(DCNF)—Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr warned media outlets Saturday that they may lose their broadcast licenses if they insist on running “fake news” content.
Carr wrote in an X post he was giving broadcasters who were “running hoaxes and news distortions ‐ also known as the fake news” the chance to “correct course before their license renewals come up.” His warning came in response to a Truth Social post by President Donald Trump slamming “the Fake News Media” for what he called an “intentionally misleading headline” about U.S. Air Force planes reportedly hit by an Iranian missile strike.
“The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not,” the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman wrote in his post. “And frankly, changing course is in their own business interests since trust in legacy media has now fallen to an all time low of just 9% and are ratings disasters.”
The FCC chief was likely citing a Gallup survey released in September 2020 which showed that only nine percent of U.S. adults had “a great deal” of trust in mass media to report “the news fully, accurately and fairly.”
“The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves,” Carr continued. “It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news.”
“When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong,” he added, referring to Trump’s sweeping all seven battleground states in the 2024 election, while winning the popular vote by 1.5% percentage points. “It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media. And we can’t allow that to happen. Time for change!”
“Yet again, an intentionally misleading headline by the Fake News Media about the five tanker planes that were supposedly struck down at an Airport in Saudi Arabia, and of no further use,” Trump, who appointed Carr to lead the FCC in his second term, wrote in his Saturday morning Truth Social post.
“In actuality, the Base was hit a few days ago, but the planes were not ‘struck’ or ‘destroyed.’ Four of the five had virtually no damage, and are already back in service. One had slightly more damage, but will be in the air shortly. None were destroyed, or close to that, as the Fake News said in headlines,” the president specified.
The story to which Trump was referring was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. As of Sunday afternoon, the outlet updated the copy of its story on Saturday at 12:18 p.m. EDT, just under three hours after Trump’s post.
The Wall Street Journal’s story, as it reads Sunday, states in its second paragraph, “The tankers were damaged but not fully destroyed and are being repaired, one of the officials said.” Other outlets that reported on the story citing the Wall Street Journal, such as Reuters, also included similar language toward the top of their copy.
“The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (in particular), and other Lowlife ‘Papers’ and Media actually want us to lose the War,” the president continued. “Their terrible reporting is the exact opposite of the actual facts! They are truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they cause the United States of America.”
Carr made headlines in September 2025 for his indirect role in the temporary suspension of late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel. After Kimmel falsely suggested Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin was a part of the MAGA movement, Carr told podcaster Benny Johnson, “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Carr’s remarks led Nexstar and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, two companies that own dozens of ABC affiliates which carry Kimmel’s show, to suspend airing the comedian pending an apology. Kimmel returned to the air less than a week later.
Earlier in September, the FCC chair made similar remarks about threatening to pull licenses of broadcasters who allegedly misled the public interest in reference to media coverage of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Garcia is a reputed MS-13 gangbanger and alleged human smuggler who the Trump administration had, at the time, deported to his native El Salvador.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.