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Head of FCC threatens broadcaster licenses over critical coverage of Iran war
https://xcancel.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/2032855414233047172 https://xcancel.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/203285541423304717...
- jmclnx 7mo agoA better link: https://xcancel.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/2032855414233047172 https://xcancel.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/203285541423304717... BTW, the link is a waste of your time reading it, it is just the current US regime whining again.
- g-mork 7mo agoI've read so much trump spam recently that on reading this my first thought was that you misspelled winning hehe Planet announced last week there will be a 14 day delay on all commercial satellite imagery from the middle east. It shocks me how transparent we are about information war and voluntarily lying to ourselves at particular moments
- decimalenough 7mo agoNo, this is deeply disturbing. The person "whining" is the head of the regulatory body that gets to decide what can be broadcast, a supposedly non-partisan role, and yet he's just straight up threatened to cancel the licenses of everybody who's not vocally supportive of what you term the current regime.
- theahura 7mo agothanks, I should've used xcancel. @dang I would love if we could update to using this link instead
- Jtsummers 7mo agoxcancel is like archive links, they prefer links to the original with bypasses/alternatives in comments.
- allears 7mo agoWell there's a clear 1st Amendment violation. Wonder if he'll get sued, and if so, wonder if the plaintiff will win, and if so, whether Carr will abide by any judgment.
- pstuart 7mo agoThe irony of this would be quite amusing if it wasn't so dangerous. Where are all the "free speech absolutists" now?
- refulgentis 7mo agoHN was such an interesting place in 2024, they’ve all disappeared, sadly. I’ve been genuinely, deeply, curious where those posters went. It was the site at that point. The most I’ve seen in months and months is a limp-wristed handwave at “but humans have gooned and been racist forever”, in response to someone saying they wouldn’t choose to work for X.ai because it accelerates those things. My most substantive idea is it was an unsustainable coalition, and that’s why we’re not seeing it much. You need to be for an ugly conjunction of things instead of against “woke” and Columbia students, thus you won’t get coalition-wide social approval (upvotes) anymore. So they’re almost certainly here, but, downvoted to the point of invisibility unless you scour every comment. Another case study to ponder is our host’s CEO, Gary Tan. Full-on loud-throated American juche stuff at beginning of tariffs. Now he has his own political website he built with Claude. And it’s LLM-generated articles that are riffs on Free Press articles he liked and they’re really tediously boring niche stuff even if you’re full in on team red, even before the AI writing cringe effect on the reader. Ex. “Mackenzie bezos philanthropy is fake and destructive because one college that got money hired the college presidents son and also enrollment dropped the next year”
- exceptione 7mo agoYou can be intelligent and believe the narratives. You can be intelligent and see you were fooled, seeing the sponsors of the narratives don't share any of your ideals to begin with. Many are confused, feeling betrayed, open for new perspectives. Some will double down as we know from group dynamics in sects. Don't feel sad, it is a good sign of healthy progress. Project 2025 and the likes are a very destructive force, not something to gamble your democracy on.
- jacquesm 7mo agoMaybe if we're going to name the department of defense the department of war we can go all the way and rename the FCC to the 'ministry of propaganda'? A free press is worth its weight in gold. If you let go of that you're going to lose more than you bargain for. All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.
- matthewdgreen 7mo agoIt would obviously be the Ministry of Truth.
- skeledrew 7mo agoIs a free press even worth anything of the country is already otherwise lost?
- jacquesm 7mo agoYes, because it is a backbone through which people trying to hold things together can communicate. Remember how the USSR supposedly held together and could not be defeated, and how the Nazi's overran Europe and there were many who figured the easy way out was to just give up and accept it? The free press held the line, in Western Europe through underground newspapers, which made a massive difference in keeping people informed and in the East between 45 and ~86 through the various - sometimes hand copied - smuggled literature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_media_in_German-occupied_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_media_in_German-oc... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_press Soldarity would have never gotten off the ground without that network and speaking for my own country I suspect that without de Volkskrant and Het Parool the war would have gotten much closer to completely eradicating the Jewish population here. It was bad enough as it was but the network that coordinated the distribution of the underground newspapers was also instrumental in keeping the underground resistance network going. The one fed off the other and vice versa, both as a training ground and as a messenger service. Lots of those stories will never be told (unfortunately) but there were a ton of very brave people that knew full well they risked a one-way trip to the dunes if discovered.
