Trump’s FCC Head Threatens to Revoke Comcast's Licenses Over Unfavorable Coverage of Abrego Garcia's Deportation to Salvadoran Gulag

Apr 19, 2025

The Trump administration has criticized NBC News and MSNBC for failing to provide sympathetic coverage of his arbitrary and lawless banishment and imprisonment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. So Trump’s FCC Chairman followed up by threatening to revoke broadcast licenses held by the networks’ parent company.

Deadline has the details:

FCC chairman Brendan Carr suggested that Comcast may be violating its broadcast licenses after MSNBC declined to carry a White House briefing Wednesday afternoon in which the administration continued to defend its decision to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.
Carr’s comments are the latest example of the Trump administration threatening, implicitly or explicitly, a news outlet over its editorial decisions.
In a post on X, Carr claimed that Comcast was ignoring “obvious facts of public interest,” suggesting that they were portraying Garcia as “merely a law abiding U.S. citizen” and not reporting on his alleged MS13 gang affiliation.
“Comcast knows that federal law requires its licensed operations to serve the public interest. News distortion doesn’t cut it,” Carr wrote.

The FCC’s power to decide if broadcasters are acting in “the public interest” has always posed a risk of partisan censorship, which the agency's independent status is supposed to mitigate. But Trump has been undermining the independence of such agencies in his quest for autocratic power.

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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