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News clip: Voters in five states hit the polls on Tuesday, and I've got some major results to share with you, starting in the state of Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed has won the Democratic primary for the United States Senate.

Brooke Gladstone: Another American primary night, another round of surprises. Thanks to the misfires of pollsters.

1. Elliott Morris: The average, miss, is actually 13 points.

Brooke Gladstone: Really?

1. Elliott Morris: As shocking as this is, last night was a better-than-average performance for the polls in a primary.

Brooke Gladstone: Stop taking these numbers so seriously. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Also, on this week's show, an intimate look at the past, present, and future of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr.

Nancy Scola: He was a wonky FCC telecom lawyer and became this very competitive, very combative guy and made a name for himself in Trump world on the basis of that persona.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, 52 years ago, President Richard Nixon said, "Uncle."

President Richard Nixon: Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me. In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort.

Brooke Gladstone: A year and a half earlier, he'd begun his second term on a defiant Note.

Jill Wine-Banks: He won 49 states. Despite what I thought was pretty clear by that point that the White House was involved in the break-in. He won a landslide.

Brooke Gladstone: Jill Wine-Banks is a legal analyst and a former Watergate special prosecutor. She recounted the unfolding events this week on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show.

Jill Wine-Banks: Then, as evidence came out from our team, as we investigated and things leaked, the poll numbers started to sink until he got to the point that Trump is now at, right before he resigned, because the facts mattered back then. Democracy worked, justice prevailed. There was full accountability, criminally and politically, and we don't have that in our country anymore.

Brooke Gladstone: Earlier this summer, Vice President J.D. Vance said as much.

Vice President J.D. Vance: If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. [laughter] The idea that it would've taken down a presidency is crazy.

1. Elliott Morris: Boy, if that isn't an indictment of the man he serves in office or the entire political system. He's right. Partisanship has taken over the way that we process our electoral choices and the performance of our presidents. It only would've been a couple-minute scandal. It may not have even made the evening news.

Brooke Gladstone: True, and yet--

1938. Elliott Morris: Well, if you look at second-term presidencies historically, and I have got numbers in front of me going back to 1938.

Brooke Gladstone: G. Eliot Morris is a journalist, statistician, and author of the data-driven news website Strength in Numbers.

1. Elliott Morris: Donald Trump's are the second worst on record. He is somewhere between George W. Bush in August of 2006, in the middle of the Abu Ghraib scandal with torture of prisoners in Iraq. Somewhere between that and Richard Nixon's numbers the week before he resigned the presidency in disgrace from the Watergate scandal. His approval at that point was 25%. George Bush's was 38%. Donald Trump's today is 36%. These are not good numbers.

Brooke Gladstone: A Fox News poll is showing that Trump is 9 points underwater in Texas, a state he won by 14 points 2 years ago.

1. Elliott Morris: If you ask Americans in Texas how they feel about Donald Trump's deportation agenda or immigration, the numbers are even lower.

Brooke Gladstone: Wow.

20. Elliott Morris: Closer to minus 20.

Brooke Gladstone: In Texas?

10. Elliott Morris: Yes. If you ask Texans how they feel about Donald Trump's handling of prices and inflation in the economy, it's even worse than minus 10. It's closer to minus 15. That's for the entire adult population of the state. We can count up the other states he's underwater in. It's about 40 states, Brooke. That includes every single swing state. If you reran the 2024 election with these numbers, you probably get something closer to the 1980 Dukakis blowout.

Brooke Gladstone: It's just remarkable that he's 9 points underwater in Texas generally, but 20 points underwater with regard to immigration.

1. Elliott Morris: It does make sense, right? The Hispanic community in Texas has been targeted more for these immigration enforcement operations that are particularly visible and unpopular. In Minnesota, for example, we asked the Americans how they felt about the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, whether consequences like that were worth it for border security. 80% of people are saying it's not worth it to them. That goes too far, and that sentiment is particularly acute in the border states. That includes Arizona, Nevada. Trump is underwater on immigration in Florida.

Brooke Gladstone: What kinds of questions did you ask about immigration?

1. Elliott Morris: One question that pollsters have been asking since the begin of Trump's administration is, "What type of undocumented immigrant do you think shouldn't be deported?" By type here, pollsters define qualities like, have you been here for 5 or 10 years? Are you married to a US citizen? Do you have kids? Have you ever been arrested for anything? That sort of thing.

By and large, Americans do not favor deporting undocumented immigrants who have been here a long time, who have kids, who work, who have no record. The only group of undocumented immigrants that Americans favor deporting is convicted criminal undocumented immigrants. If you ask about that population, about 80% of Americans say that type of undocumented immigrant should be deported, but they want the rest of them to have a path to citizenship. Around 75%, 80% even, in some cases.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm wondering, have we been polled on how we perceive his mental or moral fitness for office? I read that The New York Times found that corruption was never a number one concern, but it was in the top three for a third of Americans. Is that dispositive? Will people vote one way or another on the issue of corruption? How does he poll on trustworthiness? Or how he's enriched himself in mind-boggling ways by drawing on the power of the presidency?

