s reinstatement of complaints against ABC, CBS, and NBC affiliates in January 2025, an FCC investigation into Audacy San Francisco’s KCBS-AM over immigration reporting, and a threat against ABC and Disney following Jimmy Kimmel’s on-air comments about Charlie Kirk last September.
The Senator acknowledged that the public interest standard exists but argued it was never conceived as a mechanism for enforcing a president’s preferred editorial narrative, pointing to Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC as evidence that even that precedent does not extend to government-directed content control.
In February, Carr urged broadcasters to air “pro-America programming” tied to the nation’s 250th anniversary on July 4 and framing participation as connected to licensees’ public interest obligations. The FCC’s lone Democratic Commissioner, Anna Gomez, pushed back publicly, arguing the campaign represented another instance of the Republican-led commission using the public interest standard to advance the Trump administration’s policy goals rather than functioning as an independent agency.