- jauntywundrkind 7mo agoIt's deplorable that there's such empty silence on Carr and his incessant snowflake whining from the right. For a party that has crowed so much about 1A! It's unfathomable, just depraved, to have a party that will complain and whine so loudly, and then have nothing at all to say when you have a FCC commissioner asserting that broadcast rights means saying only what the government says is good. Utterly deplorable. This man is a high traitor to the constitution and this nation. And the right: seemingly AWOL, on an issue they claimed was so important! It's so fallen. It's so unfortunate the nation haa to be sundered by people of so low moral and political regard, people who seemingly care so little about values and democracy and the nation.
- suzzer99 7mo ago> For a party that has crowed so much about 1A! Just like the anti-war stuff, it was always convenient hypocrisy that they instantly abandon when the time is right.
- 650REDHAIR 7mo agoIf it wasn’t for double standards they wouldn’t have any at all. We’ve seen it every 4-8 years for decades.
- curt15 7mo ago"Should the government censor speech it doesn't like? Of course not. The FCC doesn't have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the \"public interest\"." -- Brendan Carr 2019
- matthewdgreen 7mo agoSo much of the last four years was watching fools and dishonest people pretend that the government was coming to take away your free speech and you'd better elect [people who routinely lied about everything and clearly had no principles] to protect you.
- verdverm 7mo agoEvery accusation is an admission from the people running the united states right now
- helterskelter 7mo agoI think it's something they're doing consciously, accusing the opposition of doing what they're doing. It puts opposition on the back foot, muddies the water, and provides justification for doing something you shouldn't be since "the other side already did it". This us partly why politics has become like a Choose Your Own Adventure book (more than it was before anyway).
- throwaway173738 7mo agoWhich is why we need to watch the polls closely this year. They’ve repeatedly accused everyone of massive voter fraud so they will most certainly try it themselves.
- helterskelter 7mo agoSlight tangent but the thought has crossed my mind that (the potential of) retaliation by Iran could be a pretense for taking broad executive action which normally wouldn't be permitted, perhaps under the guise of securing the election. They may even do something which will be ruled illegal after the fact by courts, but it could take months after the election to reach a verdict and there's really no precedent in America for broadly declaring a federal election invalid. To be clear I don't really expect this to happen but at this point I honestly wouldn't even be surprised.
- tombert 7mo agoFucking Christ. I still don’t understand how anyone heard Trump bragging about how he’s going to “open up those libel laws”, in addition to all the other idiotic shit that he said, and still decided to vote for him. I am sure people had their reasons, and maybe some of them even weren’t racist, but I am still having trouble comprehending how anyone didn’t see all this shit coming. https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/donald-trump-libel-laws-219866 https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/donald-trump...
- bathtub365 7mo agoThey rightly assumed the laws wouldn’t be used against them by this admin
- Anamon 7mo agoWhy "rightly"?
- Smoosh 7mo agoThe tweet/meme about the face eating leopards seems to be entirely applicable to our current times.
- foogazi 7mo agoThey can’t take your license away if you don’t have one
- bananatype 7mo agoFeels eerily similar to Rodrigo Duterte's threats to Philippine broadcaster ABS-CBN (and in that case, he really made good on the threat and shut down its transmitters).
- brandensilva 7mo agoPropaganda state run networks are for dictatorships, not democracies.
- lo_zamoyski 7mo agoThe distinction between state and corporate media is generally a meaningless one. What matters is the power to shape and misshape public opinion. The American quibbling about “private/corporate vs. public/gov’t” consistently misses the point.
- thrance 7mo agoYour analysis is useless, irrespective of how correct it is. There are countries with a freer press that fare better. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's all pointless, only fools care about improving things" is detrimental to fixing this mess.
