Gomez Blasts FCC Censorship and Control on First Amendment Tour
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez condemned the agency’s threats against broadcast networks and warned that a loss of its independence could hurt internationally. Gomez delivered remarks during a Center for Democracy & Technology event Thursday in Washington. It was the first stop on what Gomez called a “1st Amendment Tour” in a release earlier this week. “I'm embarking on a tour to talk about this administration's efforts of censor and control, because we need people to understand what's happening, and we need them to speak out,” she said Thursday. “We are in an alarming moment, and I am not someone who is generally alarmist.”
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The FCC’s actions against public media, network editorial decisions and industry diversity programs “threaten a free and independent press, undermine the First Amendment through speech protections, and exert undue pressure that compromises the autonomy of private enterprises,” she said. The agency's reopening of previously dismissed content-based complaints against ABC, NBC and CBS “is actually about bullying and harassing the newsrooms in order to make them think twice before they report the news in a way that this administration doesn't like,” she said. “The point is not whether we have a good legal ground for taking these actions, it is in order to chill speech.” The FCC didn’t comment.
Alex Abdo, litigation director for Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, said the chilling effect from the administration’s actions against free speech is outpacing efforts to fight them in the courts. The administration’s goal likely isn’t to successfully defend such policies in court, “because it just can't,” Abdo said. "These policies are very clearly unlawful. The goal is to chill, and it's been very effective in accomplishing that chill.”
Prospective FCC action on Section 230 of the Communications Act is another aspect of the agency’s attacks on speech, Gomez said. “The attack on content moderation is largely about eliminating fact-checking.” She defined “the censorship cartel,” a phrase frequently used by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, as “anyone that wants fact-checking or that does fact-checking themselves.” Gomez didn't mention Carr by name at the event.
Carr has said the phrase refers to fact-checkers, social media companies, former President Joe Biden’s administration, advertising agencies and European governments. Authoritarian regimes such as Russia target fact-checking because they seek to “decouple truth from reality” and convince people that facts don’t matter, said Sarah Oates, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Merrill College of Journalism. Engine Executive Director Kate Tummarello said that while attacks on Section 230 have focused on large tech companies, smaller startups that have internet forums or comment sections would face disproportionately heavy consequences without its protections. “Litigation over user speech is a very coercive tool, especially when you're dealing with a startup that has very little resources,” she said.
“We will lose our standing as a regulator if we are seen as just a political arm of the administration,” Gomez said. The FCC has an important presence internationally and could forfeit its “soft power” if it stops being “respected as a stable, expert-driven regulatory body,” she said. It “works with colleagues all over the world, both to promote a free and independent media ecosystem, as well as to do really boring things like get spectrum allocations on the international charts so that we have new and innovative services." The agency could lose that “if we are seen as a tool weaponizing our licensing authority in order to take actions on behalf of the administration.” Before becoming a commissioner, Gomez oversaw the Department of State’s preparations for the 2023 ITU World Radiocommunication Conference.
Gomez said she would like to see more “courage” from companies and entities that the FCC and administration are targeting. “When you have companies that have business before the FCC that involves billions of dollars, they are going to look at this in terms of how they meet their shareholder needs and how they can get their transaction done,” she said. “And therefore you see capitulation.” The “problem with capitulation is that it engenders capitulation."