Washington, DC — Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr blasted the legacy media during a Tuesday interview with Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle, pointing to their “wildly out-of-touch” nature and hoaxes that “go in one direction.”
Speaking to a crowd gathered for a Breitbart News policy discussion, the Trump nominee explained why Americans trust their local news outlets over the national establishment media.
“There’s a big gap in trust between legacy national media and local news journalists,” Carr said. “In fact, we can talk about this more, but you see newspapers closed by the dozen all across the country. We’ve lost a lot of really good gumshoe reporting.”
According to the FCC leader, local television stations are some of the few places left to get “real gumshoe reporting” — “and we want to do a lot more at the FCC to try to support them and empower them.”
Carr went on to say, “Something like only nine percent of people have a great deal of trust in national news media.”
“And that’s not just a throwaside — there’s actually a study that says 15 percent of people would eat gas station sushi, but only 9 percent of people have trust in the legacy national media, and it’s for a confluence of factors,” he said.
The first factor Carr mentioned of why the legacy media is untrustworthy is them being “just wildly out-of-touch with where the American people are.”
Ahead of this year’s Super Bowl LX, the Washington Post‘s Adam Kilgore wrote that Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback-turned Black Lives Matter activist, was the “most relevant figure” to the game.
“You can see example after example,” Carr said. “So Super Bowl Sunday — people are gearing up for the big game, they’re all excited about it. Washington Post came out with a story that says the most important person to the most recent Super Bowl was Colin Kaepernick, right? […] No actual human being in America would reach that conclusion.”
Carr also pointed to ABC News’s negative coverage of the men’s U.S. Olympic hockey team meeting with Trump after winning the gold, and to TIME‘s cover of Eileen Gu, the American-born skier who chose to compete for China as examples of the media being “out-of-touch.”
The second reason why legacy media is not trusted is because they are “consistently being exposed for running hoaxes that go in one direction,” Carr argued, citing CNN’s infamous “mostly peaceful protests” coverage of the violent Kenosha, Wisconsin, Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.
He also recalled media reports of former President Joe Biden being “of sound mind” when he was mentally struggling, the hoax that smeared a Covington Catholic High School student as a racist, and “Russiagate.”
“I mean the list of these hoaxes that the legacy media was running went on and on and on,” Carr said.
Another source of distrust in the media stems from news anchors becoming political activists, he added.
“You have a lot of sort of straight-news journalists that sit on the evening news, and when they eventually lose their job, the mask falls, and they show you who they really are, whether it’s Don Lemon, or Jim Acosta, or Dan Rather, or Terry Moran […] Once they sort of stop sitting behind that anchor desk, they show you that they’re really just partisan actors,” Carr said. “I think that just undermines the credibility of the other people that take their place in the seat.”
“And finally, I say, people have access to news and information from so many different sources. Now that that gatekeeping role is eroded, you can actually find out the truth about stories again.”
Carr also highlighted CNN’s controversial coverage of two accused ISIS-aligned terrorists who allegedly threw homemade bombs outside of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s home, where the outlet wrote in a now-deleted social media post that the suspects could have had a “normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather.”
“I woke up this morning and CNN has this tweet up about how these two innocent kids were traveling to New York City on a warm summer day, and lo and behold, they found themselves caught with charges of terrorism for dropping, effectively, IEDs at a protest,” the chairman said. “And CNN left that tweet up. They now deleted it. The story itself is still up there — again, whether that falls in the hoax bucket, or the out of touch bucket, I don’t know, but it’s just time after time after time, and that’s why you see that trust in the legacy meeting just continuing to crater.”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
