The second Trump administration is full of horribles, to be sure, but we all really ought to be paying more attention to Trumpfluffer In Chief Brendon Carr.
That would be Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, going by technical titles, but since Carr himself has no qualms in describing his role as predominantly one of making sure our national airwaves are fluffing Donald Trump at all hours and in every particular, calling him the "chairman" of anything seems more obfuscatory than descriptive. If he thinks his job is to be the nation's top Trumpenfluffer, then we ought to let the man have the title and give him the slow clap he seems to be so desperately angling for.
But while Donald himself is off wrecking everything that can be wrecked merely by reflex, and bioluminescent sea squirts like Robert F. Kennedy are wrecking the foundations of public health because they believe anything that can't be cured by vibes ought not be cured at all, Brandon Carr is off in his own little fiefdom breaking laws and being a Muskian Nazi at all opportunities.
Carr's remolding of our national airwaves into propaganda outlets for Dear Leader is covered only sometimes, however. It is always a background story, and not the top corruption story of any given day.
It's not because he's a piker, when it comes to being a gleefully corrupt manslut for Donald. It's mostly because the other wreckers of the Trump administration keep stealing the spotlight with actions that literally kill people. Pete Hegseth, Steven Miller, and Marco Rubio have continued a drone and bombing campaign against South American fishermen mostly out of a desire to be seen killing people and not at all because anyone is pretending it has a broader purpose. Rubio has become the shadow treasurer of Venezuela, allegedly, and is siphoning off an unknown percent of the nation's international oil sales to be used instead as a crooked Dear Leader slush fund. Trump launched a war against Iran that near-immediately killed a school's worth of children and within weeks had devolved into Trump vowing new and very specific war crimes on a near-daily basis. Elon Musk and Russell Vought's destruction of USAID has already lead to somewhere on the order of 750,000 dead people with millions more casualties expected.
And measles is back, and there's a new lettuce in town that gives you life threatening diarrhea and Trump's government lackeys are either pretending to not know where it's coming from or have so gutted the basic functions of government that we've lost the ability to tell where it's coming from, Trump's government continues to abduct legal immigrants off the streets while boosting Radio Rwanda-styled rhetoric encouraging the purging of entire towns, and take-your-pick.
In the middle of all of that, you can get why Carr's Trumpfluffery tends to come off pathetic and mewling in comparison. Everyone else on the team is murdering people to show their loyalty to Dear Leader, Brendon. ICE is shooting people in the streets, Pete's purging the military ranks of anyone who's not a white male with severe anger issues, and the whole country's on pins and needles waiting to hear whether it will ever be safe to eat food again.
And then here's Brendon, whose idea of being a team player is to pick a fight with Jimmy Kimmel or to threaten apocalyptic consequences for making wisecracks about Trump on The View. Go f--k yourself, Brendon. You're pathetic. You're the Rob Schneider version of Joseph Goebbels.
But Deuce Bigalow, Trumpfluffer has, like his compatriot Russell Vought, has been very successful in undermining Congress and the very concept of Americanness even as the administration's stars steal each day's headlines with new acts of murderous incompetence. While nobody's been looking, Carr has decided that Dear Leader's movement can't survive unless Dear Leader's allies own every bit of what you watch and listen to.
Congress passed very specific laws to prevent a bare handful of stupid rich assholes from owning everything the public watches or listens to, however. So Carr has decided, on his own, that now that Dear Leader has arrived those rules don't apply anymore.
The Federal Communications Commission will vote to repeal the National Television Ownership Rule that is supposed to prevent a single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. The proposed change sets up a likely court battle over the FCC claim that it has authority to repeal a limit set by Congress.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has already treated the rule as more of a suggestion. In March, the Carr FCC granted a waiver allowing Nexstar Media Group to buy Tegna in a deal that let it reach over half of TV households. The Carr FCC argued that Congress gave it authority to modify or waive the rule.
Carr now plans to repeal the 39 percent limit and replace it with a âcase-by-case reviewâ of each proposed merger, the chairman announced today in an op-ed published on Breitbart. The change would make it easier for the FCC to pick and choose which station groups get to surpass the limit. Under Carr, this would likely benefit news companies that provide favorable coverage for President Trump.
That's a good story to read if you want to get a sense of just how pathetic our nation's head fluffer comes across even as he quite successfully wrecks things for Dear Leader, though I suppose "an op-ed published on Breitbart" pretty much tells you what you need to know. The important bits are that Carr now says the 39% limit on total household reach for a single media company no longer applies, even though it's a federal law he's obliged to enforce no matter how much Trump's ass needs kissing, and Carr isn't even trying to make a case for why he gets to break the law other than a generic "because the media keeps saying mean things about Trump, which we can only fix by making sure Trump fluffers own every last station."
The problem this creates is the problem ... we already have. Even without Carr's own personal crookedness, the notion of "journalism for the public good" in this country is already wheezing out its last breaths. The whole purpose of the 39% ruleâalready provably too lenient, recent history provesâwas to act as bulwark against oligarchic propaganda. There needs to be at least a minimal local stake in local news production or the production just doesn't happen.