1. Elliott Morris: In a survey I conducted from July 14th to 17th, so pretty recent with the polling from Verasight, we asked Americans how they would rate Donald Trump's mental sharpness as president from very poor to very good. About 46% said Trump's mental sharpness was poor or very poor, which for context is just 4 percentage points shy of the same percent for Joe Biden's presidency. We also asked people to rate Joe Biden's mental fitness when he was president. The American people view Donald Trump as about as mentally sharp as Joe Biden. You can make of that, I think, what you will.

Brooke Gladstone: Now you've said that, quote, "Trump's own voters are now less loyal to him than Democrats are hostile to him." Is that possible? What does that mean?

1. Elliott Morris: Democrats are much more hostile to Donald Trump than his voters are supportive of him. About 95% of them say they disapprove of his presidency, whereas only about 80% of Trump's 2024 voters say that they approve of what he's doing as president. We would expect that vote share for Republicans would fall, both as former Republicans switch sides and as they stay home. Looking at the difference in opinion among Democrats and Trump's 2024 voters, we see a really similar pattern for the November generic congressional vote.

That's how people are going to vote in the House, where Trump's 2024 voters are about 80 percentage points voting in favor of Republicans, but Democrats are about 95 percentage points voting in favor of Democrats. There's both defection, people changing their vote, and a lot of people staying at home in this former Trump voter group.

Brooke Gladstone: Who are these defectors?

2024. Elliott Morris: They are really emblematic of that group that switched voting for Democrats in 2020 to Trump in 2024. They tend to be younger, they tend to be less white, especially more Hispanic, and they tend to be from urban and suburban areas more than rural areas.

Brooke Gladstone: We had primary elections in five states this week, but the one that obsessed the talking heads the most was in the swing state of Michigan. The progressive candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, squeaked out a win over his more centrist competitor, the Democratic establishment's choice candidate, Haley Stevens. Now he's the party's contender for a crucial Senate seat, and this is despite Stevens outspending El-Sayed roughly 11 to 1. You have some takeaways on this result? It seems the kids showed up.

1998. Elliott Morris: Oh, yes, the kids are all right, Brooke, [laughter] or in this case, all center [laughter] it's because the polls were surprising in how close the election was. El-Sayed won by 1 point on average. This includes a lot of nonpartisan polls, but also some partisan campaign polls had Sayed up about 13 points. This is like a 12-point misfire in the surveys, but actually, I've gone back and looked at all of the Senate primary polls, back to 1998. The average, miss, is actually 13 points.

Brooke Gladstone: Really?

1. Elliott Morris: As shocking as this is, last night was a better-than-average performance for the polls in a primary, but 13 points, we're still misreading the electorate.

Brooke Gladstone: Most of us look at this election, and we are trying to prognosticate what happens during the midterms.

1. Elliott Morris: The media over the next six months will probably endlessly relitigate whether or not Haley Stevens would be doing better in the general election against Mike Rogers than Abdul El-Sayed. God forbid he loses, there will be an endless number of takes that Haley Stevens would have won, but the polling does not support this as of now.

I did this. If you look at all of the polls that were done of a hypothetical general election in Michigan with Stevens versus Rogers or El-Sayed versus Rogers, the average difference between these polls is Stevens doing 1 point better than El-Sayed. The range is from 17 points for Stevens to 10 points for El-Sayed. You statistically cannot be drawing conclusions based on those numbers. The people that are are doing it because they're ideologically motivated to draw those conclusions.

Brooke Gladstone: Or they have columns [chuckles] that they have to write.

1. Elliott Morris: The tape machine must be fed, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles] What did you think of the coverage of the numbers in the run-up to the vote this week?

1. Elliott Morris: Coverage of polls tends to oversimplify and offer too much certainty for what the polls are saying. People read more smart posts like from the people at fiftyplusone.news, and from my newsletter, and from The Downballot that say, "Hey, maybe don't pay so much attention to these early primary polls."

Brooke Gladstone: Were there any lessons in the fact that the youth vote did appear to really come out, whereas in other times and places it hasn't?

1. Elliott Morris: The Democratic Party right now is in something of a protracted stage of infighting because there is a wing of the party that is increasingly anti-establishment. They're saying the political system, the economic system are not working for everyday Americans, and they're gaining a lot of support. That's people like El-Sayed, the DSA candidates in New York City, Zorhan Mamdani. That draws a lot of support from those people who feel left behind and is a particularly common sentiment among young people.

I think we'll probably see more of younger voters, especially in the Democratic Party, but maybe in the Independents, Republicans as well, moving towards these anti-system candidates in the general election. The last person who really turned out young people in this new politics way, Barack Obama.

