Home Business Trump’s Media Enforcer Is Relishing His Jimmy Kimmel Moment

Trump’s Media Enforcer Is Relishing His Jimmy Kimmel Moment

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr testifies before the House Committee on Appropriations on May 21. (Tom Brenner/For The Washington Post)

Naming Brendan Carr to chair the Federal Communications Commission in November, President-elect Donald Trump heralded him as a “warrior for free speech.”

Now, after spearheading the Trump administration’s successful push for ABC to take comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air, Carr has become a gleeful avatar of what critics say is a sweeping government crackdown on speech — and his backers see as an overdue reckoning with an instinctively liberal broadcast industry.

A lawyer who served as the FCC’s general counsel before being nominated as a commissioner by Trump in 2017, Carr’s résumé until recently fit the bill of a career policy wonk at a federal agency whose work rarely seizes the spotlight. Yet there he was on Wednesday playing the role of political enforcer while speaking to the prominent right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson. “We can do this the hard way or the easy way,” he said, counseling Disney — and by implication its competitors across the media sector — to “find ways to change conduct” or else.

The threat he implicitly leveled at the Hollywood giant that owns ABC is one he has wielded before: that the FCC would pull local broadcast licenses — an extraordinary step with almost no precedent, and which First Amendment experts said is probably illegal.

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