Of all the Trump administration’s sycophants, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr may be the most try-hard — and he proved it Thursday during his comments on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Grapevine, Texas. In his fervor to tout the successes of President Donald Trump, Carr unwittingly admitted that the administration’s goal is the Orbanization of America, and that he takes pride in trying to make that happen.
Ranting about the “legacy national media” — which he also referred to as “the fake news media” — Carr claimed the president “smashed the facade,” and said, “You don’t get to decide what we say, what we think, how we’re going to vote inside the voting booth.” But because Carr is arguably the most eager-to-please attack poodle in Trump’s kennel, he couldn’t help but reveal what MAGA considers “winning.”
“Look at the results so far. PBS defunded. NPR defunded,” Carr boasted, before rattling off a few names of television journalists who no longer hold their previous high-profile jobs. Then he gave the game away: “[Stephen] Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership. And soon enough, CNN is going to have new ownership as well.”
Orbán must be flattered to have laid the template now being emulated by the U.S.
It’s obvious why Carr, a hyperpartisan culture warrior, would consider these “wins.” And his assessment matches the zero-sum Trump worldview: Somebody wins, somebody loses. Still, a more savvy player would have hidden the ball a little better. The defunding of PBS and NPR were done for nakedly political purposes (Trump’s executive order was literally called “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media”), but in crediting Trump for the upheaval at CBS and CNN, Carr blew off the flimsy facade that the changes were strictly made for business and journalistic reasons.
CBS News’ parent company Paramount was bought in 2025 by Skydance Media, a company owned by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison — a MAGA bankroller and one of the richest men in history. Skydance paid $150 million for Bari Weiss’ soft-MAGA site The Free Press, which often touts the press releases handed to it by the Trump administration as “exclusive” reporting, and installed Weiss in a newly created position as CBS News’ editor-in-chief. This, unsurprisingly, resulted in what several since-departed veteran journalists at the network characterized as overt pressure imposed on them to report from a specific political point of view.
That same company is now poised to buy CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. (The elder Ellison’s company Oracle now also owns a 15% stake in the American arm of TikTok, giving one massively wealthy Trump-supporting family control over an incredibly wide swath of U.S. media.)
So, credit to Carr for his shameless honesty — which Ellison and Weiss probably wish he had kept to himself, at least to keep up appearances. As former Republican operative Sarah Longwell, now the publisher of The Bulwark, put it on X, “the FCC Chairman himself is stating that CBS’ new ownership is ‘Trump winning.’ That should deeply embarrass and offend CBS’s leadership. When the FCC Chair brags that you’re state TV for the Trump administration, a reassessment of one’s values is in order.”
But Carr’s candor makes it clear that he sees his role as a soldier in Trump’s war on American institutions — and that the mission is to make this country’s media landscape into something more like what Hungary has under its authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW, often covering free speech, civil liberties and extremism. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider.