Brooke Gladstone: Building on what you just said, Donald Trump, many of his voters, notably the ones that had previously voted for Obama, craved a disruptor. Obama gave them much better access to health care, but he didn't substantially change the system that had failed them. Trump gave them tariffs and a ballroom, a murky reflecting pool, and a war. I'm not being snarky here. That's what dominates his Truth Social account, and they definitely got disrupted, but it didn't break their way. I'm talking about the voters. You just published an election forecasting model, adding up factors like polling and fundraising, recruitment. What are your conclusions?

1. Elliott Morris: Well, this looks like a typical midterm cycle in the House. The party of the president in power loses about 26 seats on average. We give the Democrats about an 87% to 90% chance rounding of winning the majority in the House, and we give Republicans about a 13% chance.

Brooke Gladstone: You had some insight about the impact of Republican gerrymandering in the last year, that by gerrymandering, the Republicans decreased the number of competitive Democratic seats, but inadvertently increased the number of competitive Republican ones.

1. Elliott Morris: If you are the Republicans in Texas and you would like to draw more Republican seats, you have two options. You can crack the Democrats in urban areas into surrounding rural areas like where I'm from, outside Corpus Christi, Texas. Or you can pack them into single districts, thereby making one really blue urban district and a bunch of surrounding red suburban and rural districts.

The Republicans have chosen to crack in many places in Texas, which took Democrats from the city and put them into rural suburban districts. In some cases, in such a large number, in the case of Democrats winning by 10 points, they could win one or two of those seats back in a big wave election. It just so happens that we're in the type of environment that looks like a big wave election.

Brooke Gladstone: What do people mostly get wrong about polls, reading them in the newspapers and following them so very closely months in advance?

2025. Elliott Morris: They expect far too much accuracy out of pre-election surveys. We saw a good example of this in the Michigan primary this Tuesday. People were equally surprised at Zohran Mamdani's win in the mayoral primary in 2025. There is danger in this, and that if they don't believe that they can provide them perfect election predictions, many people then assume polls aren't useful at all in highlighting policy mismatches between the president and the public, highlighting those issues Americans say are most important to them. Those are not electoral questions, and they tend to be more accurate than election questions, or at least accurate enough.

Brooke Gladstone: The Trump in his second term is very different from the Trump in his first term. We have Trump unbounded now. He is running as fast as he can from reality. He said, "My polls are historically high."

1. Elliott Morris: "The highest they've ever been," he said last week.

Brooke Gladstone: And, "Don't believe the lying media."

1. Elliott Morris: Maybe he's not being constrained by public opinion the way we would want a president to be constrained by public opinion, but there are a lot of other actors that could be constrained, especially in their local districts or their state. There's other groups, nonprofits, agency heads in Washington, D.C., or judges, could also be affected by public opinion.

The political scientist V. O. Key wrote that public opinion offers levees to steer a river, and we can view the polls as being tools for identifying policy that Americans really, really don't want, and then, as good stewards of the public opinion data, fight for that. V. O. Key, the political scientist, he coined the term echo chamber. The public is an echo chamber.

Today, people wrongly argue that he is offering an indictment of the public, that they're only parodying what they see on the news. He's actually talking about an entirely different echo chamber, the echo chamber of the choices that are offered to them by the political party system, that if you are only offered the choice between democracy and autocracy, for example, or really imperfect political and economic system and the wholesale sacking of the federal government. Or if they're only given maybe even sharper, a choice between two idiots, you can't really fault them for picking an idiot. It is just the choices that are offered to them.

Brooke Gladstone: The Republicans, at least in Congress, some of them, Mike Lee, for instance, they've really leaned in on opposition to participatory democracy, so have a lot of the big thinkers behind Trump, and Trump too. He said, "We need to make sure that people who don't vote for me have trouble voting because I'll be impeached."

1. Elliott Morris: About 14% of Americans say democracy is their number one issue above everything else.

Brooke Gladstone: Will people vote on it?

1. Elliott Morris: I think it would take a real obvious attack on the election to change the mind of those voters in the swingy middle. About half of Americans don't pay attention to the news at any regular cadence, so you have to think of the event that would percolate down to that person. An event like sending ICE to the polls and those images making it onto network news, I'm thinking might be close to your activating event for democracy being a number one issue.

Unfortunately, people just don't care as much about it as I think we want them to. [music] If we want to level up, maybe the outcome for democracy, then one way we can do that, the inference is to run really good candidates everywhere and try to inform people as much as possible and give them an echo chamber that's echoing good, positive democratic outcomes.

Brooke Gladstone: Elliot, thank you very much.

1. Elliott Morris: Brooke, thanks for having me back.

Brooke Gladstone: Elliot Morris is a data journalist and author of the newsletter Strength in Numbers, and he has a book out by the same name.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, the head of the Federal Communications Commission hasn't historically been a household name. Current chair, Brendan Carr, is bucking the trend.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. [music ends] This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. If you're waiting for media mogul David Ellison and his company, Paramount, to buy Warner Bros, which would collectively give Ellison control over CBS and CNN, it might be time to stretch and go get a hot dog.