- MarkusQ 7mo ago> Your analysis is useless, irrespective of how correct it is. Generally, knowing the truth is more useful than the alternative. > There are countries with a freer press that fare better. That's a non-sequitur if I ever saw squirrel. > Throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's all pointless, only fools > care about improving things" is detrimental to fixing this mess. No one said that.
- paulryanrogers 7mo agoThe distinction is important because at least private enterprises aren't directly controlled by the government. So they have the capacity for independence, and if they choose not to flex it then another private enterprise may.
- spwa4 7mo agoThat's not really accurate. I'd say in dictatorships you have one state run network ... and they grow very "confident". Most of the population doesn't believe the state network, but also doesn't have real other sources of information. Shit happens and nobody knows, like the surprise internet outages in Russia recently spreading to Moscow. In a democracy, you essentially have 5 propaganda networks, each with their own agenda. Agendas go from pure government standpoint to business standpoint, some rich individual's standpoint, religious/ideology/political parties standpoint, ... Everybody knows the big events, because the networks know they have to have some kind of coverage, as it's everywhere. This often goes right into ridiculous territory. Do you want to know the Socialist viewpoint on the recent strike in Brussels about pensions, and how in that strike the position of women compares to the position of children? Read all about it! Or don't, because of course it's 90% why all other political parties are so very, very wrong ...
- abdelhousni 7mo agoIt was already done before and now Trump and Israeli lobby are doing the same with Social networks and US media "The Nazi assault on the press, publishing, and scholarship was more than censorship. It was an attempt to monopolize reality." https://brewminate.com/words-under-siege-hitlers-assault-on-the-german-mind/ https://brewminate.com/words-under-siege-hitlers-assault-on-...
- dlivingston 7mo agoThis article feels very AI generated to me.
- wewewedxfgdf 7mo agoYouTube is a problem, people speaking their minds.
- vizzier 7mo agoYoutube is also a problem of unverified non-journalistic information. Presents a very double edged sword.
- replooda 7mo agoSo is mainstream media, though. Maybe with a few more allegedlys thrown around.
- t0bia_s 7mo agoNot true. Thoughts are shifted by trends. If not politically correct, spreading is limited.
- _heimdall 7mo agoHere's a crazy thought - if you're the president of the united states, or in his cabinet, and don't like news coverage that makes POTUS look bad regardless of the accuracy, how about you find some big boy pants and do better if you don't want to "look bad."
- parineum 7mo ago[flagged]
- _heimdall 7mo agoI was going of the OP article here, the quote is a concern that it makes Trump look bad, not that it is inaccurate reporting. I do agree with you though, if reporting is wrong then that's the problem. In those cases, and there are plenty, the concern raised should be inaccuracy rather than optics though.
- bediger4000 7mo agoHow do you know the coverage is "wrong"? I mean, no news org, not NYT, not Fox, not WaPo, not even NPR can determine if Trump is lying. Sure, they occasionally note that what he says is "baseless", but never lies. So how are you going to determine wrong?
- ethbr1 7mo agoE.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgmlzg0p8k2o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgmlzg0p8k2o
- scuff3d 7mo agoCan you imagine the absolute mayhem at Fox News if Obama had declared himself the greatest president of all time. Or declared a US company a supply chain risk after trying to weasel out of a contract. Or, you know, incited a terrorist attack on the US Capitol...
- GianFabien 7mo agoThe Gaslighter in Chief wants to abolish the First Amendment.
- zimpenfish 7mo agoThe Twitter Files contingent are awfully quiet all of a sudden.
- Analemma_ 7mo agoWhat do you mean? “all of a sudden”? They’ve been dead silent ever since the election. Their mission was accomplished successfully; nothing more to do.
- zimpenfish 7mo ago> They’ve been dead silent ever since the election. Their mission was accomplished successfully; nothing more to do. A fair point, well made.
- xtiansimon 7mo agoSo it's a Tweet allegation-- Do we know what specifically what the Chaiman objects to?
- ouraf 7mo agoHave someone already brought the "reinstate the Fairness Doctrine" talking point for this issue? The best back and forth arguments happen under it.