FCC’s Gomez Testifies About First Amendment Concerns
At last week’s appearance before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology Committee on Energy and Commerce, FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez testified about her concerns with
the way the commission is operating. She took issue with FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s interpretation of how the Commission should ensure that licensees operate in the public interest. She stated, “For months, this FCC has asserted an apparent roving mandate to police speech that this Administration does not like, invoking an undefined and unchecked concept known as the ‘public interest’ standard.
Instead of functioning as a principle intended to serve the public, this standard is being treated as a license to weigh in on content, viewpoint, and editorial judgment.
This is not what the FCC was created to do. The Commission’s job is not to police content, root out media bias, or guarantee favorable coverage for any administration. Its responsibility is to regulate communications infrastructure and markets, not censor the speech that flows through them.
The First Amendment protects against government interference with speech, and the Communications Act prohibits the FCC from engaging in censorship. In a free society, the government does not decide what speech is acceptable or aligned with its views. When the government’s media regulator claims the power to judge content or police bias, we move away from oversight and closer toward censorship and control.
That is why it is so important for the FCC to clearly define what it means by the public interest standard, something I have called on it to do repeatedly. It is also why Congress must insist on guardrails that prevent content-based regulation and protect against the FCC acting as an arbiter of speech.”
move to appease the Administration and secure regulatory approval of a major transaction currently pending before the FCC. For months, it has been clear that this lawsuit was entirely meritless, just like the complaint now before the Commission. The transcript and video of the 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Harris show no evidence of wrongdoing, only the standard editorial judgments used across the news industry to ensure clarity and brevity. Had Paramount chosen to fight this in court, they would have prevailed on the facts and the law. But instead of standing on principle, Paramount opted for a payout. That decision now casts a long shadow over the integrity of the transaction pending before the FCC. Given the extraordinary public interest in this deal, the novel legal questions raised by the lawsuit and its resolution, and the repeated calls from lawmakers for transparency, I once again urge the FCC to bring this matter before the full Commission for a vote. Approving this transaction behind closed doors and under the cover of bureaucratic process would be a shameful outcome that denies the American people the transparency and accountability they deserve, especially when press freedom is at stake.”
In the golden age of broadcasting, the rules were clear. If you edited the message, you owned the consequences. That was the tradeoff for editorial control. But today’s digital platforms – YouTube, X, TikTok, Instagram – have rewritten that deal. Broadcasters and those who operate within the FCC regulatory framework are paying the price.