The Federal Communications Commission has scored another victory in the campaign to use its regulatory powers to promote the MAGA goal of stamping out all vestiges of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the private sector. T-Mobile, which is seeking FCC approval of two fiber and wireless deals, has announced it will shut down all its DEI programs.
The company announced the move in an obsequious letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a contributor to Project 2025 and an unabashed Trump loyalist. It wrote: “We remain fully committed to ensuring that T-Mobile does not have any policies or practices that enable invidious discrimination, whether in fulfillment of DEI or any other purpose,” adding that the company is ending its DEI-related policies “not just in name, but in substance.”
T-Mobile’s move comes about two months after Verizon, also seeking regulatory approvals, issued a similar renunciation of DEI. That, in turn, came after the FCC announced it would investigate DEI at major media companies.
While anti-DEI pressures can be found throughout the Trump Administration, it is particularly troubling to see them at the FCC. That is because the agency has a long history of policies to combat discrimination and promote diversity in the communications industry.
Those policies came about primarily through the efforts of non-profit groups with close ties to the civil rights movement. Chief among these was the Office of Communications of the United Church of Christ, now known as the UCC Media Justice Ministry. In the 1960s, the UCC effort, led by Dr. Everett C. Parker, began to research the way in which television and radio stations in the South covered the campaigns for racial justice.
The UCC found that stations such as WLBT-TV in Jackson, Mississippi mostly ignored the protests while frequently airing pejorative comments about African-Americans. The UCC petitioned the FCC to deny the station a license renewal because it was not serving the public interest, as broadcasters were required to do under federal law. After a lengthy legal battle, the UCC won a landmark court ruling.
Around the same time, the UCC successfully pressured the FCC to adopt equal employment regulations for license holders. Those rules were modified by a 1998 court ruling, but the agency continued not only to prohibit discrimination but also require broadcasters to take positive steps to promote the hiring and promotion of minorities and women. Operations with larger staffs were expected to engage in more initiatives than smaller ones.
The current FCC’s policies turn this tradition on its head. By embracing the wrong-headed idea that efforts to address discrimination are themselves discriminatory, the agency is starting to turn back the clock to a time when people of color were largely absent from the staffs of media companies.
It is also concerning to see a regulatory agency distort its mission by using its power for ideological purposes. We can only wonder how much the FCC’s anti-DEI efforts are taking resources away from its legitimate enforcement practices.
T-Mobile, for instance, certainly deserves plenty of scrutiny. Last year, it paid over $4 million to state attorneys general to resolve allegations of misleading advertising practices. The year before, it paid $350 million to settle a class action lawsuit over its failure to prevent a massive customer data breach. The Biden FCC fined the company another $80 million in the data case.
Pursuing matters such as these as well as conducting honest evaluations of proposed mergers should be the focus on the FCC–not engaging in culture war attacks.