President Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and FCC Chair Brendan Carr have assailed the media over coverage of the war in Iran. Carr now threatens broadcast license owners with repercussions.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump and other senior administration officials have lashed out at the press over how journalists have covered the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran. Here is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Friday.
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PETE HEGSETH: Fake news from CNN reports that the Trump administration underestimated the Iran war’s impact on the Strait of Hormuz. Patently ridiculous, of course.
MARTIN: NPR’s David Folkenflik says the Trump administration is talking tough but making what appear to be empty threats. And he’s with us now to tell us more about this. Good morning, David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: So let me back up for a minute before we get to the threats. The president and his allies have been attacking the media for more than a decade. Is this new?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, the setting, the backdrop is new. The substance of the complaints – Hegseth – I mean, fascinatingly enough, last week, early on, he was really upset with what photographers were doing. They were taking snaps of him in these military briefings. That upset him, and so he denied those news agencies access to military briefings subsequently. Then he was more upset about the substance of what was being reported. And as you heard, Hegseth was upset about coverage of the Strait of Hormuz, and specifically about whether or not the administration was prepared for the fact that the Iranian regime would try to cut off access to the strait so that oil tankers couldn’t go through it and come to the U.S. and other parts of the world.
MARTIN: And so what exactly are the president and his team accusing the media of? Do they have some specific complaints?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, fundamentally, it’s a lack of patriotism. President Trump fired off an angry riff about coverage of U.S. planes being bombed in a pair of the nation’s leading newspapers. Here’s a quote. He said, “The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in particular, and other lowlife papers and media, actually want us to lose the war.” And then Brendan Carr echoed it. Let’s remember who he is. Brendan Carr is the nation’s chief broadcast regulator. As chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, he’s supposed to be, in a sense, independent of the president, or at least somewhat so. He operates basically hand in glove with the administration. He said – after the president’s post, Carr said broadcasters are running hoaxes and news distortions, also known as fake news. They now have a chance to correct course before their license renewals come up. And the president was delighted by that. He wrote online that he was thrilled with Carr. He posted that on Sunday night and said some news outlets should be tried for treason for their reporting.
MARTIN: Yes. That’s a – that is a complaint that he has often about people who disagree with him.
FOLKENFLIK: Yep.
MARTIN: So what powers does Carr actually have to change the way journalists report on the war?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, if you have the FCC threatening licenses, those are the licenses for local stations to continue broadcast. So he’s limited authority over national networks directly. He’s complaining about The New York Times, which actually owns no broadcast licenses, no stations. Complaining about The Wall Street Journal. Well, the Journal doesn’t own a network, much less any local licenses, but its controlling owners do. That’s Rupert, Lachlan Murdoch’s Fox stations. Complaining about CNN. That’s not even in broadcast at all, and it’s not owned by a broadcast company. But the guys poised to buy its parent company, or David and Larry Ellison, do own stations. They own CBS. Pete Hegseth said Friday that the sooner David Ellison buys CNN, the better. And that’s part of, you know, the logic that we’re talking about there.
MARTIN: So this is rhetoric from Carr, but are there actual consequences to this?
FOLKENFLIK: So on paper, it’s a paper tiger. The consequences shouldn’t be that big, but there’s a bigger problem here. You’re seeing the federal government use a variety of bully pulpits to try to intimidate people – journalists and their corporate managers and owners – from raising important and tough questions at a time of war and threatening the bottom line if they do. So what you’re seeing them do is kind of try to control the message through any means possible.
MARTIN: That is NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. David, thank you.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
MARTIN: And let me mention that NPR has asked FCC Chair Brendan Carr to join us for an interview, and that invitation remains open.
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