In the latest assault on press freedom from the second Trump administration, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to threaten NBC’s Kristen Welker for describing his primary endorsement record as having “mixed results.” It appears FCC Chair Brendan Carr has taken the threat seriously.
The Hill reports:
His comments come after President Trump urged the agency to punish NBC News’s Kristen Welker. She angered the president last Sunday while teasing an upcoming episode of “Meet the Press” on its Washington, D.C., affiliate earlier in the day. She said Trump is “going to loom large over” the midterm elections while also noting that Trump-endorsed candidates have had “mixed results” during the Republican primaries.
Trump has compiled a 96-percent winning record in this year’s primaries, according to Ballotpedia. Those who have lost include Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, Rep. Randy Feenstra (R-Iowa), MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and South Carolina Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette.
“How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves?” Trump wrote last week on Truth Social. “Results are attached. Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment.”
NBC News said it stands by Welker, calling her “one of the best in the business.”
Welker’s characterization wasn’t “purposeful inaccuracy,” it was simply true. Four candidates Trump endorsed lost, which is enough to make “mixed results” an understatement if anything. Trump isn’t punishing a lie; he is punishing an accurate account he didn’t like, while complaining about it as if it were a lie.
Carr, for his part, appeared on Fox News days later and said the FCC is “looking at a lot of actions” to police “fake polls and partisan coverage” ahead of the midterms. The FCC’s own commissioner, Anna Gomez, a Democrat, has pushed back directly: “the FCC has no authority to punish journalists this administration doesn’t like,” she said, calling the threats “dangerous” to the foundation of American democracy. Notably, so has at least one prominent Republican: Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz previously called Carr’s threats against ABC over the Jimmy Kimmel suspension “dangerous as hell.”
Even if Carr’s threatened actions never materialize, or are successfully fended off in court, the chilling effect is real and dangerous.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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