News Anchor 2: A federal judge now has set a March trial date to determine whether the $111 billion mega merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery violates antitrust law. This after a coalition of a dozen states led by California challenged the merger, saying it would create less competition, higher prices and a loss of jobs.

Micah Loewinger: This week, in an op ed for The New York Times, [music] Ellison argued that he would be an honest steward of the Paramount SkyDance Warner Bros behemoth, writing, quote, "Great news organizations like CNN and CBS News are here to tell it straight down the middle. That requires newsrooms that reflect the whole world, not one side of it, and it requires independence." End quote, but independence means reporters can freely follow the facts wherever they lead. Insisting reporters supply stories that cleave to an imagined center is not independence.

Already, Ellison's stewardship of CBS has allegedly led to 60 Minutes shelving or delaying segments about Trump's immigration policies and Jeffrey Epstein's banking practices. There was a report this week from ProPublica that about six months after the FCC greenlit Ellison's Warner Bros. deal, Paramount gave away a pair of tickets worth $125,000 each to a Kennedy Center gala. The recipients, FCC Brendan Carr and his wife, who sat with Ellison in his skybox. Carr has claimed the massive merger approval was just business as usual, but not much about his tenure at the FCC has been business as usual, despite his rather buttoned-up beginnings.

Nancy Scola: The reason I was intrigued by Brendan Carr and wanted to write about him was that I knew him as an FCC commissioner who was-- somebody close to him described him as very much a spectrum nerd. He was a lawyer. He was a wonky FCC telecom lawyer and became this very competitive, very combative guy and made a name for himself in Trump world on the basis of that persona.

Micah Loewinger: Nancy Scola is a reporter covering tech policy and politics. Writing recently for Washingtonian Magazine, she charted Carr's transformation from benign bureaucratic to MAGA mercenary.

Nancy Scola: He was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Northern Virginia, went to The Potomac School, which is a private school in Northern Virginia. His father was a lawyer, did criminal work. One of his clients was Richard Nixon. Carr, very traditional D.C. path, went to Georgetown. He had interned at the FCC during his education and really liked the work, liked the telecom law work. Went to Catholic University specifically because Catholic has a well-known telecom law institute.

He knew early on in his early 20s that he wanted to be a telecom lawyer, and he very briefly dipped into big law work. He's talked about how he realized pretty quickly he hated living life in 1/6 of an hour, billable hours, that the big law firm lawyers have to do. He likes a little bit of excitement.

Micah Loewinger: 2012 was the year he became directly affiliated with the FCC, working in general counsel. In 2017, he became an FCC commissioner himself. How did he move up the ranks so quickly?

Nancy Scola: He became an advisor to Commissioner Ajit Pai. Commissioner Ajit Pai became Chairman Ajit Pai, and they were close. They were very much allies. Brendan Carr was named general counsel himself, which is a pretty prominent position in the FCC. Got immersed in the day-to-day work of the FCC and learned everything about the levers of power that it potentially has. I think that's the crux of what I'm hoping to get across in this piece and in my reporting, is that he was someone who looked at the FCC and said, "There's a lot of powers here that just aren't being used.

In the statute, in the law, the FCC has an enormous amount of ability to shape the media industry in the United States. We're just leaving it on the table, and we're just not going to do that anymore." That's what set him apart from everyone else running around in FCC circles and in telecom circles at the time. When there was an opening on the commission, looking for a loyal Republican who knows this stuff, Carr was a natural pick.

Micah Loewinger: One of the ways that Carr increased his own profile was through social media. Talk about how he became so prolific on Twitter and what it unlocked for him.

Nancy Scola: People close to him say, "He just has an itchy trigger finger." If somebody's wrong on the internet, Brendan Carr has to tell them. He's mixed it up with actors from Glee for no-- [laughter] The actor from Glee was like, "Why are you spending your time?"

Micah Loewinger: [chuckles] A show that aired 15 years ago?

Nancy Scola: Yes. Members of Congress, there's just about nobody he won't debate on X. One particular example is December of 2023, and he at the time is really going after the Biden administration. He's been renominated and reconfirmed for the FCC. He's in another term. He's in a safe spot now, and he really starts targeting the Biden administration on X. He posts about how he believes the Biden administration is subjecting Elon Musk to what he calls regulatory harassment, not giving him licenses for certain projects, that sort of thing.

Micah Loewinger: Musk's company, Starlink, had scored a lucrative government contract, and then the FCC threatened to revoke it, basically saying Starlink is not providing high-speed internet to the hundreds of thousands of rural homes it said it would or could.

