FCC Chair Brendan Carr: "So broadcasters are unique among all other distributors of information or even data. They have a license given them by the federal government that necessarily means the government has excluded other voices that might have wanted to use those airwaves, and so they have an obligation to stand not just in their own shoes, but in the shoes of their entire community of license. And that means they have to operate differently than a cable channel or a podcast or social media. And what's been interesting to me is that on the Democrat side, there's a lot of simply projection and distortion. If you go back to the Biden years, there was actual weaponization of the FCC in communications policy. As we noted, there was members of this committee that wrote letters to cable companies to pressure them to drop conservative channels simply because they were viewed, in their words, as right-wing media outlets. You had Democrats in Congress write letters to the FCC asking it to investigate the news activities of Sinclair broadcaster because they disagreed with the views of Sinclair--After that letter, there were 227 routine Sinclair licenses that came up for renewal or were pending during the Biden years, and all but one of those—so 226—were not renewed by the FCC. That was unprecedented. It had never happened before. So Democrats put pressure and it engendered results. What we're doing is applying the public interest standard in an evenhanded way. And for people that benefited from the weaponization during the Biden years that may feel like discrimination, but it doesn't make it so."
