NBC filed an equal time notice with the Federal Communications Commission Sunday afternoon, noting that Kamala Harris received 90 seconds of free airtime in her appearance on Saturday Night Live last night.
The filing follows complaints from Trump-appointed FCC commissioner Brendan Carr, who began crying foul when word first leaked out Saturday evening that Harris would be appearing on the show.
“This is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule,” Carr wrote in a post on Twitter/X. “The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct—a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election.”
The FCC’s equal time rule ensures that U.S. broadcast stations provide all political candidates for a specific office with comparable airtime opportunities.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Saturday Night Live offered Donald Trump or any of the third-party candidates for president the opportunity to appear on the show, although the equal time rule doesn’t require that time be offered ahead of time. Nor does it require that the time be granted on the same show.
For example, when Donald Trump hosted Saturday Night Live ahead of the 2016 Republican primaries, NBC filed an equal time notice the Monday after the broadcast stating that Trump had received 12 minutes and 5 seconds of free air time. Trump’s primary opponents then had seven days to request equal time on the network. (At least five of them did so.)
Complicating matters this time around is the fact that November 5th is less than 48 hours away, making for a very short timeline for any equal time requests to received (and granted) ahead of the Election Day.
Ahead of the start of the season, SNL boss Lorne Michaels cited equal time rules when he was asked if he had extended any invitations to any of the actual candiates to appear on the show.
“You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal time provisions,” Michaels said at the time. “You can’t have the main candidates without having all the candidates, and there are lots of minor candidates that are only on the ballot in, like, three states and that becomes really complicated.”
