President Joe Biden’s nominee for commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission hates Fox News and wants the federal agency to regulate conservative broadcasts because she disagrees with them.
The White House first announced Gigi Sohn as Biden’s FCC nominee in October.
“Gigi is one of the nation’s leading public advocates for open, affordable, and democratic communications networks,” the Biden administration claimed. “For over thirty years, Gigi has worked to defend and preserve the fundamental competition and innovation policies that have made broadband Internet access more ubiquitous, competitive, affordable, open, and protective of user privacy.”
Sohn’s inclination towards censorship and partisan regulation, however, torpedoed her chances of confirmation. Biden re-nominated Sohn at the beginning of the year but her chances of gaining Republican support are once again slim considering her history of criticizing and painting TV networks she disagrees with as threats to our democracy that need to be punished.
In one 2019 tweet, Sohn hinted that Fox News should be scrutinized because they “have played their own role in destroying democracy.”
“I agree that scrutiny of big tech is essential, as is scrutiny of big telecom, cable & media. And trust me, the latter have played their own role in destroying democracy & electing autocrats. Like, say, Fox News?” she tweeted.
One year later, after social media companies censored posts about Covid-19 and circulation of the Hunter Biden laptop story, Sohn once again asked: “So do you still want me to believe that social media is more dangerous to our democracy than Fox News?”
One month earlier, Sohn admitted that she had concerns with Facebook but said “I believe that Fox News has had the most negative impact on our democracy.”
“It’s state-sponsored propaganda, with few if any opposing viewpoints,” Sohn complained. “Where’s the hearing about that?”
In addition to holding a grudge against Fox News, Sohn also repeatedly expressed doubts about whether Sinclair Broadcasting “is qualified to be a broadcast licensee at all.” In a 2018 tweet, Sohn took her complaints from rants on Twitter to demanding action from the FCC where she had previously served as a counselor to a former chairman.
