Outgoing FCC chair rejects high-profile TV petitions as attempt to ‘weaponize’ government

New York (CNN) — The outgoing Democratic chair of the Federal Communications Commission is taking bold action on the way out the door, rejecting what she described as four efforts to weaponize the government’s TV licensing authority for political purposes.

Activists on both the right and left may be disappointed. But chair Jessica Rosenworcel said the agency needs to “take a stand on behalf of the First Amendment.”

So on Thursday, according to a statement obtained by CNN, she is dismissing all of the pending petitions and complaints before the FCC that, she asserted, “seek to curtail freedom of the press.”

One of the petitions targeted a Fox-owned TV station in an attempt to hold the Murdochs accountable for Fox News Channel’s falsehoods. The other three efforts were pro-Trump in nature and related to the recent presidential campaign.

“The facts and legal circumstances in each of these cases are different,” Rosenworcel wrote. “But what they share is that they seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment. To do so would set a dangerous precedent. That is why we reject it here.”

Rosenworcel is not just tidying up before her term ends on Jan. 20, she is trying to convince others about the value of a clean house. She is clearly concerned that President-elect Donald Trump might use the agency that oversees US telecommunications to punish media outlets he doesn’t like.

During the presidential campaign, Trump called for every major American TV news network to be punished for one reason or another, according to a CNN review of his speeches and social media posts. On at least 25 occasions, Trump has said certain licenses should be revoked, almost always in reaction to interview questions he disliked or programming he detested.

The FCC, which grants eight-year license terms for TV and radio stations, and hasn’t denied any license renewal in decades, has historically prided itself on its independence.

But Trump’s pick for FCC chair, commissioner Brendan Carr, has echoed (in more polite terms) Trump’s grievances with media outlets and spoken sympathetically about some of the pending complaints against station owners.

The complainants could go ahead and re-file once Carr takes charge next week, but Rosenworcel is rejecting their bids to send a broader message.

By doing so, “we draw a bright line at a moment when clarity about government interference with the free press is needed more than ever,” Rosenworcel’s statement said. “The action we take makes clear two things. First, the FCC should not be the President’s speech police. Second, the FCC should not be journalism’s censor-in-chief.”

Rosenworcel has spoken out against Trump’s license threats in the past, but this mass dismissal is a weightier statement, putting the Biden-era FCC on the record about the role of government vis a vis media regulation before the second Trump era begins.

Industry observers had been wondering what Rosenworcel and the FCC’s other Democratic commissioners might do about the long-gestating petition to revoke the license for Fox’s local station in Philadelphia, since its parent company also owns the anti-Democrat cable channel Fox News.

Former Fox Broadcasting executive Preston Padden and other activists argued that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the father and son who control Fox Corp, should be held accountable for Fox’s promotion of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Rupert “lacks the character required to hold broadcast licenses,” Padden told CNN.

The FCC is denying his petition because the so-called “character assessment” is at odds with the First Amendment and because the station at issue hasn’t clearly failed to comply with agency rules.

In effect, Rosenworcel is saying that FCC procedures shouldn’t be used to penalize an adversary of the current administration, lest the same thing happen under the next administration.

Her statement also addressed three complaints that were all filed last fall by the Center for American Rights, a conservative nonprofit group. One filing accused ABC News of favoring Vice President Kamala Harris during a presidential debate, another complaint was about how CBS News edited an interview with Harris, and a third was about NBC’s “SNL” featuring Harris without giving Trump equal time.

Rosenworcel said all four cases “ask the FCC to penalize broadcast television stations because they dislike station behavior, content, or coverage,” and that’s simply not the role of the US government.

The press freedom group, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, welcomed Rosenworcel’s decision to dismiss the petitions.

“The FCC’s authority to police news content is rightfully narrow, precisely because the government should not be the arbiter of truth,” Bruce Brown, the RCFP executive director said in a statement. “The alternative is nothing short of censorship on public airwaves that continue to be an indispensable source of news for millions of Americans.”

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