“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough on Monday slammed Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr for his weekend threats to revoke broadcast networks’ licenses over their coverage of the Iran War, claiming he was “posing” to endear himself with President Donald Trump.
“Just please stop,” Scarborough said. “There will be a time when this administration is over and you don’t want all of this following you the rest of your life. It’s just embarrassing. So do your job, all right? Stop posing. Stop posing for the president. You know that’s not going to help you in the long term either. It’s just an embarrassment.”
The FCC did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
Carr on Saturday suggested unspecified news outlets that ran with “hoaxes and news distortions” in their coverage of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran still “have a chance now to correct course” before license renewals come up. He said broadcasters “must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”
The comments, which Trump then endorsed in a Truth Social post on Sunday, came after multiple administration officials rebuked media outlets for scrutinizing the war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday called CNN “fundamentally unserious” and “patently ridiculous” for a story on the U.S. underestimating the war’s impact on the Strait of Hormuz, which CNN defended. It came days after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed the New York Times had “harassed” the administration by covering a deadly strike on an Iranian elementary school.
Scarborough said comments like Hegseth’s reflect how the Trump administration doesn’t “remember the severe, lasting generational damage that all the lies coming from the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, how long it took our United States military to recover for that.” He then pointed to X posts from former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, who claimed media outlets “cheer against the U.S.” to defend how news organizations sought to hold government officials to account.
“I’m not suggesting that we’re getting the same amount of lies from this Pentagon or from this administration,” Scarborough noted. “I’m just saying the ignorance even of people like Ari Fleischer who go out and say, ‘How dare anybody write anything bad about our military? You’re almost rooting against America.’ All of those people know better. The press is doing its job. End of story.”
