by Mark C. Eades
The Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission says that the FCC is “investigating” San Francisco radio station KCBS for its live reporting on a recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in the S.F. Bay Area. “Investigating” is in scare quotes here because, under the First Amendment right to freedom of the press, there is no legitimate reason for the government to investigate news media for simply for reporting the news. This is not an “investigation” — it is intimidation, meant to scare news media off from reporting anything that the Trump administration doesn’t want reported.
Appearing on Fox News on February 4 and February 6, Trump FCC chairman Brendan Carr said that it is investigating KCBS for its live coverage of a January 26 ICE raid in East San Jose. According to Carr, KCBS may have violated an FCC “public interest” licensing requirement by “broadcasting the live location” of the raid and describing the ICE vehicles involved in the raid. Carr’s comments suggested that, by simply reporting the news, KCBS was interfering with law enforcement and putting the safety of ICE officers at risk.
News media putting officers’ safety at risk? (O.J. Simpson chase, Los Angeles, 1994)
This is, of course, absolute hogwash. News media report live on events as they happen — including law enforcement actions — all the time. We have all seen live TV news coverage of law enforcement actions. Anyone who is old enough remembers watching live TV news coverage of the California Highway Patrol and Los Angeles Police Department’s low-speed chase of O.J. Simpson in his white Bronco along the freeways of L.A. in 1994. Like nearly 100 million other Americans who watched these events unfold live, I watched from a bar in San Francisco while having beers after work. However, I don’t recall anyone from CHP or LAPD accusing broadcasters of interfering with law enforcement or putting officers’ safety at risk simply by reporting the news as it was happening.
Brendan Carr’s comments on Fox suggest that the Trump administration may try to revoke KCBS’s broadcast license as a warning to other news media, which would almost certainly spark a legal battle in the federal courts. In this event, the administration would almost certainly lose at the district court and appellate court levels, since the First Amendment is clear on the right of news media to report the news. What would happen in the Supreme Court, however, is anyone’s guess. This is, after all, the same corrupt Supreme Court that decided it would be perfectly okay for a president to order the assassinations of political opponents, at least as long as that president is Donald Trump. At the very least, I’m sure that Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito can come up with a way of bending the First Amendment to Trump’s will. On the other hand, perhaps KCBS will preemptively go the way of too many other media, apologize profusely for its bad behavior, and donate a few million dollars to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund.
In any case, this “investigation” doesn’t bode well for press freedom in the United States, as Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut noted on eX-Twitter (mistakenly referring to KCBS as a TV station): “This is authoritarian shit. Trump is opening up an investigation (boilerplate government harassment) of a TV station simply because it was covering ICE deportations.... When the regime decides what is news and what isn’t, you’re not in a democracy anymore.” Unfortunately, the mostly negative, right-wing replies to Murphy on eX-Twitter demonstrate what a cesspool that particular platform has become: Most seemed perfectly happy to see the Trump administration use federal power to suppress news reporting it doesn’t like.
We have all seen what it looks like when the Trump administration wants news coverage of ICE raids. We all saw Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem’s absurd ICE cosplay for news cameras during raids in New York City. We all saw Dr. Phil riding shotgun with ICE during raids in Chicago and taking part in the public humiliation of detained immigrants. We all know what it looks like when Trump’s goons want to dress up and perform in front of news cameras. Now, in the case of ICE raids in the San Francisco Bay Area, we also know what it looks like when the Trump administration doesn’t want news cameras around. Apparently, the Trump administration wants made-to-order propaganda from news media that report only what the administration tells them to report.
