On Thursday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” FCC Chairman Brendan Carr responded to a question on his prior statement that the FCC doesn’t have “a roving mandate to police speech” in the name of public interest by stating that “when it comes to the Internet. We want wide open, robust debate. And there’s no public interest standard there. There’s no licensing obligation there. But, again, broadcast TV is simply different. Particularly during COVID, we saw this massive surge in censorship on the Internet, by Facebook, by previous owners of Twitter, and I pushed back very strongly there. But again, broadcast is different.”
Co-host Carl Quintanilla asked, “Some people have pulled some of your old posts Chair Carr, including this one from 2019, ‘Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the “public interest.”‘ How do you square what you’re saying with those old posts? And is there pressure now, for example, for Comcast to drop Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers the way the president suggested?”
Carr responded, “I’ve been very, very consistent when it comes to the Internet. We want wide open, robust debate. And there’s no public interest standard there. There’s no licensing obligation there. But, again, broadcast TV is simply different. Particularly during COVID, we saw this massive surge in censorship on the Internet, by Facebook, by previous owners of Twitter, and I pushed back very strongly there. But again, broadcast is different. They’ve got a license and they’re free to go on the Internet and do whatever they want. But if they want to keep access to those valuable airwaves, I’ve been clear, we’re reinvigorating the FCC’s enforcement of public interest.”
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