Trump’s media enforcer is relishing his Jimmy Kimmel moment
Naming Brendan Carr to chair the Federal Communications Commission in November, President-elect Donald Trump heralded him as a “warrior for free speech.”
Now, after spearheading the Trump administration’s successful push for ABC to take comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air, Carr has become a gleeful avatar of what critics say is a sweeping government crackdown on speech — and his backers see as an overdue reckoning with an instinctively liberal broadcast industry.
A lawyer who served as the FCC’s general counsel before being nominated as a commissioner by Trump in 2017, Carr’s résumé until recently fit the bill of a career policy wonk at a federal agency whose work rarely seizes the spotlight. Yet there he was on Wednesday playing the role of political enforcer while speaking to the prominent right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson. “We can do this the hard way or the easy way,” he said, counseling Disney — and by implication its competitors across the media sector — to “find ways to change conduct” or else.
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