FCC's Pai Under Pressure Over Trump Threats

Ajit Pai

President Trump’s threats to revoke media outlets’ broadcasting licenses have put Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai under new pressure.

The Hill reports Pai, a Republican, has been silent this week on Trump’s suggestions that media outlets he believes are slanted against him should be challenged over their licenses.

The calls were instantly met with criticism from both sides of the aisle. Critics said that, while the proposal isn’t feasible, it still constitutes an egregious threat to free speech and a free press.

And the controversy has turned the spotlight on Pai, whose agency is responsible for licensing local news broadcasters.

Democrats and activists have dialed up the pressure on Pai to break his silence. On Friday, a coalition of press freedom advocates sent Pai a letter urging him to publicly disavow the president’s comments.

“As an independent agency charged with protecting the public interest and overseeing the public airwaves, the FCC must resist any attempts to co-opt the broadcast-licensing process to suit the president’s whims,” the letter reads.

“Such threats are what you would expect to hear in a dictatorship, not a democracy, and they must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.”

The Hill has repeatedly asked Pai’s office for comment since Trump’s initial tweet on Wednesday, but has not yet received a response. Spokespeople for the other two Republican commissioners, Brendan Carr and Michael O’Rielly, also did not return requests for comment.

On CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, said that she doesn’t “think history will be kind to silence” and that it was important that the agency make clear its support for the First Amendment.

Variety reports former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler was more critical of Pai, saying that his silence was “making himself complicit in the coercion that the president himself is engaging in.” Wheeler wrote in a blog post on Friday that “the president may decide he can walk away from his oath of office, but the FCC commissioners have also sworn to uphold the Constitution.”

“The founders of our nation set as a cornerstone of our democracy the First Amendment, forever enshrining and protecting freedom of the press,” Gordon Smith, president of the National Association of Broadcasters, said in a statement last week. “It is contrary to this fundamental right for any government official to threaten the revocation of an FCC license simply because of a disagreement with the reporting of a journalist.”

Pai himself expressed dismay last month over what he sees as free speech “under siege” in the United States, citing efforts to silence to speakers on college campuses. But in his speech to the Future of Speech Online Forum at the Newseum, Pai said that he also saw “worrying signs” at the FCC, pointing to Twitter messages in which “people regularly demand that the FCC yank licenses from cable news channels like Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN because they disagree with the opinions expressed on those networks.”

“Setting aside the fact that the FCC doesn’t license cable channels, these demands are fundamentally at odds with our legal and cultural traditions,” Pai said.