Carr Blasts Free Press After Report on Free Speech Attacks
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr condemned Free Press as a “radical group” in a post Monday on X after the organization issued a report on President Donald Trump’s “war on free speech,” which called Carr a “sycophant” willing to act against Trump’s critics. The report “analyzes how President Trump and his political enablers have worked to undermine and chill the most basic freedoms protected under the First Amendment,” Free Press said.
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Carr blasted CNN analyst Brian Stelter for posting about the report, calling it “stenography.” Posts from Carr and former FCC General Counsel Tom Johnson said Stelter omitted key facts about Free Press by not mentioning the group’s 2020 push to require disclaimers on what it called COVID-19 disinformation in Trump administration briefings (see 2003260065). Carr also said Stelter omitted a 2021 Free Press petition submitted to the FCC that was made up of personal comments that members of the public submitted to the group (see 2109150060). One comment in the petition included remarks suggesting that Republicans should be shot. “So, yeah, just a nonprofit advocacy group out there calling balls and strikes,” Carr posted Monday, followed by an emoji of a face rolling its eyes.
Free Press said in its report, titled "Chokehold," that the Trump administration’s retaliations against critics and work to undermine free speech “largely fail judicial scrutiny and have roused significant and wide-ranging public opposition,” and their speed and scale are unprecedented in U.S. history. “The government’s assault on core First Amendment principles is an active, protean threat that’s symptomatic of broader democratic erosion,” the report said. To combat attacks on free speech, institutions must be “emboldened to protect people over profit,” media and tech consolidation must be mitigated, and U.S. civil rights policies must be reinstated. “We must cultivate the framework of egalitarian politics, the principles of people over profits.”