Less real local journalism creates local news deserts, where there's less attention paid to local corruption or abuses by consolidated corporate power. In 2019 I spoke to researchers documenting how the supplanting of local journalism with right wing propaganda measurably swings election outcomes.
I often see a prevailing sentiment that this sort of thing doesn't matter because "nobody watches regular TV anymore," but that's simply not true. 65% to 70% of U.S. adults (roughly 170â180 million people) still at least occasionally watch local TV broadcasts via cable, antenna, satellite, or streaming.
That's 180 million households consuming lazy right wing propaganda in a country endlessly confused as to why such a large segment of the electorate routinely votes against their best self interests. The output of these local broadcasts is also tethered to national media and internet news sources, allowing the right wing to manufacture entire bogus news and outrage discourse cycles at will.
Media consolidation strips the local out of media and reduces it all, as we have so pointedly seen, to a lowest-cost, hypergeneric mass-produced goo. It may be rancid fare that a good chunk of Americans can barely stomach, or that many Americans turn away from, but none of that matters when the collected work of a hundred local stations can be consolidated into a single studio with a single set of cameras that can half-ass its way through a 30 minute news broadcast with a mere 1% of the resources.
We've seen what the results are. The results are Sinclair Media. The results are the corporatized Internet, in which every niche site struggles to remain afloat after Google has siphoned off every bit of their ad and traffic revenue, gets sold to a hedge fund or other buyer of last resort, and turned into a landing page for robot-produced slop surrounded by scam-grade advertisements. And that's the pattern we've seen in local media companies, from television stations to radio to newspapers, as well.
There have been no serious attempts to counteract this Great Media Enshittening. Bode argues (or rather observes; I don't see any plausible counterargument to be made here):
With scattered exception, Democrats have been a feckless disaster when it comes to media policy and reform. Not only have they not had a cogent media reform plan anytime in the last quarter-century, establishment dems can't even effectively communicate the fact that there's an information war going on. [...]
Assuming we can unfasten Trump's fangs from the neck of democracy, media reform is going to be absolutely essential if the country doesn't want to enjoy repeated, ongoing bouts with corporatocracy and fascism, culminating in the country splintering into a broken coagulation of bickering nation states.
Such reform has to center around restoring media consolidation limits, imposing media ownership diversity requirements, rebuilding our demolished public broadcasting systems, embracing meaningful antitrust reform, and establishing tougher new media literacy standards (Finland starts teaching children to spot propaganda and unreliable narrators as early as three-years-old).
An aside: While Finland's curriculum was developed specifically to counteract Soviet and Russian propaganda programs, and now being revised to include A.I. awareness, the need might better be framed as anti-predator awareness. Kindergarteners get taught not to follow strangers into vans; teaching them not to believe strange avatars looking to lure them into handing over photos, addresses, or their parents' credit card numbers is now an educational necessity, whether the person on the other end of the conversation styles themselves to be a fellow child or a supposed multinational conglomerate.
Carr, on the other hand, appears to believe that his version of America can only exist if all of those previous good things America once had to protect itself get shredded to bits, and the sooner the better. He's right about that, because Carr has been just as bold as anyone else in the administration when it comes to promoting fascism, both by rhetoric and in act, and fascism as a movement cannot exist in environments that allow it to be critiqued.
Also, he's just a horrible wedgie of a man. If Trump hadn't come around he'd probably be shilling just as avidly for whatever other fellow huckster the movement could burp up. Seriously, listen to this guy talk; the patheticness, the neediness and desire to be Useful to Dear Stupid Leader, wafts off him almost visibly.
The whole dynamic of Trump's second term has been this one, of course. Trump squeaked into a second try at power due mostly to the incompetence and feckless indifference of the press, of elected officials, and at least a little because a now thoroughly crooked Supreme Court couldn't stomach the notion of any rich person facing any legal burden whatsoever. Trump then immediately filled his new administration with outright crooks: people willing to ignore whatever laws they might run across in service to far-right power.
That was likely not his intentâthe man remains brick-stupid, incapable of strategic thought or indeed of holding anything in his head that does not revolve around his most immediate needs. It instead happened as a natural outcome of his attempted coup.
Once you have attempted a violent coup, the only people who will work for you are people who believe you might again attempt something like a violent coup and who don't have a problem with that. That's where Trump has scraped up a "government" from: It is culled from the ranks of far-right figures who admired him for attempting to overthrow America for the sake of power and who believe 100% in the necessity of that overthrow.
Vought is one of those. So is Hegseth. The whole of the Heritage Foundation is that; the whole of the Claremont Institute is that.
And that's what Carr is. You'll never convince him to follow laws because his whole schtick is that laws that impede Dear Stupid Leader are conspiracies against him. He considers the enforcement of pro-Trump beliefs in media to be the entirety of his job; he considers it his duty to police late-night television skits and morning show banter to ensure Dear Stupid Leader gets his due, and if the only way to truly ensure the outcome is to illegally hand over the stations to Dear Stupid Leader's most toadying golf buddies then that's what will happen.
It's not as glamorous as dropping bombs on fishing boats and then watching drone footage of the survivors slowly drown, but what can you do. The movement requires boring bureaucratic fuckuppery as well; it's the boring bureaucratic fuckuppery that keeps the murders and bribecoins and diarrhea lettuce going strong.
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