Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has a message for the biased corporate broadcast media: Their “free monopoly” without responsibility ride is over.
As The FCC investigates Disney-owned ABC on alleged discriminatory practices and The View’s absurd claims that it’s a “bona fide news program,” the old, corrupt guard of broadcast media are being forced to come to terms with Equal Time. And it’s driving them insane.
“The American people went through hoax after hoax after hoax, whether is was the Hunter Biden laptop, or ‘mostly peaceful’ protests, the list goes on and on,” Carr said this week on The Federalist Radio Hour podcast. “The legacy media has really done this to itself.”
“I think it’s good for them to want to correct course and earn a little trust back,” Carr said of the FCC’s renewed focus on the “statutory equal opportunities requirement” in the Communications Act of 1934. Equal Time, as the act’s Section 315 is commonly known, stipulates that a broadcast program that hosts a political candidate also must provide equal access to the office seeker’s opponent to appear on the show or in another commensurate capacity.
The section was amended in 1959 when Congress passed limited exemptions to the equal time requirement for content deemed “bona fide” news — interviews, newscasts, and documentaries. The idea was to spur news coverage of political campaign activity in the early days of broadcast television.
Congress gave the FCC discretion to determine the scope of each exemption, according to the agency’s guidance issued in January, putting broadcast stations on notice and sending shockwaves through the industry.
‘A Thumb on the Scale’
As the guidance states, Congress’ inclusion of “bona fide” in the exemption categories reflects congressional concern that “broadcast stations would apply the exemptions too broadly in service of a political agenda and thereby frustrate the original purpose of the equal opportunities requirement to maximize broadcast coverage of political events.”
“The idea was pro-speech. It was about more debate, more discussion, more candidates, let’s empower people,” Carr said. “What Congress didn’t want was for broadcasters to put a thumb on the scale for one political candidate for one partisan political party.”
Congress was right to be concerned.
The “Big Three” over-the-air, broadcast TV networks have become the purveyors of the “vast wasteland” that then-FCC Chairman Newton Minnow warned Americans about in 1961. They also have long abused the public interest through biased, one-sided coverage of American politics. That bias has exploded in the Trump Age.
Carr said that over the years the networks and the producers of their shows had “just assumed that the FCC had walked away from enforcing the line between bona fide news programs and those that aren’t, and that basically everything is treated as bona fide news.”
Everything including late-night talks shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Late Night with Seth Meyers and the nonextant Late Show with Stephen Colbert that have been nothing more than Democratic Party public-relations operations badly masquerading as “comedy” for years. And The View, ABC’s daytime Trump Derangement Syndrome freakout.
The Media Research Center’s NewsBusters has long tracked the left-wing bias in the over-the-air broadcast networks. According to a recent NewsBusters’ report, 87 percent of Colbert’s political jokes had targeted conservatives since the media tracker began counting late-night jokes in 2023. “Likewise, since September 2022, more than 99 percent of his political guests have been liberals.”
The MRC recently filed a petition urging the FCC to reject the renewal of eight Disney-owned broadcast licenses, The New York Post first reported.
“We finally have an FCC willing to hold Disney and ABC accountable,” MRC President David Bozell said in a statement to the news outlet. “Broadcast licenses are a privilege, not an entitlement. In exchange for free use of the public airwaves, broadcasters agree to serve the public interest.”
‘Fairly Standard PR Campaign’
As the FCC investigates Disney, ABC and the entertainment company’s subsidiaries over potential violations of the Communications Act including allegations of discrimination, the agency has called for an early review of its broadcast stations’ licenses.
The American Alliance for Equal Rights in a June 17 letter to Carr claims Disney and ABC have “engaged in racial discrimination” through DEI programs and initiatives. In one hiring campaign, Disney “requir[ed] that at least half of producers and writing staff come from underrepresented groups,” according to documents obtained by the nonprofit “dedicated to protecting Americans of every race from the poison of racial classifications.” AAER asserts that the evident focus was on race.
“Disney’s hiring discrimination reportedly extended to positions like composers, costume designers, editors, music supervisors, crew, and technical assistants,” the letter states. “Disney even launched a fund that provided financial support for aspiring ‘Underrepresented Directors,’ apparently limited to ‘women, AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) Black, Indigenous/Native, Latinx, LGBTQIA+, disability-identifying, and religiously marginalized individuals.’”
The media conglomerate has launched an in-house PR campaign to urge viewers to defend Disney from what it considers a weaponized regulator. ABC has been running spots on The View and on other programs in local markets telling viewers that the agency “wants to control who is allowed to appear on the show.”
Carr said the media giant is running a “fairly standard PR strategy.” He told The Federalist that the agency isn’t trying to control content, it simply is interested in “applying the law that Congress passed, and that’s the bona fide news provision.”
‘Massive Weaponization’
As of late Wednesday, the FCC had received more than 215,000 public comments about The View’s bona fide news position. Many of the commenters expressed outrage over the FCC’s investigation, asserting that it was politically motivated and pushed by President Donald Trump who ceaselessly sparred with the accomplice media. Much of it was standard Trump-hating fare.
“The government needs to stop bowing down to a dictator. All you will gain is having our great nation come for you when he’s not president anymore,” one commenter wrote.
Carr said claims that the Trump administration is weaponizing the FCC are “interesting” in light of the actual weaponization that took place during Joe Biden’s presidency. He noted a petition filed by a leftwing group of activists urging the FCC not to renew the broadcast license of a Fox TV affiliate in Philadelphia because the group disagreed with the content on Fox News cable channel.
“This FCC entertained it, put it up for comment, and effectively threatened to not renew that license throughout the entire 2024 election cycle. Nobody said a word about it,” Carr told The Federalist.
Congressional Democrats have pressured cable companies to drop Fox News, OAN, and NewsMax from their channel lineups because they don’t like the messenger and the message. In some cases, the political pressure campaigns worked.
“I guarantee you when Democrats get back into power at the FCC, whenever that is, they’re going to go back to what they did the last time and there’s going to be massive weaponization,” Carr said. “So my view is, when we have gavels we shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand and take our gavels and hide them under a bush. We should not weaponize it, but we should use it and appropriately apply the law and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Listen to The Federalist Radio podcast with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr here.
