FCC chairman Brendan Carr suggested that Comcast may be violating its broadcast licenses after MSNBC declined to carry a White House briefing Wednesday afternoon in which the administration continued to defend its decision to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.
Carr’s comments are the latest example of the Trump administration threatening, implicitly or explicitly, a news outlet over its editorial decisions.
In a post on X, Carr claimed that Comcast was ignoring “obvious facts of public interest,” suggesting that they were portraying Garcia as “merely a law abiding U.S. citizen” and not reporting on his alleged MS13 gang affiliation.
“Comcast knows that federal law requires its licensed operations to serve the public interest. News distortion doesn’t cut it,” Carr wrote.
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Garcia had been responding to a post from White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, complaining that CNN and MSNBC did not cover the briefing.
Comcast outlets spent days misleading the American public—implying that Abrego Garcia was merely a law abiding U.S. citizen, just a regular “Maryland man.”
When the truth comes out, they ignore it.
Comcast knows that federal law requires its licensed operations to serve the… https://t.co/0sGZHQvp5r
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) April 16, 2025
During Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s briefing, she called Garcia an “illegal alien, MS-13 gang member and foreign terrorist who was deported back to his home country.”
Per the FCC, cable networks like MSNBC are “outside of the FCC’s jurisdiction with respect to news distortion.” NBC News, another Comcast network whose stations do fall under the FCC’s authority, actually led Nightly News in segment that included excerpts from Leavitt’s remarks, including the details of her claims that Garcia is a gang member and his family’s denials.
Garcia’s case isn’t merely about whether he was a gang member, but whether the Trump administration is ignoring court orders. The Supreme Court largely affirmed a lower court ruling that the Trump administration had to “facilitate” Garcia’s release from El Salvador custody, as the government had conceded that the deportation was an “administrative error.” Garcia came to the U.S. illegally but obtained legal status. He was detained in 2019 and accused of being a member of MS-13 back then, but after a U.S. immigration judge’s decision, he was released.
Since the Supreme Court ruling last week, the Trump administration has not done so, and instead has accused the mainstream media and Democrats of siding with violent illegal immigrant criminals. There also has been substantial coverage of the due process rights for those who are being sent to El Salvador for deportation.
Trump has accelerated his attacks on the media since her returned to office, including barring the Associated Press from the White House pool after they refused to change their style guidance to the Gulf of America from the Gulf of Mexico. A federal judge, appointed by Trump in his first term, ruled that the administration was violating the First Amendment because the ban was “viewpoint discrimination.”
In a Truth Social post on Tuesday evening, Trump blasted MSNBC and NBC as well as Comcast’s CEO, Brian Roberts, calling them all a “disgrace to the integrity of broadcasting.”
Earlier this week, Trump, upset about segments on 60 Minutes, called on CBS to lose their broadcast license and for Carr to “impose the maximum fines and punishment, which is substantial, for their unlawful and illegal behavior.” Carr has opened up an inquiry into CBS over the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris last October.
The FCC’s authority over news content, by its own admission, “is narrow.” It has a news distortion policy, but “broadcasters are only subject to enforcement if it can be proven that they have deliberately distorted a factual news report. Expressions of opinion or errors stemming from mistakes are not actionable.” Only in rare cases has enforcement action been taken.
Anna Gomez, a Democratic commissioner on the FCC, has accused Carr of acting to “weaponize our broadcast licensing authority,” by taking steps “designed to instill fear in broadcast stations and influence a network’s editorial decisions.”
During his first term, after Trump threatened the broadcast licenses of NBC over their news content, his FCC chairman then, Ajit Pai, said that “under the law does not have the authority to revoke the license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.”
A Comcast spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.