FCC's Wheeler Vows To Require Equal Time

The head of the Fed­er­al Com­mu­nic­a­tions Com­mis­sion prom­ised Thursday to en­force his agency’s reg­u­la­tions re­quir­ing tele­vi­sion sta­tions to give polit­ic­al can­did­ates equal op­por­tun­it­ies for air­time.

“The rules are pretty clear. Rules are rules,” FCC Chair­man Tom Wheel­er told re­port­ers Thursday. “I hope that we have de­veloped a repu­ta­tion as folks who en­force the rules.”

Tom Wheeler

The National Review reports Hil­lary Clin­ton’s ap­pear­ance earli­er this month on Sat­urday Night Live could trig­ger the so-called “equal-time” rules, as could Don­ald Trump’s plan to host the long-run­ning NBC com­edy show next month. That doesn’t ne­ces­sar­ily mean Lin­coln Chafee will be the next host of SNL—but it could mean that loc­al NBC af­fil­i­ates across the coun­try will have to give pres­id­en­tial can­did­ates ac­cess to equal TV time, except in bonafide news programs.

Un­der a law passed in 1934, the FCC re­quires broad­cast tele­vi­sion and ra­dio sta­tions (but not cable chan­nels) to give equal op­por­tun­it­ies to “leg­ally qual­i­fied” can­did­ates. The law ex­empts news pro­grams, which the FCC has broadly in­ter­preted to in­clude talk shows like The To­night Show.

But the rules would likely ap­ply to a scrip­ted pro­gram like SNL. Con­cern over hav­ing to give air­time to oth­er can­did­ates led some sta­tions to stop air­ing Arnold Schwar­zeneg­ger movies in his cam­paigns for Cali­for­nia gov­ernor and sta­tions to pull re­runs of Law & Or­der when Fred Thompson ran for the Re­pub­lic­an pres­id­en­tial nom­in­a­tion in 2007.

Lawrence Lessig, a Har­vard Uni­versity law pro­fess­or who is run­ning a long-shot pres­id­en­tial cam­paign to draw at­ten­tion to cam­paign-fin­ance is­sues, has already filed re­quests with dozens of NBC af­fil­i­ates for three minutes and 12 seconds of air­time fol­low­ing Clin­ton’s ap­pear­ance on SNL last month.

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