Trump Threatens Broadcasters Over Iran War Coverage, A Move Straight Out of Russia
As Trump’s war with Iran enters its third week, his regime has begun escalating attacks not just on Iran, but on the press. In a remarkable authoritarian display delivered, naturally, via tweet, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr publicly threatened to revoke broadcast licenses from television networks whose coverage of the war he claims contains “hoaxes and news distortions” — apparently the latest standard for determining whether journalists are allowed to keep operating in the United States.
Carr issued the warning while amplifying Trump’s own social media complaints about media coverage of the war, objecting in particular to reports about U.S. military losses and battlefield setbacks. The message was not subtle: if broadcasters continue reporting facts that contradict the regime’s propaganda of the war, the federal government may decide their licenses are suddenly no longer in the “public interest.” It is a curious interpretation of press freedom in which public interest means flattering the government during wartime.
Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth has been using Pentagon briefings to scold reporters for insufficient enthusiasm about the war effort, complaining that journalists are failing to portray the campaign in the glowing terms he believes it deserves while helpfully suggesting the kinds of headlines television networks should run. It is always reassuring when the defense secretary takes time away from running a war to workshop better press coverage for it.
If this feels strangely familiar, that’s because it is, and exactly how war coverage works in Russia.
When the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, one of its first moves was to seize control of the information environment surrounding the war. Russian authorities banned journalists from describing the genocidal invasion as a “war,” forcing media outlets to use the phrase “special military operation,” while simultaneously passing laws threatening reporters with up to fifteen years in prison for publishing information that contradicted the government’s narrative. The handful of remaining independent outlets that had survived years of Kremlin pressure were shut down, blocked, or forced into exile, cementing Russia’s media landscape as a tightly controlled propaganda machine portraying the invasion as a “righteous” campaign against “Nazis” and “Western aggression.”
Trump has not yet reached the stage of jailing journalists for reporting inconvenient facts about his operations and wars, but is clearly moving in that direction.
The instinct driving these attacks is unmistakably familiar: the belief that reporting should reinforce the government’s narrative rather than challenge it, and that journalists who expose uncomfortable truths are somehow undermining the country rather than doing the job democracy requires of them. This logic sits at the core of authoritarian rule, where information is not meant to inform the public but to shape perception, suppress dissent, and protect those in power from scrutiny.
And that instinct becomes even more pronounced during wartime, when controlling the narrative of a conflict becomes almost as strategically important as controlling territory on the battlefield. Independent reporting inevitably reveals the things governments would prefer the public not know, such as civilian casualties, intelligence failures, operational mistakes, and the rapidly mounting costs of military escalation, which is precisely why wars so often trigger efforts to silence, intimidate, or sideline journalists who refuse to repeat the official script.
Authoritarians understand that shaping how a war is perceived can be nearly as important as the war itself, which is why press freedom is often one of the first casualties when conflicts begin to go badly. Threatening broadcasters with the loss of their licenses for coverage the government dislikes is therefore not simply another round of partisan complaints about media bias, but an effort to intimidate journalists and reshape the information environment so that critical reporting becomes riskier and ultimately nonexistent.
We saw early signs of that shift last year when the Pentagon pushed many independent reporters out of the press pool after demanding journalists sign restrictive access pledges governing coverage of military operations — conditions several outlets refused to accept because they effectively allowed the government to dictate how conflicts could be described. Many of those reporters were subsequently denied access, while Hegseth increasingly filled briefings and events with MAGA influencers, podcasters, and sympathetic media figures whose job is to function not as journalists, but as propagandists.
In Russia, this approach produced one of the most aggressive wartime censorship regimes, where journalists cannot report on Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine and risk prison for even minor deviations from the Kremlin’s narrative. The system is so restrictive that the regime still conceals the true scale of its military casualties from its own people.
In the U.S., constitutional protections for the press remain far stronger. But when government officials threaten media licenses over a tweet, demand more flattering coverage of their wars, and sideline independent reporters in favor of loyalist influencers, the direction things are heading becomes difficult to ignore.
The moment governments begin demanding “patriotic” coverage, the objective is no longer informing the public, but ensuring the public only hears what the government wants them to hear.
Big Brother is listening and has ways of making you behave.
Resist before it’s too late to do so!
Carr is just a lacky. He’s on the list now of law breakers. Move over Bondi Babe.