Nancy Scola: It was a decision that had lots of critics. This was also at the time when there was thinking that the Biden administration was treating Elon Musk unfairly over Tesla, that he wasn't being invited to White House meetings on electric vehicles, that sort of thing. It fit into a broader narrative that Joe Biden doesn't like Elon Musk and is picking on him, so Brendan Carr posted about this on X. Maye Musk, who is Elon Musk's mother, retweets this, saying how furious she is that her son has been treated this way by the president of the United States.

Because of the combination of-- it's Maye Musk defending her son, the issues involved that have a lot of people on the internet like to talk about Starlink and internet access, it just gets a lot of reposts. It's viewed 16 million times. Might sound silly, but a lot of people are saying, "Okay, who's this guy? Brendan Carr?" It really raised his profile in Republican circles because at the time, Republicans were so eager. This was 2023.

Republicans were so eager to win over some portion of Silicon Valley to back Candidate Trump, and Brendan Carr emerged as somebody who could bridge those two worlds. We know this guy is like a pretty good telecom lawyer. Everyone admits he's a good lawyer, but he also is somebody-- he can go and throw some punches in the public sphere. A lot of people in Trump world just really liked him.

Micah Loewinger: He was also banging the drum about Silicon Valley's supposed bias against conservatives, and people in the MAGA world, they had a friendly face within this regulatory agency.

Nancy Scola: Yes, he talks about at the time, it was his main issue, was he talked about smashing the censorship cartel. That was the idea that companies like Google and Meta, which owns Facebook, were treating conservatives unfairly and silencing their voices. He got a lot of attention for saying, "Hey, I'm somebody inside the government who knows how this stuff works, and you're right to think that Washington is opposed to conservative voices."

Micah Loewinger: Another way that he raised his profile was by becoming a more frequent guest on TV shows, the kind that President-to-be Donald Trump would watch often. Tell me about his first appearance on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show. It seems notable that that appearance was in response to an op ed that CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote for the Washington Post about why there was need for greater regulation of social media.

Nancy Scola: [laughs] You're pointing out the central irony here, is that for a long time, Brendan Carr was adamantly opposed to the idea of the government censoring the speech that happens amongst the American public. That was one of his core issues.

Micah Loewinger: That brings us to the moment when Brendan Carr becomes chairman of the FCC. When did you first see an example of a transformation in his agenda?

Nancy Scola: Carr came into office as what Trump called a free speech warrior. The opponents of free speech in this view of the world was the big tech companies, Google, Meta, that sort of thing. Carr authored a chapter in the famous Project 2025, this manifesto for Republican control of government. No mention of media. It's focused on big tech, boring telecom issues, and big tech. Then it became clear that Trump was maybe not as enthusiastic about this agenda as people thought he might be. We saw the CEOs of the big tech companies stand behind him at his inauguration.

Micah Loewinger: They donated a crap ton of money to his--

Nancy Scola: That's the technical term, the crap ton of money, yes, to his inauguration. It quickly became clear that Trump had won. Trump liked that, and he suddenly thought, "Okay, these people are on my side. Maybe I don't care so much anymore about how I think they may or may not be censoring conservatives," in part because the platforms made changes. They said, "Maybe we were in the wrong, the way that we filtered our algorithms in the past. We're not going to do that anymore," so Trump moved on.

Micah Loewinger: Therefore, Brendan Carr and his FCC could turn their attention towards the real enemy, according to Donald Trump, the legacy media.

Nancy Scola: As we've seen, Trump can be fickle on the policy issues that capture his attention. I think that's fair to say. The one policy area he has long-standing and deep interest in is in how the media works and, in particular, how the media covers him. At some point, Carr realized he's in the catbird seat. He sits atop the apparatus charged with regulating this industry that Trump is very, very interested in shaping. Puts Carr in an enormously powerful position.

Micah Loewinger: Talk a little bit about what the FCC actually does have to regulate media companies and how he wielded that power.

Nancy Scola: There's a couple core things. There's a law that stipulates broadcasters who get licenses from the FCC to have exclusive use of the radio spectrum, which broadcasters need to broadcast. They get that license in exchange for a promise to act in the public interest. What the public interest is has never been clearly defined. That gives the FCC an enormous amount of authority to say, "we're not going to give you a license, or we're not going to renew a license because we don't believe you're acting in the public interest."

The other big tool that the FCC has is the ability to approve media mergers, and so Brendan Carr has an ability to say, "Hey, I'd like to approve your merger, but you're engaging in behavior X or behavior Y, and we don't love that. Can you address that before we actually go ahead and approve your merger?"

Micah Loewinger: Okay, let's do a little bit of a speed round of some of the Highlights of Carr's tenure so far at the helm of the FCC.

News Anchor 3: The latest on ABC's decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel Live off the air indefinitely. Kimmel faced criticism from FCC chairman Brendan Carr, who suggested--

Brendan Carr: Frankly, when you see stuff like this, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.

News Anchor 4: Late-night show host Stephen Colbert is saying CBS blocked him from airing an interview on the broadcast. That interview was with James Talarico.

