The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is conducting an unseemly and unconstitutional spectacle, ostensibly to determine whether CBS violated its policy against "news distortion" by editing a 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Its real purpose is to exercise raw partisan power.
The FCC already knows CBS did not violate any rules and merely engaged in everyday journalism. And there is nothing to be learned from the over 8,000 comments and counting that have poured into the commission's inbox. Many simply registered their like or dislike of the network and mainstream media in general, and many others were just unserious quips submitted to troll the regulators.
But judging the merits of the "news distortion" allegation was never the point. The FCC staff already dismissed the complaint—filed by a partisan activist group—as fatally defective back in January. As outgoing FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel explained, "The FCC should not be the President's speech police….The FCC should not be journalism's censor-in-chief." But one of Brendan Carr's first acts as the new FCC chair in Donald Trump's administration was to reinstate the complaint and call for public comments.
