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With so many cartoon villains in the Trump administration, it’s hard for an upstart evildoer to break through the news cycle. Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr is giving it his all, though. He’s threatening late night hosts! He’s appearing at CPAC! He’s sucking up to Elon Musk!
But his latest campaign to menace the hosts of ABC’s The View and destroy the independence of broadcast media may just make him a household name. Because this time ABC and its parent company Disney are fighting back, exposing Carr's blatant misconduct as he schemes to censor media outlets for refusing to toe the MAGA line.
Kimmel was the warm up act
As the agency’s own website acknowledges, “the First Amendment, as well as Section 326 of the Communications Act, prohibits the Commission from censoring broadcast material and from interfering with freedom of expression in broadcasting.”
But Carr has weaponized the FCC’s immense power over local affiliate stations, which license the finite broadcast spectrum from the government. In the fall, he pressured ABC to cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live! for a supposedly offensive joke about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
“There’s actions that we can take on licensed broadcasters,” he blustered to right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson. “And frankly, I think that it’s sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, ‘Listen, we are going to preempt. We are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.’”
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The media monoliths gobbling up local news heard that message loud and clear. Nexstar Media Group, which needed Carr to bless its $6 billion merger with rival Tegna, continued to preempt Kimmel on its ABC affiliates, even days after ABC returned the comedian to his time slot.
But Carr was just getting started.
The only view that matters is Carr’s
In February, the FCC opened an investigation of The View over an interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico.
The basis of this investigation is a deliberate misreading of the Equal Opportunities Requirement, better known as the equal time rule, that requires broadcast licensees to give equal airtime to opposing candidates. ABC is not a licensee, but its affiliates are, and, just as he did with Kimmel, Carr leverages those local stations to control the network.
"When you look at the lineup of guests that have typically been on The View, I think it's an uphill climb for Disney to make the case that they're just a straight news program," Carr scoffed to Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. (Irony is dead.)
