Meetings With Murdoch and Sinclair Chief
I’ve been making the case in Where Things Stand for some time now that Federal Communications Commissions Chair Brendan Carr has been one of the most successful yes men of Trump’s second term when it comes to carrying out the very specific and often petty aims of Trump’s retribution campaign against the media.
We saw it play out in the first Jimmy Kimmel saga, when in September 2025 ABC bent the knee to Carr’s pressure campaign and suspended the late night host over comments he made about Charlie Kirk. We saw it in the Stephen Colbert/James Talarico drama when Colbert chose to YouTube livestream an interview with the Texas Democratic Senate candidate after CBS’ lawyers shut down the comedian’s interview with Talarico out of fear of an FCC investigation. At the time, Carr had announced an investigation into the daytime talk show, “The View,” over its interview with Talarico a few weeks prior, claiming the show had violated an old school FCC “equal time” rule that has not applied to talk shows in decades.
We saw it again when Carr suggested that news outlets might experience delays or worse in the renewal of their broadcasting licenses for not doing Trump Speak about the war in Iran. Pro-Trump groups have since asked the FCC to deny license renewals for a handful of Disney-owned TV stations and Trump himself has called for ABC and NBC to lose their licenses, in part because Trump did not like a joke Kimmel made about Melania Trump and in part because neither network aired his primetime address earlier this summer, in which he outlined his delusions about the 2020 election.
It’s all part of an ongoing and explicit effort on Carr’s end to punish the mainstream media and do anything he can within his jurisdiction as FCC head to carry water for the president. It’s more than other Trump sycophants like Jeanine Pirro can say for themselves at the moment.
ABC and the Walt Disney Co., its corporate parent, have since sued the FCC over Carr’s blatant attempts to silence it’s freedom of speech, specifically related to the broadcast license renewal investigations that Carr has been carrying out.
This new piece from The Guardian today is worth the read. It came together thanks to documents The Guardian obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request to the FCC. While Tom Wheeler, FCC chair during the Obama administration, told The Guardian that there was nothing “terribly unusual” about Carr’s meetings with various members of the Trump administration, the piece also outlines the extent to which Carr has engaged in private meetings with the heads of conservative and right-wing news empires throughout Trump’s second term. Per The Guardian:
Between 12 March 2025 and 11 February 2026, Carr attended at least eight meetings at the White House, according to the records, and had at least three scheduled calls with administration officials, including two conversations with the chief of staff, Susie Wiles. He also spoke by phone with administration officials such as the controversial health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.
In addition, the files provide insight into Carr’s media strategy, including communications with producers at Fox News, and make public previously undisclosed meetings he has held with media titans such as the Fox Corp chief executive, Lachlan Murdoch, and Sinclair Broadcast Group chair, David Smith.
— Nicole LaFond
Trump’s Vote-by-Mail Hypocrisy Continues
Trump reportedly voted by mail in Florida’s primary elections, which took place last night, according to Politico. The president requested an absentee ballot last month and returned it on August 13, which is fine! And normal! The only reason this is notable is because of his relentless attacks on the practice, which he has zoomed in on as a universally Bad Type of Voting to justify his conspiracy theories about elections, from the 2020 contest onward. He’s signed executive orders that would seek to restrict the practice ahead of the midterms and has been gunning for Congress to pass a voter suppression law that would severely limited mail-in voting across the nation.
— Nicole LaFond
Missouri Map Showdown Ahead
The final skirmish over whether Republicans will get to nullify Missouri citizens’ right to veto gerrymandered maps will play out over the next couple, frantic weeks.
First up: a ruling from Cole County Judge Daniel Green, which Richard Von Glahn — director of People Not Politicians, the group behind the petition to bring the new 7-1 Republican gerrymandered map to a statewide vote — said he expects “in the next 24 to 48 hours.” He added that “people shouldn’t read too much into it” even if his group prevails; the losing side will certainly appeal.
The case would then go to the Missouri Court of Appeals — though the state Supreme Court interceded early in a related case, and Von Glahn thinks it could happen again, given the extremely tight timeline to get maps finalized for the general election.
“I don’t think it’s an extreme court by any sense of the imagination,” Von Glahn said of the red state’s Supreme Court, which is selected through a nonpartisan process. “It’s conservative but not a Trump-captured, loyalist court.”
The state Supreme Court should be the final word on the case…
“Is there a world where the Missouri Supreme Court rules, let’s say in our favor, that the RNC goes to Justice Kavanaugh, who has Missouri, and says ‘you have to save us from this?’” he mused. “That would not surprise me.”
(Each justice oversees judicial districts; Kavanaugh has the sixth and eighth, which includes Missouri, so a request for Supreme Court intervention would be addressed to him but decided by the full Court.)
— Kate Riga
Read This From TPM Today
Layla A. Jones unpacks the anomalies in a questionable new Census Bureau study that Trump is now bolstering to declare he won the 2020 election: Trump Is Using a New, Highly Unusual Census Bureau Report to Claim He Won the 2020 Election
Yesterday’s Top Story
Appeals Court Blocks Trump Scheme on US Attorneys
What I’m Reading
GOP issues stark warning to AI companies
‘We are not a bunch of woke Marxist liberals here’: Rural voters scramble Texas election
With a six-pack of beer.
Cat:
Did CF-DJT mail his ballot back? Trusting the government workers of the USPS? Or did he take it to the registrar himself? Or have a mule or vote harvester deliver it?
The world needs to know.
Not only did we know about Carr, but the Senate that confirmed him knew it too. They didn’t care.
George Orwell, We Hardly Knew Ye
Just a reminder: The “joke” Kimmel told, really little more than an innocuous and truthful observation, was: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
Meanwhile, DOJ goons claimed in a court filing in the Comey case “there is no serious dispute” that a social media post of seashells he made last year could be understood as a threat against President Trump.
In reality the only thing that’s not seriously in dispute is my regret that Comey or whoever wrote “86 47” on the North Carolina beach didn’t have enough shells to add “with extreme prejudice.”