Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
You can learn a conference’s worth of data journalism through these NICAR tipsheets
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Nov. 18, 2024, 1:02 p.m.
LINK: www.nytimes.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   November 18, 2024

In September, I went through all the proposals from Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint for a second Trump term — that would have a direct impact on the media. At the time, of course, candidate Donald Trump took pains to say that he wasn’t behind Project 2025, that he barely knew anyone involved with Project 2025, that he’d never even been in the same room as the words “Project” or “2025.”

Of the Project 2025 proposals I highlighted, the largest share were authored by Brendan Carr, who sits on the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC is the chief regulator of broadcast media in America and plays a big part in Internet policy though issues like net neutrality and broadband access. Carr is best known for his Trumpian rhetoric. Among the things he calls for in Project 2025:

banning TikTok1
removing restrictions on media ownership
eliminating Section 230 protections for publishers

(More details at those links.)

Since Election Day, Carr has been making himself very visible backing Trump’s wishes — falsely accusing NBC of violating equal time rules, saying the FCC should stop doing anything “partisan” until Trump’s inauguration, arguing the “censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed” (you know, fact-checkers — he really doesn’t like NewsGuard), and backing Trump’s regular statements that TV networks should lose their broadcast licenses for doing things he doesn’t like. He’s also very tight with Elon Musk, last seen accompanying McNuggets at Trump’s right hand.

Last night, Donald Trump — now president-elect — announced that Brendan Carr would be his nominee to lead the FCC.

Photo of Brendan Carr speaking at CPAC 2018 by Gage Skidmore used under a Creative Commons license.

  1. Though Trump recently decided he likes TikTok after all, so you can expect Carr to follow suit. [↩]
Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
You can learn a conference’s worth of data journalism through these NICAR tipsheets
From AI to OSINT, maps to the sports section, it’s a data journalism jubilee.
“More alarming by the day”: New York Times investigations editor on the legal threats faced by news publishers
“The rhetoric and actions that Trump and his allies take at a national level are being mimicked across the country at a much smaller level. Whether they’re Trump supporters or not, they’re taking cues from the President of the United States.”
How Trump’s cuts are crippling journalism beyond the United States
According to a USAID factsheet now taken offline, the agency funded training and support for 6,200 journalists and assisted 707 outlets.