FCC chairman Brendan Carr responded to ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel after the host weighed in on the agency’s new “equal opportunities” rule guidance, which will exclude late night and daytime talk shows from receiving a bona fide news exemption.
to ensure equal access to broadcast station facilities for legally qualified candidates for office, regardless of political affiliation. The rule covers individuals who have publicly announced their intention to run for office and qualify under applicable state or federal law to hold the office being sought.
In 2006, the FCC determined that “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” qualified for an exemption from the rule as a “bona fide news interview” — the first time that such an exemption had been applied to a late night talk show.
“I might need your help again,” the late night host said. “This isn’t the ’50s anymore … Back then there were only three major networks. Now we’ve got cable, we’ve got streaming, we have satellite, podcasts, social media. There are thousands of outlets now. Broadcast TV used to account for 100 percent of viewing. Now, it’s like 20 percent. There are so many channels, some of them doing 24/7 Trump programming: Fox News, Newsmax, One America New, Real America’s Voice. None of them are required to give equal time, but we are because we use the public airways.”
During the FCC’s monthly press conference on Thursday, Carr responded to Kimmel, saying it’s ultimately up to Congress to decide whether the rule should be expanded to other forms of distribution.
“If you don’t want to comply with the public interest standard with your programming now, you have so many other ways of getting it out there, whether it’s a podcast, a cable channel, a streaming service,” Carr continued. “If you want the unique privilege of distributing over this one type of thing, broadcast TV, then we should really make sure that you’re actually complying with the rules of that distribution mechanism.”
He added that the statutory history of the bona fide news exemption is clear that Congress was “worried that TV programmers would broadly take advantage of trying to claim they were bona fide news when they weren’t.”