As chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Alfred Sikes took the agency’s duty to foster broadcasting in “the public interest” seriously. Sikes, a conservative who was appointed by George H. W. Bush in 1989, engaged in a long-running battle against Howard Stern’s employer, Infinity Broadcasting, levying repeated fines against its stations for violating rules against broadcasting “indecent” material when children were in the audience. (The legal tangle helped persuade Stern to move to satellite radio, where he faced no such editorial restrictions.) One thing he never did, however, was seek to revoke licenses for Infinity’s stations.
In a recent interview, Sikes told me that current FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s threats against the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel and TV networks are antithetical to the agency’s founding mission. Carr, he said, seems to be opposed to “too much free speech. In my view, the public interest is for free expression.”
Like his political patron, Donald Trump, Carr is fond of threatening TV networks whose programs displease him. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said on a podcast last week.
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