The left’s political operatives have launched a relentless campaign to vilify FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. He has become a target, and supposedly the number one threat to democracy, simply because he empowered small local broadcast stations to comply with statutory requirements.

Carr’s critics paint him as censor-in-chief — ignoring Joe Biden’s massive censorship initiatives. But the facts tell a different story. Carr is simply upholding longstanding federal obligations to ensure that our public airwaves serve all Americans, not just a partisan sliver.

Broadcast television is fundamentally different from cable, streaming or podcasting. Local affiliates of ABC, NBC and CBS operate on publicly owned frequencies, granted free of charge by the FCC. This is no small privilege — it is a massive public subsidy, akin to the taxpayer funding that supported NPR and PBS.

When Congress created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to fund NPR and PBS, it required “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programming.” The goal was simple: taxpayer-funded media should never become party propaganda.

NPR and PBS disagreed. They took the subsidies, ignored the statute and cried censorship when........

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