Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
It’s been a bad week for the Trump administration rolling out new terms with seriously ominous overtones: “Epidemic denial” and “nihilistic violent extremists” both made headlines as new branding efforts by the administration—referring to “saying you don’t believe vaccines cause autism” and “people who shoot healthcare CEOs, and who didn’t vote for Trump” respectively, as far as we can tell. Now, we’ve got another pair of phrases that are starting to send chills down our spines: “News distortion” and “Serve the public interest.”
This is per a Twitter missive from FCC chairman/Trump media attack dog Brendan Carr, who was apparently pissed off that MSNBC (and CNN) didn’t deign to air one of Trump’s periodic press conferences where he trots out the mothers of murdered women to help drum up xenophobic hatred of immigrants in a live and timely fashion. Carr, venting spleen about the decision, was technically speaking from his private account on Twitter/X. But given the ways this administration has happily used informal social media statements as arms of its public messaging, it’s hard not to read this section, in particular, as patently disturbing, and intended as a clear shot across the bow: “Comcast knows that federal law requires its licensed operations to serve the public interest. News distortion doesn’t cut it.”
Carr has not been shy about using the FCC’s authority over broadcast licenses to threaten the corporate owners of media outlets it wants to smack around a little, notably threatening Disney with investigations after it only mostly caved to the White House on DEI. But claiming that outlets are endangering their licenses by engaging in “news distortion,” simply by not covering one of Trump’s propaganda events, is a whole other level of threat—one firmly in line with recent moves to gut PBS and NPR for not “serving the public interest,” as defined by Trump.
[via Deadline]
