New FCC chair Brendan Carr will reportedly reverse a last-minute decision by the Biden administration-led regulator to reject bias complaints lodged by Donald Trump against the three network TV news broadcasters over their coverage of the presidential campaign, a source familiar with the matter told The Post.
Carr will move the complaints against ABC, NBC and CBS – which accused them of being partial to Democrat Kamala Harris – back to active or pending status, the source said. Newsmax first reported the news.
Last week, Jessica Rosenworcel, the Democratic chair under Biden, dismissed the three claims, arguing they sought “to curtail freedom of the press.”
If Rosenworcel had acted on the media complaints a few weeks earlier, it would have prevented Carr from being able to reverse the decision, since there is typically a 30-day buffer period, the source told The Post.
A representative for the FCC and Carr did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The three FCC complaints in question were filed by The Center for American Rights, a conservative nonprofit law firm.
“These are serious issues that deserve real resolution. The prior chair’s last-minute actions were political, not based on a principled defense of the First Amendment,” Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights, told The Post in a statement.
One complaint said ABC News favored Harris during its coverage of the presidential debate by aggressively fact-checking Trump during his face-off against Harris.
Another claimed CBS was guilty of news distortion for airing edited answers from Harris’ interview on “60 Minutes.”
“Harris wasn’t able to put two sentences together, so they completely removed her answer, and put in another one,” Trump wrote on Truth Social following the interview.
He demanded the Tiffany Network release the full transcript from the “60 Minutes” sit-down, and later filed a lawsuit against the network, demanding $10 billion in damages.
CBS has said it aired the shorter answer for clarity and time, and refused to release the full transcript.
Executives at parent company Paramount Global have held talks about settling the lawsuit, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Trump’s team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The third complaint slammed NBC over Harris’ appearance on “Saturday Night Live” in a sketch with Maya Rudolph just three days before the election.
About 70 other FCC complaints were filed across the country concerning the SNL bit, according to The Hill.
The complaints alleged NBC violated the “equal time” rule, which requires networks featuring a presidential candidate on their show to offer equal time to all other candidates for office.
