FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr loves the idea of government speech regulations, and he especially loves the idea that he will be the one to impose them in a future Trump administration.
That’s the short version.
Here’s the slightly longer, dumber version: Kamala Harris made a cameo appearance on Saturday Night Live over the weekend, triggering an FCC broadcast TV policy known as the “equal time rule”. NBC, no stranger to FCC rules, did the legally required thing and offered Trump his own appearance on the network later in the weekend. Everything should be settled… but here’s Carr, calling for the government to punish NBC.
Seriously! Here’s Carr appearing on Fox Business this morning, threatening to revoke NBC’s broadcast license in retribution for speech he doesn’t like:
“We need to keep every single remedy on the table,” Carr said to host Maria Bartiromo when asked how the government should handle Harris’ SNL spot. “One of the remedies ultimately would be license revocation if we find that it’s egregious, and we’ll see what they have to say about this. But it needs to deter this type of conduct, because when you’re 50 hours before the opening of election day, the whole purpose of this rule is to give people a fair shot.”
The equal time rule, which Carr is referencing, says broadcasters using the public airwaves have to provide legally qualified candidates for office “comparable time and placement to opposing candidates.” It is a pretty archaic rule — it was formulated back when people got their most of their content over the air using TV and radio antennas, which gave those networks a huge amount of power over what voters might have seen and heard. This historical media dominance is how the government justified imposing speech regulations like the equal time rule on broadcasters over the obvious First Amendment issues.
FCC commissioners aren’t supposed to run around threatening to punish broadcasters for their speech
The way the equal time rule generally works is that big broadcasters like NBC tell the campaigns that a candidate is appearing on air, and the campaigns are allowed to request equal time. Notably, the FCC says the equal time rule “does not require a station to provide opposing candidates with programs identical to the initiating candidate,” so there’s a lot of ways to satisfy the rule. If the campaigns think this process isn’t being followed, they can complain to the FCC, but the government isn’t meant to sit in the middle negotiating all this, and FCC commissioners certainly aren’t supposed to run around threatening to punish broadcasters for their speech just because they want to.
I will disclose here that NBCUniversal is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, but Trump has threatened ABC and CBS with similar FCC penalties and filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS, so the specific network isn’t really an issue here. In fact, we just did an entire Decoder episode about the increasing number of threats against broadcast TV networks from Trump and the GOP because it’s getting so weird.
“No program is more familiar with the equal time rule than SNL.”
Here, the system worked exactly as designed. Harris appeared on SNL, NBC told the Trump campaign, and then Trump appeared in a short video broadcast during a NASCAR race on NBC and again during Sunday Night Football, satisfying the equal time rule. “No program is more familiar with the equal time rule than SNL,” an FCC source intimately familiar with this process tells me, noting that John McCain, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and other candidates have appeared on the show during presidential campaigns without similar eruptions.
The funniest thing about all these Trump threats to revoke licenses is that the days of broadcast TV dominance are obviously long gone. They were already gone 20 years ago, when Republican FCC Chair Michael Powell started arguing that consumers don’t make a distinction between regulated broadcast channels and unregulated cable channels and TV networks should all just compete for audience free of government interference.
Here in 2024, broadcast viewership is at all-time lows and there are more ways than ever for candidates to reach voters, making speech regulations like the equal time rule even more irrelevant. Trump can call into Fox News whenever he wants, and when they cut him off he can just call into the next conservative cable news network that will take him. Trump also owns a social network! His pal Elon Musk also famously owns a social network! Trump’s rallies are all livestreamed on multiple platforms, and he’s recently appeared on as many interchangeable bro podcasts as is possible, including the ur-bro podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, which is among the most popular podcasts in the world. No one needs the government messing with speech to ensure access to Donald Trump.
No one needs the government messing with speech to ensure access to Donald Trump
So why this particular tempest in a teapot now? Well, Brendan Carr really wants to be chair of the FCC in a second Trump administration, and saying he will punish companies for their speech on cable news is the best way to get Trump’s attention. We wrote an entire profile of Carr in 2020, when he was making the same censorious noises in favor of a particularly bad Trump executive order imposing moderation rules on social platforms — an order that Carr’s fellow FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel warned would turn the agency into “the President’s speech police,” and which faced immediate First Amendment lawsuits before President Biden rescinded it.
That all happened the last time Trump was in office, when he was still hemmed in by a functional legal system and a staff of career bureaucrats with a basic understanding of American democracy. It’ll be worse the next time — and Brendan Carr will be there to punish you for speaking your mind about it.
