{"id":354647,"date":"2025-12-17T19:19:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T19:19:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/354647\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T19:19:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T19:19:06","slug":"jimmy-kimmel-hearing-fcc-chairman-deflects-responsibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/354647\/","title":{"rendered":"Jimmy Kimmel Hearing: FCC Chairman Deflects Responsibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn a testy and often heated hearing Wednesday, FCC<\/a> Chair Brendan Carr<\/a> did not take responsibility for his statements about Jimmy Kimmel<\/a> ahead of his late night show being pulled from the air.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou look at the evidence, the express statements by every single company involved, from Nexstar to Sinclair to Disney, as recently as last week, is that they made these business decisions on their own,\u201d Carr said.<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter comments Kimmel made on his late night show about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Carr appeared to threaten<\/a> the licenses of ABC affiliates that broadcast Jimmy Kimmel Live! in a Sept. 17 appearance on a conservative YouTube show.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen 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, on Kimmel, or there\u2019s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead,\u201d Carr said at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter these comments, Nexstar and Sinclair Broadcast Group, major owners of local TV stations and ABC affiliates, said they would preempt<\/a> Kimmel\u2019s show. Disney, which owns ABC, then said the network would \u201cindefinitely\u201d suspend Kimmel. Kimmel\u2019s show returned to air <\/a>Sept. 23 amid public outcry, including from Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Cruz who said the FCC shouldn\u2019t meddle with policing political speech.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Wednesday, Carr claimed Kimmel\u2019s comments \u201cappeared to be an effort to mischaracterize the motivations of one of the most significant political assassinations of our time.\u201d (Kimmel said: \u201cWe hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\n\tHowever, Carr claimed Wednesday that there was \u201cwas no threat to revoke a license there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAsked by Sen. Ben Ray Luj\u00e1n (D-NM) and others on whether the FCC is an independent agency, as it says on its website, Carr said it is \u201cnot formally an independent agency,\u201d and would not directly answer whether or not President Donald Trump was his boss when pressed by Sen. Andrew Kim (D-NJ), but said he did have the ability to fire any commissioner. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWould it be appropriate for the President or senior administration officials to give you direction to pressure media companies?\u201d Kim asked.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSorry, I\u2019m not going to get into hypotheticals,\u201d Carr said.<\/p>\n

\n\tLuj\u00e1n then asked Carr: \u201cIs it appropriate for the FCC to revoke broadcast licenses based on the viewpoint of the licensee?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s appropriate for the FCC to take action under our public interest standard and hold broadcasters accountable, things like broadcast hoax, news distortion, localism, these are things that we should be taking action on and enforcing,\u201d Carr said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHe added that even if a broadcaster is critical of Trump, \u201cany broadcaster that complies with the public interest standard is not in any risk at all,\u201d but when pressed on whether he would commit to not retaliating against those broadcasters added that \u201cthere is no First Amendment right to an FCC license.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnna Gomez, the lone Democratic commissioner at the FCC, vehemently disagreed on both of Carr\u2019s responses to Luj\u00e1n\u2019s questioning, while Olivia Trusty, the other Republican commissioner agreed with Carr.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAt one point during the hearing, which sometimes turned to yelling, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA.) called for Carr\u2019s resignation.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe is turning the Federal Communications Commission into the Federal Censorship Commission. It\u2019s a betrayal of the FCC\u2019s mission. You should resign, Mr. Chairman,\u201d Markey said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) also pointed to additional investigations Carr is enacting, saying that the Kimmel comments were not an \u201cisolated incident.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe do have investigations going on NPR and PBS. We have a number of investigations that are ongoing. I think you step back over the years, I think the FCC has walked away from enforcing the public interest standard, and I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a good thing,\u201d Carr said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tShe also critiqued what she saw as his position targeting liberal voices rather than conservative voices, pointing to Trump\u2019s recent tweet blaming <\/a>director Rob Reiner\u2019s death on his dislike of the president.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDo you think that\u2019s appropriate for the President of the United States to do that? And if Jimmy Kimmel would have said that would you have threatened to take him off the air?\u201d Kloburchar asked.<\/p>\n

\n\tThroughout the hearing, Carr defended his position by pointing to the news distortion rule and broadcast hoax rule, saying he\u2019s making sure broadcasters are operating in the public interest. However, as lawmakers and Gomez pointed out, this appears to be a misuse of those rules, and he is defining what\u2019s in the public interest.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat [broadcast hoax] rule was put in place because of Orson Welles and the War of the Worlds and our news distortion policy does not mean any content we don\u2019t like. It requires a very specific circumstance in order to be used, which is why it\u2019s really never used,\u201d Gomez said. \u201cThe First Amendment governs what we do, as does the Communications Act prohibition on censorship and this commission is abusing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tGomez also said she did think Nexstar and Tegna preempted Kimmel in order to curry favor with the administration amid their planned merger. She was directly asked: \u201cDo you think the FCC uses merger approval approval as a lever to exert pressure on media corporations to threaten free speech in our democracy?\u201c<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWithout a doubt, the FCC is leveraging its authority over mergers and enforcement proceedings in order to influence content,\u201d Gomez said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile Cruz had previously spoken out about Carr\u2019s \u201ceasy or hard way\u201d statement, calling it \u201cdangerous as hell\u201d and \u201cmafioso,\u201d he did not press him on the issue Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAnother area of agreement between you and I is that Jimmy Kimmel is angry, overtly partisan and profoundly unfunny. That sadly is true for most late night comedians today, who seem to have been collectively broken by President Trump\u2019s election,\u201d Cruz said to Carr on the matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a testy and often heated hearing Wednesday, FCC Chair Brendan Carr did not take responsibility for his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354648,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[17105,88,3092,17114,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-354647","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-brendan-carr","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-fcc","11":"tag-jimmy-kimmel","12":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}