Somewhere in a corner office in an otherwise empty, mausoleum-like, concrete-and-steel box in Washington, D.C., with icicles hanging from the windows and frozen lampposts on the street below, a middle-aged, white-bearded, slick-pated gent in frameless glasses may have been huddled under a wool blanket watching TV as Monday night rolled over into Tuesday, and he found himself defying the chill by boiling over with rage at what he was witnessing:
Obviously partisan political speech, right there in front of his eyes. Exactly what he was talking about when he recently renewed his campaign to smother the supposedly satirical commentary directed at his patron and caudillo, the president of the United States.
Not only did he have to endure Jon Stewart ferociously denouncing Administration officials as liars who’ve attempted to gaslight the nation in the matter of the killing of a legal protester in Minneapolis, and his chief bete noire, Jimmy Kimmel, defending with passion and choked-up emotion, the victim of that killing, and Stephen Colbert spending double-digit minutes assailing the federal agents who fired the shots and suggest they had better devote the rest of their lives to eating dinner at home because no other meal they might order in a restaurant would “go un-spit-upon.”
But Colbert was also devoting three full segments of his show to interviewing a Democratic politician who was accusing his boss, Donald Trump, of using the federal government “for pure evil in Minnesota right now.”
So, not a fun time for Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Even if he was watching at home instead of his office.
Maybe so unpleasant a time he might push even harder for his plan to enforce the old, mostly obsolete equal-time rule for broadcasters. The rule is supposed to compel broadcast stations which give airtime to pols running for office to offer the same exposure to their opponents.
Late-night shows have for years not been seriously subject to that rule, because they could claim that their interviews with major politicians constituted “news” content, and were thus exempt.
Carr has signaled he means to challenge that exemption, specifically targeting ABC stations for two shows, the afternoon women’s roundtable staple, The View, and the network’s late-night entry led by Kimmel. Jimmy surely is crawling under Carr’s skin because he escaped Carr’s previous effort to silence him by squeezing some ABC station-owners to yank Kimmel off the air under threat of losing their broadcast licenses.
The license gambit is at the heart of the renewed threat, almost surely targeted at late-night hosts like Kimmel, Colbert and Seth Meyers. (Stewart, distributed on cable, is not subject to the FCC Inquisition.)
There’s no question that Colbert this Monday night showcased a political guest, Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, who is running for a second term. The appearance might have triggered Carr’s license-challenge sound-alarm except for the fact that, as reported in The Hollywood Reporter, Shapiro’s re-election campaign does not begin officially until February 17.
That meant Colbert was safe, for now. And because his Late Show on CBS ends May 21, maybe he will simply defy whatever legal action the FCC might undertake because he’ll be gone before the real campaign season begins. (Though his network’s level of loyalty is hardly rock solid, having canceled his show despite its position as ratings leader in the late-night hours.)
How the challenge will be addressed by the other late-night shows is unclear at the moment, though one avenue of counterpunch might be suits that claim selective regulation if the FCC doesn’t take similar action against radio shows hosted by Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, and scores of other voices who run strictly partisan shows with conservative political guests.
They’re broadcasters, too.
Carr’s statement of January 21 specifically says that “a program that is motivated by partisan purposes” may not be exempt under that “news” provision. But the point may be mainly to harass and legally encumber the remaining Trump critics, and their networks, in late night.
Monday night certainly underscored that the hosts who have been unabashed denigrators of Donald Trump show zero signs of moderating their approach. The brutal events in Minneapolis last weekend only raised the volume on the mockery and disgust directed at the president.
The Shapiro interview was another direct assault on Trump’s policies and character. But a fair case could be made it was also something else: news.
Colbert raised the issue that those in charge of ICE and other federal units who have occupied Minneapolis and other major cities during the Administration’s crackdown on undocumented aliens have talked of targeting Philadelphia next.
That’s the biggest city under Shapiro’s management, so his comments about how he and his staff are preparing were legitimately newsworthy. He said they have conducted extensive “tabletop exercises” in anticipation of any action directed at Philadelphia.
He also of course poured on the aggressive partisan rhetoric: “It’s a sad day in America that a governor of a Commonwealth needs to prepare for a federal onslaught where they would send troops in to undermine the freedoms and the constitutional rights of our citizens. That is un-American.”
If Shapiro visits another late-night stage and says similar things after February 17, and into the months leading up to November, his Republican opponent (likely State Treasurer Stacy Garrity) may push for equal time.
Would she enjoy chatting with, say, a motivated and likely hostile Jimmy Kimmel in those circumstances?
She might want to ask Jay Leno how that worked out for him back in 2010.
