A bipartisan group of former FCC chairs, commissioners, and senior staff is asking the agency to fully scrap its decades-old news distortion policy, warning that it invites political meddling in newsroom decisions and clashes with the First Amendment and the Communications Act.
The 42-page petition was filed just after the federal government reopened, on behalf of former FCC chairs Mark Fowler, Dennis Patrick, Alfred Sikes, and Thomas Wheeler; former commissioners Andrew Barrett, Rachelle Chong, and Ervin Duggan; former FCC general counsel Christopher Wright; and veteran staffers Kathryn Brown, Jerald Fritz, and Peter Pitsch. The filing was prepared by the Protect Democracy Project, TechFreedom, G Squared Strategies, and communications attorney Andrew Jay Schwartzman.
The group argues that the policy, which allows the FCC to sanction licensees for intentionally distorting the news, effectively “seeks to mold the speech of private broadcasters to the FCC’s own view of what is correct, complete, and accurate news.” They say that approach is incompatible with the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Moody v. NetChoice, which reaffirmed that government has no role in “un-biasing” private expression, and with the Communications Act’s explicit denial of any FCC “power of censorship.” The petition calls the policy “a vestigial organ” that casts “an omnipresent shadow” over broadcasters’ editorial freedom.
Adopted in 1949 as a companion to the now-defunct Fairness Doctrine, the news distortion policy requires broadcasters not to “distort or suppress” basic factual information on public issues. Unlike the Fairness Doctrine, which the FCC abolished in 1987, the distortion policy has never been formally repealed. Petitioners note that in more than sixty years the Commission has found violations in only eight cases, typically involving outright hoaxes or fabricated reports, conduct now covered by the broadcast hoax rule adopted in 1992. That overlap, they argue, makes the news distortion policy redundant at best and dangerous at worst.
More troubling, they write, is the way recent FCC leadership has invoked the policy to question editorial calls and even comedic monologues, creating “the specter of government interference” that chills speech. The petition cites FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s public references to “news distortion” in criticizing major networks and his willingness to scrutinize wording and story selection as evidence of how easily the policy can be weaponized.
Quoting Moody, the filing warns that “on the spectrum of dangers to free expression, there are few greater than allowing the government to change the speech of private actors in order to achieve its own conception of speech nirvana,” and urges the FCC to make clear it will not investigate or punish broadcasters for allegedly “distorting,” “slanting,” or “staging” news content, absent a true dangerous hoax.
Sitting commissioner Anna Gomez quickly endorsed repeal, saying the FCC lacks “the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to go after broadcasters for their news content,” and criticizing the current use of the policy as a vague and improper tool to pressure newsrooms.