FCC Democrat warns broadcasters to resist Trump’s media pressure tactics
FCC commissioner Anna Gomez urges broadcasters to resist pressure from the Trump-era FCC over fake-poll claims and news-distortion threats, Al Jazeera reports.
Anna Gomez, the only Democratic member of the United States Federal Communications Commission, has urged broadcasters to stand up to pressure from Donald Trump's administration ahead of the November 3 midterm elections, according to Al Jazeera.
In a four-page letter sent on Thursday to Curtis LeGeyt, president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters, Gomez said she would not be doing her job without stating plainly that the industry's response had not yet matched the scale of what its members are facing.
The letter responds to recent comments by the FCC's Trump-appointed chairman, who warned on social media that broadcasters airing "entirely fake polls" ahead of the consequential midterms could violate their regulatory obligations, according to the report. In a post on X, he said many journalists and broadcasters had been amplifying polls without regard to basic journalistic ethics and without informing the public that the surveys lacked a scientific, accurate or even real basis.
Gomez pushed back, arguing in her letter that the legal bar for news distortion is high. It applies, she wrote, only when a broadcaster knowingly airs false information about a crime or catastrophe and that broadcast directly causes immediate and substantial harm to public safety or property, as quoted by Al Jazeera.
"Reporting the results of a poll this Administration happens to dislike does not come close to meeting those standards," she said, according to the report, which also described the agency as one of the most active instruments in what she called a coordinated government effort to reshape the media into its sanctioned messenger.
Al Jazeera said it had asked the FCC which journalists, broadcasters and polls were being referred to, but received no clarification. Seth Stern of the Freedom of the Press Foundation was quoted criticising the chairman's remarks, saying he was "not the journalism police" and that his attacks on the press target coverage unfavourable to the president.
Source: Al Jazeera English — TrendWire reports stories in its own words; facts should be confirmed against the original source.