In his first 100 or so days as F.C.C chairman, Brendan Carr is proving to be as fast and pugnacious as anyone in the Trump administration, and that’s no small feat. Carr has already tormented legacy media, and ostensibly devoured the media attention that attends his scalp-hunting. Since assuming control of the F.C.C., Carr has launched investigations into both Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Disney’s ABC over their D.E.I. initiatives; into PBS and NPR over their airing of commercial advertisements; and into a San Francisco–based radio station for revealing the locations of undercover ICE agents. Most notably, he demanded that CBS turn over the raw footage of their 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, suggesting that their fairly benign alternate editings of the tape could be relevant to whether or not the F.C.C. grants approval of David Ellison’s $8 billion Skydance-Paramount merger. On Wednesday, in his latest calculated fit of pique, Carr took aim at Comcast once again—this time, however, it was over MSNBC’s coverage of the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was whisked away to a maximum security prison in El Salvador last month without trial or due process. In the view of many federal judges, Garcia’s deportation was “lawless” and “unconscionable,” and the Supreme Court was unanimous in its declaration that the White House should “facilitate” his return. Garcia’s attorneys argue that their client is a caring father and family man, while the Trump administration contends that he’s a dangerous criminal and gang member—exactly the sort of factual dispute that could be resolved by, you know… due process. But I’ll leave that to the justices.

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Ever since Bob Iger agreed to pay $16 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit over George Stephanopoulos’s errant use of “rape” to describe what was legally deemed “sexual abuse,” the general sense I get from the anchors, correspondents, journalists, and even opinion writers is that no one wants to be responsible for their boss having to cough up tens of millions for the next settlement—or legal fees, if any of these folks ever grow some actual stones. Indeed, this is all in keeping with the terms of engagement that Jeff Bezos modeled when Amazon shelled out $40 million for Brett Ratner’s masterpiece on Melania, which became the precedent for the Don Jr. Duck Dynasty spinoff that an administration type reportedly soft-pitched to WBD emissaries—a detail that landed in Michael Wolff’s copy this week. In Comcast’s case, Brian Roberts is about to sever ties with MSNBC by spinning off his cable assets into SpinCo—a play to free his business from the linear albatross that has the added benefit of reducing his exposure to the headaches that come from owning an overtly partisan cable network (Six percent of my business and 90 percent of my problems, as the saying goes). Needless to say, the divorce papers can’t get filed soon enough. Meanwhile, David Zaslav will probably spin off CNN along with the rest of his cable assets—an eventuality that he has prepared for via the recent restructuring of Warner Bros. Discovery. As CNBC’s Alex Sherman reported Friday, Zaz still has his bankers working that option. The more illustrative example of Trump administration pressure here is the Paramount-Skydance merger. In recent months, I’ve reported on the myriad controversies at CBS News—from the mishandled Tony Dokoupil–Ta-Nehisi Coates contretemps to the controversial 60 Minutes segment on Gaza—and both Paramount’s Shari Redstone and Skydance’s David Ellison plainly obvious frustration with CBS News C.E.O. Wendy McMahon. Indisputably, McMahon deserves scrutiny for mishandling those matters, as well as for her ill-advised overhaul of Evening News, which is now drawing less than 4 million viewers despite recent assurances from executive producer Guy Campanile that such a plunge would never happen. At the same time, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the heat she’s enduring is coming from two dealmakers who are extremely eager to get F.C.C. approval on a merger, and really wish she’d stop giving Trump and Carr reasons to equivocate on, or even block, that deal. Of course, Shari has already signaled her willingness to settle Trump’s lawsuit over the Kamala interview, and the two sides have hired a mediator to help determine the terms. One can only wonder what her current partner, the Pulitzer-winning journalist Paul Goldberger, makes of this concession. Last Sunday, Trump once again attacked 60 Minutes after the news magazine ran stories about the war in Ukraine and his proposed takeover of Greenland. “Almost every week, 60 Minutes ... mentions the name ‘TRUMP’ in a derogatory and defamatory way, but this Weekend’s ‘BROADCAST’ tops them all,” he wrote on Truth Social, before calling on Carr to impose maximum fines and punishment “for their unlawful and illegal behavior.” In another era, the owner of CBS News might have felt compelled to stand up to the president on behalf of its journalists and remind the public that there is nothing unlawful or illegal about reporting on the president. It can be hard, however, to summon such fortitude in the heat of a deal. On Wednesday evening, McMahon and some of her CBS News colleagues, including Scott Pelley, attended a Broadway performance of George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, portraying the era when CBS’s Edward R. Murrow stood up to Joe McCarthy. Presumably, the show was more to her liking.