Anna Gomez’s Lonely Fight

On a recent evening, Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the Federal Communications Commission, sat before fifty or so people in a government building outside Washington, DC. It was the latest stop on what she’d been calling her First Amendment tour. “It is foundational to our democracy,” she said. “And yet, today, the greatest threat to that freedom is coming from our own government.”

Gomez—who is fifty-eight, and a lawyer born in Orlando, who spent her childhood in Bogotá, Colombia, and New Jersey—has been touring since April, and found a spotlight late last week, when the FCC announced its approval of a merger between Paramount, which controls CBS, and Skydance, a production company. At the FCC, which regulates public radio and television airwaves, most of the decision-making power lies with its chairman, Brendan Carr, whom President Donald Trump put in that role in January. Under Carr’s watch, the FCC has reopened previously closed complaints against ABC News, for its moderation of the presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris, and NBC, over whether Harris’s appearance on Saturday Night Live violated a legal requirement to offer equal time to both candidates. Carr launched investigations into whether NPR and PBS inappropriately accepted advertisements. And he’s paid special attention to CBS News—accusing it of, among other things, unfairly editing a 60 Minutes interview with Harris. (In early July, Paramount agreed to pay sixteen million dollars to settle a separate lawsuit filed by Trump over the interview.)