Going Broad

A week before he was nominated by Donald Trump to serve as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr issued an extraordinary letter to the chief executives of Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple. Acting in his current capacity, as the agency’s ranking Republican, Carr accused those tech leaders of participating in a “censorship cartel” that included “advertising, marketing, and so-called ‘fact-checking’ organizations as well as the Biden-Harris Administration itself.” Beyond Carr’s feverish rhetoric, what made the letter noteworthy was the fact that the FCC does not exercise oversight over social media networks, digital advertisers, or independent fact-checkers such as NewsGuard, a site that Carr singled out with particular scorn, calling it “Orwellian.” Carr’s letter represented a brazen attempt to broaden the agency's authority.