News Anchor 5: Chairman Brendan Carr says it may also be worthwhile for his agency to target The View, another ABC program.

News Anchor 6: Today, Trump's FCC chairman Brendan Carr took the unprecedented step of threatening Disney's broadcast licenses by bringing them under an early review. The Trump administration claimed--

Micah Loewinger: Brendan Carr, the leader of a once sleepy agency, has managed to put himself in the headlines over and over and over again. How normal or abnormal is this regulatory body behaving?

Nancy Scola: It's abnormal in two ways. The frequency with which they're using some of the tools that we've talked about. The public interest standard, the equal time rule is just much greater than past FCCs. Allies of Carr will point to specific examples where Democratic administrations use some of these tools, drag their feet a bit on some license renewals, that sort of thing.

Micah Loewinger: This is how Carr defends himself, and here he is talking about it with CNBC in May.

Brendan Carr: During the Biden years, they teed up potentially not renewing a Fox broadcast TV license for content on Fox News cable. There were Democrat senators, including Senator Markey, that previously, even before Biden, wrote to the FCC to ask them to investigate a perceived conservative broadcaster, Sinclair. When the Biden FCC came in, they didn't renew almost a single license for Sinclair the entire time. That was unprecedented. Democrats pressured cable companies to drop Fox News and OAN and Newsmax.

Micah Loewinger: Is there any there there?

Nancy Scola: Absolutely. Under the Obama administration, the FCC was considering this idea of net neutrality. President Obama came out and said, "Hey, listen, I think you should go with this provision of the law to classify the internet." The FCC very quickly afterwards agreed with the President, and people were appalled by that because the FCC was an independent agency, arguably still is an independent agency, although Brendan Carr says it is not. People took real umbrage at that. They're absolutely examples.

I think that two different aspects of this is the frequency. The other aspect of it is he's doing it expressly at the behest of President Trump. I mentioned the FCC has been considered an independent agency. Brendan Carr was asked about this during a congressional hearing, and he said, "It's not an independent agency," and the member of Congress questioning him said, "Why does it say that on the FCC website that it's an independent agency?" During the hearing, they scrubbed an independent language from the website.

Micah Loewinger: Oh, my God.

Nancy Scola: He talks proudly that President Trump is reshaping the media landscape in a way no other president has. Implied in that is that Brendan Carr is his aide in doing so. That's wholly different than any FCC in the past.

Micah Loewinger: It reminds me so much of how Todd Blanche has responded to accusations that he has politicized the Department of Justice by saying something quite similar, like, "Well, we're just part of the executive branch, so we're not independent from the White House."

Nancy Scola: It's a theory of government that goes back a long ways, but it goes back to the George W. Bush administration. Dick Cheney was a proponent of this theory of a unitary executive. All power in the executive branch devolves from the president. We've gone astray by having these independent agencies that can make decisions on behalf of the American people that are enormously consequential, and they're really not accountable in the same way that a department of the government is directly accountable to the president.

Micah Loewinger: As far as I can tell, you're one of the first reporters to dig this deep on Brendan Carr. What do you think his story, his transformation, reveals about power in Washington, D.C., and the media's relationship with the government?

Nancy Scola: Brendan Carr's story is two things. One is you can get pretty far by winning President Trump's affections. That's a short-term lesson for a lot of people in Washington of, if you take on President Trump's enemies as your own, it's going to be pretty good for your career. I think the other aspect of Brendan Carr's career is some of the limitations that people saw on what you use government power to do have shifted, and he's helped shift that to say, "Government power is used to reward your friends and punish your enemies, and that's okay."

That's the story of the Trump administration in many ways. He's gone after, as we mentioned, CNN. He's gone after Harvard, all these entities that he thinks have been opposed to him over the course of his career. In the first Trump administration, you saw a little bit more of the idea of, "Yes, we don't like these people. [music] There's not that much we can do about it." Just focusing on the FCC, they're restructuring media companies in a way that are going to have lasting change. We're going to have a very different CBS at the end of this Trump administration.

Or we potentially have a very different CNN, lasting effect on local broadcasting, with some of the stuff they're doing about media ownership caps that they're raising the caps on media ownership. How much time are they going to have to do this right? Is it until the midterms? Is it until the end of the administration? Is it until the end of a J.D. Vance administration? We'll see, but Brendan Carr is one of the prime examples of having figured out that playbook, and now they're just running it as long as they can.

Micah Loewinger: Nancy, thank you very much.

Nancy Scola: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Nancy Scola is a reporter covering tech policy and politics. Her latest piece for Washingtonian is called How Brendan Carr Became MAGA's Media Watchdog.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, Iran's decades of draconian censorship has led to a fractious information ecosystem no one can rely on.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. [music] As we just heard, Brendan Carr's hostile campaign to reshape America's legacy media has already begun paying dividends for the Trump administration. Now imagine that same effort carried out by a religious authoritarian regime over decades, and you get the Islamic Republic of Iran, where internet access and most newspapers, radio stations, and TV channels are tightly controlled by the state. For Iranians living with the constant threat of US bombings, finding reliable information about the war is a persistent challenge.

