FCC Chair Brendan Carr made an appearance on Fox's America's Newsroom this Thursday, and was asked about CBS cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and whether Trump was directly involved, and Carr refused to give host Bill Hemmer a straight answer:
Carr’s ambiguity regarding whether Trump was directly involved in the decision to end a long-running program hosted by an outspoken critic of the president comes amid CBS parent company Paramount’s pending merger with Skydance Media, which the FCC chief is responsible for approving.
Trump’s hand-picked top media regulator also took the opportunity on Thursday to say that it’s “entirely possible” that ABC’s The View could be in the administration’s “crosshairs” after the White House called View host Joy Behar an “irrelevant loser” while suggesting “her show is next to be pulled off air.”
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At the same time, Hemmer kicked off the interview with Carr by saying he wanted to get something “out of the way,” and that was whether Trump had “anything to do with the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s show.” The Trump official, however, played coy with his response.
“What is important to keep in mind is when President Trump ran for election, he ran right at these legacy broadcast media outfits and the New York and Hollywood elites that are behind it, and he smashed the facade that they are gatekeepers that control what Americans can think and what Americans can say,” Carr responded.
“Once you do that, you have exposed a business model of a lot of these outfits as being nothing more than a partisan circus. So I think there are a lot of consequences that are flowing from President Trump deciding, I won’t play by the rules of politicians in the past and let these legacy outfits dictate the narrative and terms of the debate,” he continued. “He is succeeding.”
