Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr made a social media post on March 15 that free speech advocates say will go down in history as a blatant attempt at wartime censorship.

Instead of warning consumers about current efforts by billionaire oligarchs to consolidate cable news broadcasters under their control, the FCC chair threatened the broadcasters by suggesting they could lose licenses over coverage of the war on Iran that the Trump administration dislikes.

Congress created the FCC to manage limited airwaves on behalf of consumers independently from the White House, but critics say Carr consistently conflates the “public interest” with Donald Trump’s desire to control the media.

“Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not,” Carr wrote on social media.

Carr included a screenshot of a post from Trump complaining about news coverage of damage sustained by the U.S. military in the war. A day earlier, Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth attacked CNN for reporting that the White House underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the critical Strait of Hormuz and cut off global energy supplies.The next day, Trump baselessly accused news outlets of running AI propaganda and said they should be tried for treason.

Trump’s initial post singled out The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, but Carr’s threat was clearly aimed at the newsrooms of cable broadcasters such as CBS, CNN, and NBC. The FCC controls licensing for the local stations operated by major broadcasters, giving regulators serious leverage over their ability to reach viewers and sustain local newsrooms.

Looming over Carr’s threats is the proposed $110 billion merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, which would put the newsrooms at CNN and CBS under control of the same media empire owned by Larry Ellison — a billionaire oligarch, Trump ally, and Republican mega-donor.

In 2025, the FCC approved a $8 billion merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media only after CBS made very public concessions to Trump — including agreeing to pay $16 million to his presidential library to settle a lawsuit over edits to a “60 Minutes” interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Free speech advocates said CBS should have fought the case and would have likely won under the First Amendment.

CBS also essentially agreed to air more conservative viewpoints while installing right-wing pundit Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief, which Carr trumpeted as a political victory. Weiss brought with her a wave of layoffs and resignations.A couple weeks later, CBS announced it would cancel Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, citing cost overruns. Colbert often mocked Trump, who celebrated the show’s demise.

If the Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery merger is finalized and approved by regulators in the Trump administration — which the president says he wants — Ellison is expected to move both CBS and CNN in a pro-Trump direction and remake the U.S. media landscape.

Carr has said the FCC would likely play a “minimal” role in the merger, but Democrats in Congress are demanding a full review under the FCC’s foreign ownership rules because the deal includes investments from sovereign wealth funds in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Echoing Trump, Carr’s March 14 post threatening to withhold broadcast licenses claimed there is “something very wrong” with the media when a political candidate such as Trump is “able to win a landslide election victory in the face of hoaxes and distortions.” In reality, Trump won the popular vote by a slim 1.5 percent margin.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions — also known as the fake news — have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr said.

This indirect threat is a classic example of censorship by “jawboning,” a form of coercion involving public threats and pressure by people in positions of authority, according to Seth Stern, the advocacy director at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

“Jawboning is generally the theory that the government coerced or pressured someone to censor themselves, rather than ordering them to do so, or legally compelling them to do so in a manner that would more clearly violate the First Amendment,” Stern said in an interview. “The idea is that jawboning is not a workaround when you can’t legislate directly or seek an injunction directly due to constitutional law, and you can’t achieve the same effects through threats and pressure.”

Experts say jawboning is one of several tactics Trump and his appointees are deploying to promote propaganda and exert control over the media — and a glaring example of Republican hypocrisy on issues of free speech and the First Amendment. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as millions of people died from the virus, conservatives spent years attacking the Biden administration for pressuring social media companies to enforce their own content standards and remove misinformation about social distancing and vaccines.

Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office condemning the previous administration for infringing on free speech rights by pressuring social media sites to moderate content on lifesaving health and safety information. Conservative influencers and the attorney general of Missouri sued the Biden administration over its influence on social media, but the Supreme Court ultimately found the plaintiffs lacked standing.

Two of the plaintiffs, Martin Kulldorff and Jayanta Bhattacharya, were dropped from the lawsuit after getting jobs in the Trump administration last year. On March 24, the Trump administration voluntarily settled with the remaining plaintiffs outside of court and agreed that speech labeled “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation” does not make it constitutionally unprotected, according to the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represented the plaintiffs.

“This is a massive win for the First Amendment and for every American who believes in free speech,” said Missouri Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt, a far right Trump supporter, in a statement on March 24.

David Greene, senior counsel and free speech watchdog at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said it’s “sort of galling” to see Schmidt declare a big victory while the Trump administration targets visa-holders for making political statements on social media and demands that tech companies block access to apps that track immigration raids.

“With the ownership consolidation that any other administration would have taken a serious look at on antitrust grounds, and with the jawboning from the FCC commissioner who is interpreting the public interest as toeing the government line … that’s all really concerning,” Greene said.

Stern said the Trump administration’s decision to settle out of court with its own political allies was a no-brainer.

“This is a tactic the administration has used before: settling lawsuits brought by the conservatives against federal practices that the Trump administration would like to do away with anyway and thereby short-circuit the legislative and rulemaking process,” Stern said. “So it’s certainly hypocritical at least for the Trump administration to continue to fixate on what Biden did five or six years ago, when it is doing exponentially worse right now.”

Stern said Trump’s social media posts are not innocuous complaints, but another instance of the jawboning tactics Trump officials deploy constantly against critics.

“Brendan Carr telling broadcasters he is going to pull their licenses over Iran reporting, or Hegseth telling reporters he will pull their press passes if they publish unauthorized information … the list goes on,” Stern said.

All of this is far more direct than anything Joe Biden has ever been accused of doing, Stern said. Unlike under Biden, when social media companies were wary of proposed reforms to content moderation laws, the Trump administration’s threats are not implied but explicitly posted on social media.

“Any Republican official who is vocal about Biden’s jawboning but silent now is someone who probably doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously when it comes to principled application of the First Amendment,” Stern said.

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