Many turn to the BBC's Persian TV service, launched in 2009, which is banned in Iran but can be accessed via satellite. For years, the Beeb was the go-to Persian-language foreign news channel in Iran, but now it has some serious competition. Iran International, an anti-regime outlet that brings viewers information and perspectives ignored by Iranian state media.

According to Nahid Siamdoust, an assistant professor of media and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Iran International's coverage has also fed the country's depolarization by uncritically boosting military action by the US and Israel. In a recent piece for the New York Review of Books, she dug into the wide-reaching influence of the channel and its mysterious origins.

Nahid Siamdoust: Iran International was founded in 2017. The funding came from a Saudi source. We still don't know the persona behind that source, but a very large sum of money was put toward establishing the station out of London.

Micah Loewinger: The regime tries to control media consumption in Iran quite tightly. Yet, according to survey data you cite in your piece, Iran International is the most watched channel in the country. Explain how Iranians are even able to watch this channel.

Nahid Siamdoust: Yes, so the Islamic Republic tightly controls state television and radio. All terrestrial and cable channels are controlled by a very conservative faction of the state, but Iranians in the 2000s started having access to the internet, and in the late 1990s, have had access to satellite TV technology. The Iranian state initially tried to counter this by repeated raids on people's rooftops, but eventually gave up because they just couldn't control this large population setting dishes on their rooftops and connecting a receiver to their TV screens and really accessing hundreds of channels.

Initially, these channels were mostly entertainment. It was only towards late 2000s and 2009 that these news channels started coming in. There was a huge exodus of Iranian journalists because of the closure of their own outlets in Iran. These journalists landed mostly in London, so BBC Persian was founded in 2009, and then eventually in 2017, we had Iran International. These channels have huge viewerships because state television itself is state propaganda. It's very difficult to get reliable information and news from state television programming. It's always colored with a political view of the government itself.

Micah Loewinger: There are weird rules like, for instance, you can't even show instruments on state television. That's not fun.

Nahid Siamdoust: That's definitely not fun. There's just some really archaic rules still on state television. They don't show Iranian life as it is on the streets, which has been, for decades, very vibrant, very young, very different from the tightly veiled, very Islamic programming that is broadcast on state television, so it has lost most of its viewership.

Micah Loewinger: You said that Iran International is similar to Fox News, but in Persian. How has the channel been covering the US's war with Iran?

Nahid Siamdoust: What you see is really the viewpoint of the US and Israel in why they're doing these attacks and taking their word for their intentions, not being critical toward the goals of this war. They've been very much presenting the Islamic Republic as an occupying force that had to be uprooted, with Israel and the United States being the saviors, the champions of the Iranian nation who were going to do this for them.

Micah Loewinger: It sounds like a different form of propaganda from the state television. Yet, you describe it as having this kind of sheen of respectability because once credible reporters are some of the most visible pundits there.

Nahid Siamdoust: That's true. Some of these reporters, like one of them I write about, Morad Vaisi, who was an editor of the Salam newspaper, one of the first reformist newspapers that was shut down in the late '90s, which led to the first huge student uprising in post-revolutionary Iran. Some of these presenters and pundits have come to the conclusion that there is no way of reforming Iran or of having a viable future within Iran with the Islamic Republic and have joined forces with these pro-war forces in Israel and the US.

Micah Loewinger: This is one of the most fascinating things from your piece. It does seem like Iran International is providing some journalistic and civic value. You describe a popular call-in show, program, that turned into a sort of emergency hotline throughout the protests in January and February.

Nahid Siamdoust: At the time of the protests in January, when we knew thousands of protesters had been killed, but the Iranian government had shut down the internet for more than a month, historically the longest internet shutdown of any country. It was very difficult to get in touch with Iranians inside the country. Somehow, people with Starlink connections or very strong VPNs were able to connect to Iran International and leave these voice notes that they were fine, sending messages to their loved ones abroad.

More importantly, people in the diaspora were sending messages to people in Iran because they knew, even despite the internet shutdown and the severe control over state television, Iran International satellite TV technology was the one technology that was still working, even though the state spreads static, tries to interrupt the signals of satellite television technology. For the most part, it works, so people abroad were sending messages to their loved ones. We did hear in weeks afterwards that for some Iranians, this really was a bit of a lifeline.

Micah Loewinger: Is it fair to say then that you have complicated feelings about its role as a media outlet in Iran and in the diaspora?

