Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr said Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s approach to confronting legacy media outlets has triggered widespread upheaval across the American news industry.
At a policy discussion hosted by Breitbart News on March 10, Washington Bureau Chief Matt Boyle asked Carr about criticism he has received.
“We’ve seen a number of different people across the establishment media. They’ve called you Trump’s pit bull in the media. We’ve seen South Park talk about you. We’ve seen all sorts of different things,” Boyle said.
Boyle then asked Carr to explain how he approaches his role as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in the administration of Donald Trump and what he hopes to accomplish in the position.
“President Trump is fundamentally reshaping the entire media ecosystem,” Carr responded. “He’s doing it in ways that most people don’t even understand. They think it’s, you know, very sort of direct, secret things that are happening. That’s not it at all.”
Carr said the shift began with how Trump engaged with the national press during his political campaigns.
“When President Trump ran, particularly this most recent time, and every other time as well, he really ran directly at the legacy national news media,” Carr stated. “For so long, politicians just accepted the narrative that they were handed down, and they didn’t want to fight that narrative. They didn’t want to push back. They didn’t have their own sufficiently big soapbox to push back. They just took the narrative.”
Carr contended that Trump’s approach changed the dynamic between elected officials and major media organizations.
“President Trump fundamentally disrupted that,” Carr remarked. “He set the terms of the debate. And so many politicians are used to the terms of the debate being dictated to them by legacy media.”
“And once President Trump did that, he really just smashed this facade that those gatekeepers get to control what we think and what we say,” Carr added.
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Carr pointed to several developments he said illustrate changes occurring within the media industry.
“You start to see the consequences of him deciding that, you know, the legacy media is the emperor with no clothes,” Carr remarked. “You see all sorts of changes now, right? NPR defunded. PBS defunded. A lot of these legacy reporters from Jim Acosta to Don Lemon losing their jobs. You see a lot of change and upheaval in the media ecosystem.”
“Again, I think it goes back fundamentally to Trump saying you don’t get to set the narrative anymore,” Carr concluded.
