If you want to build a censorship regime in the United States, you can’t call it censorship. The First Amendment is simply too powerful, and the American people far too supportive of free expression, for overt authoritarian censorship to ever succeed in this country.
To make censorship work here, you need to disguise it. The dagger of policing speech must be cloaked in some other neutral-seeming pretext.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr has just such a secret weapon. When he jawboned ABC in an attempt to silence comedian Jimmy Kimmel, he referenced a decades-old legal basis for his threats: the FCC’s “news distortion policy.” This rarely-invoked and even more rarely-enforced rule was never intended to apply to critical journalism or unflattering coverage. But its broad sweep and invitation to the government to review the news for bias invites a full-blown government censorship regime in a country where that’s supposed to be absolutely forbidden.
Even though the Kimmel censorship attempt failed, the underlying legal weapon Carr used has not gone anywhere. To prevent future abuses — by this administration or by future ones — the news distortion policy needs to go.
What the news distortion policy is and isn’t
Inaugurated in 1949, the news distortion policy is an internal agency rule that allows the FCC to investigate and punish broadcasters for allegedly “distorting” the news when certain threshold criteria have been met.
Congress charged the FCC with regulating broadcasting to serve the “public interest.” By policing news distortion, the policy is theoretically aimed at ensuring the public is safe from manipulation and has access to factual information.
The FCC itself — as well as the Supreme Court — has recognized the potential that this policy could be abused to infringe on First Amendment-protected speech and journalism.
For the first decade or so of its existence, the news distortion policy remained largely dormant. Then, in the 1960s and ‘70s, there were a series of high-profile allegations of news staging and falsifications. But even with these extreme cases of distortion, the commission was wary about exercising the news distortion policy. The commission warned that attempts to “authenticate the news” would risk “omnipresent government censorship” and that it could not — and should not — judge whether news coverage is biased or true.
So the FCC imposed limitations on how they could use the news distortion policy so as to avoid the possibility of engaging in censorship. The alleged distortion must be deliberate — rather than an opinion or genuine error. There must be extrinsic evidence — beyond the broadcast itself — of the distortion. Broadcaster ownership or leadership (not just the individuals who appeared on the broadcast) had to have been involved. And finally, the distortion must apply to a “significant event,” rather than small errors or non-essential details.
Why the government shouldn’t be in the business of eliminating news bias
Despite these well-intentioned, important guardrails, the news distortion policy itself is still both a threat to the First Amendment (even when enforced in good faith) and begs to be used as a pretext by bad-faith actors who want to silence their political opponents.
There are three main reasons why the government should not be in the business of eliminating news bias at all.
One: It violates First Amendment principles. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the Supreme Court majority in Moody v. NetChoice, LLC (2024), the government has no legitimate role in deciding what counts as the right balance of private expression. The Court made clear that “on the spectrum of dangers to free expression, there are few greater than allowing the government to change the speech of private actors to achieve its own conception of speech nirvana.”
Yet the news distortion policy enables the FCC to do exactly that.
Two: It chills broadcaster speech. Between 1969 and 2019, the FCC found broadcasters liable for news distortion only eight times. Yet the mere existence of the policy pushes broadcasters to self-censor, avoiding controversial stories even when they serve the public interest.
Because the FCC is the agency that grants broadcasters licenses to the public airwaves, it has always wielded significant power when it comes to the interpretation of policies like this. It has a big stick with which to threaten broadcasters into compliance: revoking their license. Even when this leverage is not intentionally weaponized against political opponents or critics, it weighs heavily on the decision making of news organizations. The mere background threat of license consequences causes broadcasters to alter their content.
The National Association of Broadcasters warns that the policy encourages stations to stick to bland, inoffensive content. Former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai (R, 2017-21) echoed this concern, saying he could hardly think of an action more chilling of free speech than the federal government investigating a broadcast situation because of disagreement with its news coverage.
This chilling effect harms not just broadcasters but the public, which loses access to the full range of information necessary for democratic participation.
Three: It can be weaponized for partisanship. Between the FCC’s strict guidelines and the studied caution with which previous commissions operated, the news distortion policy has rarely been used — let alone weaponized along partisan lines. But because it wasn’t formally rescinded, the news distortion policy could prove to be a secret weapon of sorts for commissioners or chairs bent on targeting political opponents to chill their speech. The news distortion policy gives any administration a tool to target outlets that provide unfavorable coverage.
That’s exactly what happened when Chairman Brendan Carr took over the FCC.
After ABC aired Jimmy Kimmel’s commentary on Charlie Kirk’s murder, Carr threatened to revoke the network’s licenses for alleged news distortion. The message was clear: Criticize those in power and face government retaliation.
Read more: The FCC vs. the Constitution.
A bipartisan call to rein in the FCC
This week, Protect Democracy helped a bipartisan group of former FCC commissioners, chairmen, and senior staff file a petition with the FCC asking the agency to repeal the news distortion policy.
The former commissioners and staffers have called on the FCC to:
Rescind the news distortion policy entirely.
Reaffirm that the First Amendment and Communications Act prohibit the FCC from acting as a censor of speech or the press.
Clarify the limited circumstances under which the FCC may appropriately investigate broadcaster speech through the existing Hoax Rule, which applies only when broadcasters knowingly air false information about crimes or catastrophes that could cause tangible public harm.
For more on the petition, here’s Conor:
Chairman Carr has made it clear he’s not willing to give up this censorship secret weapon, but perhaps the mounting bipartisan pressure will mean he won’t have much of a choice.
If the FCC refuses to act, Congress could step in with legislation that bars the FCC from policing media bias.
One good sign: Next month, Senator Ted Cruz is calling Carr up to Capitol Hill to answer for his blatant attacks on free speech and the press, which Cruz called “dangerous as hell.”
“It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel,” Cruz said, “but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it.”
Pennsylvania’s Republican senator David McCormick and the Wall Street Journal editorial board seemed to join Cruz in recognizing that what a Republican FCC chairman can do today, a Democratic FCC chairman could do tomorrow.
Free speech is not a partisan issue; it’s an American value. The only way to stop the FCC from infringing on our First Amendment rights is to strip them of the legal pretexts they could use to do it — to expose and then take away the secret weapon of censorship. The news distortion policy has to go.
Your moment of collective courage:
Watch this video from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
On November 12, 2025, and for the first time in 12 years, the U.S. bishops issued a Special Message addressing their concern for the evolving situation impacting immigrants in the United States. Collectively, the bishops have invoked this particularly urgent way of speaking as a body of bishops. Here, some of those bishops come together to give voice to the message, which advocates for a meaningful reform of immigration laws and the recognition of the fundamental dignity of all persons, including immigrants.
Read the full statement and get additional resources here.
American values and institutions are under threat. Religious communities can play a pivotal role in protecting our neighbors and building a stronger democracy.
The Faithful Fight toolkits from Protect Democracy and the Horizons Project offer strategies to bring people together and help everyone to act.
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