Brendan Carr Speaks Out on Jimmy Kimmel, the Media and Trump

There is something wonderfully, terrifyingly weird about the Federal Communications Commission—a body historically tasked with making sure your radio doesn't bleed into your neighbor's, and that TV signals don't drop during the Super Bowl—becoming one of the most potent culture-war instruments in Washington. Brendan Carr's interview with Politico frames his controversial tenure as a kind of regulatory crusade: media outlets aren't just biased, in his telling, they're potentially breaking the law. Whether it's jawboning networks over editorial decisions or kicking up dust around late-night talk show hosts like Jimmy Kimmel, the FCC's new posture assumes that the federal government has a legitimate role in "correcting" the news ecosystem. The strangest part is how this shifts the metaphysics of free speech. For decades, the FCC's power rested on scarcity—there are only so many frequencies, so the public gets a say in who uses them. Today, the spectrum is abundant, yet the argument seems to have flipped: now the agency's authority is justified not by physics, but by a perceived moral duty to counter the so-called "information dominance" of the legacy press. That is a far more slippery slope than any broadcast spectrum. When a regulator begins defining what constitutes "legitimate" journalism, we are no longer in the realm of technical standards; we are in the realm of epistemology, where the government gets to decide which version of reality gets a license. And then there is the sheer oddity of casting a comedian as a public enemy. Jimmy Kimmel is not Edward R. Murrow; he's a guy who makes jokes about politicians for a living. The fact that a sitting FCC chair feels compelled to comment on him, to speak out about him in an interview with a major political magazine, tells us that the culture war has fully colonized every layer of the administrative state. It's a strange inversion: the government, which is supposed to be the dullest thing in the room, is now picking fights with late-night entertainment. Reality, as always, is weirder than satire. What makes this era genuinely unsettling is the asymmetry of fear. The FCC doesn't need to pull a license to have a chilling effect; it just needs to gesture. When the chair of a federal agency singles out a network or a host, the message to every newsroom and every studio is clear: the airwaves have an owner, and he's watching. Carr may claim he's fighting for the little guy against the media elite, but the power dynamic is exactly inverted. It is the state looking down at the press, and that old constitutional tension is now being weaponized in a way that feels both archaic and dangerously modern. Source: [Politico](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/07/31/fcc-chair-brendan-carr-interview-trump-01017275)