FCC Chair Denies ‘Explicitly’ Threatening Affiliates If They Didn’t Drop Jimmy Kimmel Live

When it comes to his role in Jimmy Kimmel’s September suspension, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr stuck to the script on Wednesday as he testified at an oversight hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee.

Among the topics senators asked Carr, as well as FCC commissioners Anna Gomez and Olivia Trusty, about was Carr’s orchestration of events leading to multiple affiliate groups, and then ABC as a whole, temporarily taking Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air.

“We have a public interest standard that Congress has put it into law,” Carr repeatedly maintained. “My position, and the Trump administration’s position, is we should be enforcing these rules and policies.”

KIMMEL’S SUSPENSION: A QUICK RECAP

On September 15, Kimmel during his Live! monologue said that “the MAGA gang” had been “desperately trying to characterize this kid (Tyler Robinson) who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

Though Kimmel was just recapping a crisis within the conservative movement, some saw him as suggesting that Kirk’s shooter was, in fact, MAGA. Some 40 hours later, FCC chief Carr fired a shot across the bow, saying on right-winger Benny Johnson’s podcast that “there are actions we can take [against] licensed broadcasters” such as ABC. 

Broadcasters “have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest,” Carr explained on the podcast. “When we see stuff like this… look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct… or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

TED CRUZ AT HEARING: KIMMEL IS ‘PROFOUNDLY UNFUNNY’

Opening Wednesday’s hearing, Senator Ted Cruz, who condemned Carr’s podcast hit at the time, reiterated that the FCC chair’s choice of words was “dangerous as hell” and “right out of Goodfellas.”

That said….

“Jimmy Kimmel is angry, overtly partisan, and profoundly unfunny,” Cruz opined. “That sadly is true of most late-night comedians today, who seem to have been collectively broken by President Trump’s [second] election. But what the government cannot do is force private entities to take action that the government cannot…. Democratic or Republican, we cannot have the government arbitrating truth or opinion.”

Carr, in response to one of many Senate questions that focused on his “easy way or the hard way” language, maintained, “I’m not looking at things that are [merely] offensive or awful.” Instead, he asserted that Kimmel’s monologue represented an “effort to mischaracterize the motivation of one of the most political assassinations of our time”—and thus demanded FCC interdiction.

However, “Political satire that’s not broadcast hoax, that’s not news distortion, is perfectly fine,” Carr stated.

CARR DENIES THREATENING AFFILIATES

In one of his few candid moments, Carr argued that “Democrats at the time were saying that we explicitly threatened to pull a [broadcaster’s] license if Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t fired. That was nothing more than projection by Democrats.”

Of note, Kimmel’s suspension came not two months after President Trump, in the wake of CBS cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, suggested that the ABC late-night host would be “next” to lose his job.

FCC COMMISH: TRUMP IS ‘WEAPONIZING’ US

FCC commissioner Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the FCC panel, acknowledged at the Senate hearing that the Trump administration “has been on a campaign to censor content and to control the media” by “weaponizing whatever levers it has”—including “using the FCC to threaten licenses.”

As a result, “broadcasters are being chilled” into watching their step and words, Gomez said. “We are hearing from broadcasters that they are afraid.”

Gomez explained that the broadcast hoax standard Carr repeatedly cited was put in place because of Orson Wells and his infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast, while “our news distortion policy does not mean ‘any content we don’t like.'” Rather, “it requires a vey specific circumstance to be used , which is why it is really never used.”