By
Several officials handpicked by Donald Trump to serve in his administration have attacked the media in recent days over coverage of the president's anti-immigration policies.
Last week, Brendan Carr, the conservative attack dog Trump tapped to lead the Federal Communications Commission, announced that his agency is investigating the San Francisco radio station KCBS — owned by radio conglomerate Audacy — after it broadcast federal immigration agents' live locations last month.
This particular report has garnered a lot of backlash in conservative media circles, where people framed the release of the details as a potentially unlawful act of betrayal.
As The Los Angeles Times reported:
On Jan. 26, the host of “KCBS Radio Weekend News” shared the location of agents and the vehicles they were in based on information from the Rapid Response Network in Santa Clara County, a community organization developed to protect immigrant families from deportation threats.
“The County’s Response Network says agents in San Jose were in unmarked vehicles,” the host said, describing the color, make and model of the vehicles before listing the streets and locations where they were spotted. “Stay with KCBS, we’ll be tracking it for you.” ...
Audacy, the broadcasting company that owns KCBS, declined to comment on the investigation.
Carr told Fox News last week that he believes the report put U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ lives in danger by reporting on their “live locations” and unmarked vehicles. He suggested Democrats who've encouraged protests against Trump have created a climate of antipathy toward immigration officials that’s put them at risk. However, Carr didn’t name a single Democratic official who’s called for violence — or even unlawful interference — in ICE activities.
It’s worth noting that Carr’s claims of media inhibiting immigration enforcement or putting officials at risk have been repeated by other officials in Trump’s administration. Kari Lake, the conspiracy theorist Trump tapped to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media's Voice of America, celebrated Carr’s probe in a recent Newsmax interview, accusing KCBS of "aiding and abetting criminals” with its ICE report and saying the radio station "should have their license yanked.” And last week, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, blamed news media leaks for hindering an immigration crackdown in Denver and said the leaks put agents at risk of being “ambushed.”
Immigrant rights advocates in Denver told a local ABC News outlet they had not relied on news reports to know when raids would begin, and simply equipped potentially targeted communities with knowledge of their civil rights ahead of time.
Media coverage of law enforcement activity and conservative backlash to that coverage are nothing new. In 1892, anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells was forced to abandon her office in Memphis, Tennessee, after an angry white mob, incensed over her reports and warnings about lynchings and segregation in the South, destroyed it. And in their book, “News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media,” authors Juan González and Joseph Torres write about the budding backlash to newspapers that “challenged the reigning narrative” about law enforcement in the early 20th century, saying “the federal government responded with efforts to intimidate or silence the most vocal of those papers.”
Indeed, covering law enforcement can be tricky. Occasionally, news outlets make the choice not to report on aspects of certain law enforcement activity to avoid getting in the way. But those are editorial decisions. And even if one believes KCBS crossed a line, there’s no evidence the outlet did anything illegal, so it’s certainly disturbing to see the FCC using its legal might to bear down on a news organization in this way.
KCBS is the latest in a growing list of outlets that have faced FCC probes following right-wing criticism. Carr also recently reinstated previously dismissed complaints filed by conservative groups over NBC, CBS and ABC network content, but declined to reinstate a similar complaint about Fox content. (MSNBC and NBC are both owned by NBCUniversal.)
The probe into KCBS raises eyebrows. Notably, a firm backed by Democratic megadonor George Soros — a liberal benefactor frequently named in right-wing and antisemitic conspiracy theories — is the majority stakeholder of Audacy.
One wonders whether Soros’ stake has anything to do with this probe of an Audacy-owned radio station. Carr denounced the FCC’s approval of the Soros firm’s deal when he was an FCC commissioner last year, and House Republicans have baselessly alleged the approval amounted to election interference by the Biden administration. At least one Republican — Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana — has called for the FCC to reconsider its approval.