Nahid Siamdoust: Not so much because at the end, these voice notes and everything-- if you watch Iran International intensely like I have, you realize that all these are in some ways toward this aim for war, toward justifying US politics toward Iran under the Trump government. They have, for example, for months now. Even today, if you turn on Iran International, they're still honoring the dead of the January protests, which is wonderful. There's a tab on the screen, and the people who were killed at the time are still honored, but we don't hear anything of the people who've been killed in the war.

We don't hear of the civilian casualties. We don't hear about the infrastructural damage that has happened on civilian infrastructures. It's a one-sided, biased reporting of what's happening in Iran itself. As much as I think during those really critical weeks when there was little news coming out of Iran, at least this connection existed, I'm not sure that the grand sum of it was being used toward improvement of conditions for Iranians.

Micah Loewinger: One of the big effects that Iran International has had on coverage of this war is that it's likely oversold and exaggerated the support for the former crown prince, Reza Pahlavi.

Nahid Siamdoust: They've done that in a multi-pronged way. Leading up to this war, he had the full-throated support of the Israeli government and other forces in the US. When the protests in Iran happened, Iran International, and this we know because of the research of a researcher in Sweden, in these videos taken on people's cell phones that were coming out of Iran, in 17% of them, some kind of pro-Pahlavi chant.

Iran International, in its coverage, presented the pro-Pahlavi chant or any kind of pro-Pahlavi emblem in 81% of its broadcasts. It really gave people this notion that a vast majority of Iranians were not just on the streets calling for an overthrow of the regime, but were, in fact, calling for Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince of Iran, to become Iran's future leader.

Micah Loewinger: One of the things I'm having trouble wrapping my head around is, on one hand, you have Iran International and some of this pro-monarchy, anti-regime, pro-war media throwing its faith and support behind the American government and the Israeli government. At the same time, you have these genocidal threats from the American president saying he's going to basically kill the entire population of Iran if the regime doesn't surrender to him. How is Iran International metabolizing the belligerent language that we're hearing from the President of the United States?

Nahid Siamdoust: It's been really interesting to watch. They're basically not giving it much air. They're highlighting the parts that they want, and when there are problematic statements like that, they're just not giving it much air. In fact, when Trump said that, there was a presenter on Iran International who tweeted saying, "Trump or Truman, plus? Maybe this is the ultimate solution to defeat the devil." He was pointing at an atomic bombing of Iran.

Whereas on Iranian social media, on other channels, the statement that Trump made about annihilating the civilization, this was a true crisis. Iranians were having a collective nervous breakdown trying to figure out what was about to happen. Yet this channel that purported to be presenting the news, that is apparently for the salvation of the Iranian people, didn't really give it much air.

Micah Loewinger: You write that, quote, "Although it sounded bewildering, Trump may not have been lying when he said at a White House press conference in early April--"

President Donald Trump: The Iranians have-- and we've had numerous intercepts, "Please keep bombing." Bombs that are dropping near their homes. "Please keep bombing. Do it."

Micah Loewinger: The comment raised eyebrows at the time, but you point out that there could be some truth to it?

Nahid Siamdoust: Yes, unfortunately, this was a real phenomenon. Those Iranians who are fed up enough to call for war on their own country believe that he needed to continue and not negotiate with the Islamic Republic and that he just needed to continue until they were gone. I think by now there's been a real shift and a real change in that, certainly among Iranians in Iran, and we're also not seeing as many such demonstrations among the diaspora anymore.

Micah Loewinger: I was also struck by an anecdote you offered of a friend of yours in Tehran, a former school teacher who refused to mourn the 120 school children killed in Minab on the first day of the war and blamed the regime and not American forces for the bombing. Can you talk about just the very fractured reality when it comes to the narratives around responsibility and the future?

Nahid Siamdoust: Yes, that was a heartbreaking moment for me. Actually, I really hesitated to bring that in the piece because I was not in the shoes of my friend who was saying that, but at the same time, I simply couldn't comprehend how she could say such a thing. The bodies of people who are killed have been so politicized within the Iranian media space. The bodies of those who were killed by the state are still being honored on Iran International every day, every second. The bodies of these school children are not being honored by Iran International.

On the other hand, of course, you have posters and all kinds of events around the people, the children, and others who've been killed in the US-Israel war by the state in Iran and by ordinary Iranians and also in the diaspora. The state is not honoring the bodies that it killed in the protests of January. This politicization of whose life is valuable, who can be deemed honorable based on who they were killed by and how, is truly, truly heartbreaking and only can come out of that place of complete desperation and politicization of the space.

My true hope is that in a day not too far from now, [music] Iranians can gather and really value each one of those bodies. This is something that somebody. I quote in the piece, Shadi Sadr, a human rights lawyer, also writes that, "Only then can we really have healed when we can honor the bodies of every single one of the people who died through the protests and the war."

Micah Loewinger: Nahid, thank you very much.

Nahid Siamdoust: Thank you so much, Micah. Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Nahid Siamdoust is an assistant professor of media and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas, Austin. That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender and Candice Wong.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is produced by WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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