Federal Communications Chairman Brendan Carr faces an important test of his stated standards for news organizations this week: If he's not just looking to punish media outlets for being insufficiently deferential to President Donald Trump, he must launch a news distortion investigation of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Broadcasting Co.
Trump attended a dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base on Saturday honoring the first six U.S. service members killed in the Iran war. The president drew criticism for wearing a baseball cap that his campaign store sells for $55 while saluting coffins bearing the remains of the fallen.
Fox News’ right-wing propagandists would lose their minds if a Democratic president did such a thing. But on Sunday morning, the network instead seemed to hide the president’s disrespect toward the dead. While purporting to cover the previous day’s event, Fox & Friends Weekend aired months-old footage from December of Trump attending a dignified transfer ceremony for two U.S. National Guard members and a civilian interpreter killed in Syria. The president was not wearing a ballcap in that footage, but was wearing an overcoat to shield him from the December cold.
Critics quickly exposed the Fox & Friends misrepresentation, and host Griff Jenkins apologized later in the program, claiming that the show “inadvertently aired video from an older dignified transfer instead of the ceremony that took place yesterday.” The network similarly stressed in a statement that it had been a mistake, saying, “FOX News Media programs inadvertently aired file footage from a previous dignified transfer while discussing yesterday’s ceremony at Dover Air Force Base. The archival footage was mistakenly used during the video sourcing process. We regret the error and apologize for the incorrect footage.”
But Fox News didn’t just air this incorrect footage once — as CNN noted on Sunday, “A quick scan showed both last night's ‘The Big Weekend Show’ and this morning's ‘Fox News Sunday’ also used the wrong footage, while last night's ‘My View with Lara Trump’ used the correct video.”
Fox News Sunday aired the footage of Trump at the December dignified transfer twice, first while anchor Shannon Bream said, “As fallen service members from Operation Epic Fury make their final return home, the Pentagon praises the progress being made on the battlefield,” and again as Bream stated: “On Saturday, the remains of the six U.S. service members killed in Operation Epic Fury came home. The president, first lady, and Vice President Vance joined family members for the dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force in Delaware.” During the second occurrence, on-screen text read, “DOVER, DE. Saturday.”
Fox News programming airs on cable, which means its content is largely unregulated — but Fox News Sunday also airs on hundreds of local broadcast stations across the country, which “are subject to certain speech restraints” overseen by the FCC. That body, under Carr’s leadership, has been much more aggressive in cracking down on broadcast networks over purported “news distortion” on the public airwaves — at least when those distortions are against the interests of the president.
Carr targeted CBS for purported “news distortion,” using his federal regulatory power to extract concessions from the network as its parent company Paramount sought to merge with Trump ally David Ellison’s Skydance Media.
Shortly after Trump took office and made him the FCC chair last year, Carr reopened a previously dismissed probe of CBS News over its editing of a 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris that aired in October 2024. Trump had sued CBS for $10 billion over the interview, and repeatedly declared that the network should “lose its license.”
Carr demanded an unedited transcript of the 60 Minutes interview and tied the investigation to the merger, saying, “I’m pretty confident that that news distortion complaint over the ’60 Minutes’ transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction.” The probe went away and the merger went through after Paramount agreed to settle Trump’s lawsuit and appoint a right-wing ombudsman.
CBS hasn’t been the only target of Carr’s ire. He also revived FCC probes into right-wing complaints that NBC favored Harris during the 2024 election because she appeared on Saturday Night Live, and that ABC’s moderator had unfairly fact-checked Trump during their presidential debate.
And when ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel inaccurately suggested in September that right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s killer was part of “the MAGA gang,” the chair rushed to a MAGA influencer’s show to accuse the comedian of “an intentional effort to mislead the American people” — and to threaten retribution against both ABC parent company Disney and the broadcast stations that aired Kimmel’s show, including potential “license revocation from the FCC.”
Broadcast licenses granted by the FCC give networks “a unique obligation to operate in the public interest,” Carr explained to Trumpist mouthpiece Sean Hannity during a Fox interview amid the Kimmel uproar.
Fox Broadcasting stations, one could argue, failed that “unique obligation to operate in the public interest” when they engaged in “news distortion” by airing inaccurate footage that prevented viewers from seeing the president disrespect deceased service members.
So how about it, Mr. Chairman? Why not launch a probe and demand interviews and documents to find out whether Fox’s editing issue was “inadvertent,” as they claim — or, as certainly seems possible given the network’s record, “an intentional effort to mislead the American people”?
Reprinted with permisson from Media Matters
