Just because the law hasn't been enforced for a while doesn't mean it's not the law.
What would a "bona fide" news program look like? I don't know, but I imagine it would require editors who verify "facts" and would not allow Joy Behar and Sonny Hostin and Ana Navarro to just repeat whatever nonsense they saw on BlueSky three minutes before air.
Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr questioned on Thursday whether ABC's "The View" should be subject to review from the agency, making the daytime talk show Carr's latest target in his scrutiny of television programs that have been critical of President Donald Trump.
In an appearance on conservative commentator Scott Jenning's podcast, Carr said he wondered whether "The View" qualified as a "bona fide" news program, a program discussing current events.
If the show did not qualify, Carr said, the program would have to obey the FCC's equal time rule -- which requires broadcast stations to give equal airtime and access to competing political candidates.
"I think it's worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether 'The View,' and some of these other programs that you have, still qualify as bona fide news programs and therefore are exempt from the equal opportunity regime that Congress has put in place," he said in the interview.
The FCC head has long targeted the ABC daytime program. But his criticism -- and a hint that the agency may take action against the show -- takes on new relevance after Carr threatened ABC and its local affiliates on Wednesday to act against Jimmy Kimmel's late-night program following his comments about the death of Charlie Kirk.
ABC suspended Kimmel hours later. A spokesperson for "The View" did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mollie and Mark Hemingway made this point: The federal government really does have a statutory regulatory power over broadcast networks. The airwaves are regulated by the government because we can't just have six stations all attempting to broadcast on the same frequency in the same area, or else they'd all interfere with each other. So the federal government assigns these valuable spectrum rights to companies, but with restrictions and requirements. One is equal time, and Brenden Carr says he's going to enforce that requirement.
You know what the government has no control over? No statutory power to regulate?
The internet and cable, which are exactly the mediums that Obama and then Biden asserted power to censor.
Why didn't they also censor the broadcast networks, which they had the power to regulate?
Easy: They didn't have to. The broadcast networks were the pinnacle of liberal media power. They needed no federal "jawboning" to push the left-wing line.
It was the internet and cable where dissident wildcat media operations were blooming, and so that's where Obama and Biden declared a wholly-extralegal power to control.
Ed Morrissey wrote about this:
In this argument, Carr makes a very important distinction about jurisdiction. The FCC issues licenses for broadcasters only pursuant to the Communications Act of 1934 and other legislation, ie, those whose signal goes out over the public airwaves. As Carr notes (and as I noted briefly last night), the FCC does not have jurisdiction over cable channels such as Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, or others. The FCC has absolutely nothing to do with online outlets either, nor newspapers. This is a key difference between the FCC and OfCom, which polices all media in the UK -- and is politically corrupt, to boot.
Even so, why does Congress invest the FCC with the authority to terminate licenses for content or actions they consider to be "not in the public interest"? To understand that, one has to understand the nature of broadcasting. In the earliest days of radio, operators would "step on" each other's broadcasts by using the same or close-by frequencies, ramp up power, and attempt to drive competitors into collapse by literally blocking their signals. Congress put an end to it by declaring the commercial broadcast spectrums to be a federal jurisdiction and to be public property.
...
The FCC has mainly let its foot ease off that pedal in recent years, as Carr notes. Why? Most of the offensive material they would normally police has moved to cable or the Internet. The irony of this is that the FCC has largely stood down while the Biden administration essentially created its own OfCom [the shithole country Britain's all-purpose censorship operation] at the State Department and HHS, funding "misinformation" policing that targeted mainly the online and cable-channel markets. The federal government created censorship regimes on platforms where they had no jurisdiction, while allowing broadcasters to exploit government-provided monopolies with carte blanche on blatantly false content with clear partisan and malicious intent.
Now, one can argue that the FCC really should use a more laissez-faire approach to enforcing the "public interest" clause. However, one can't argue that the authority doesn't exist and hasn't been enforced in the past.
The anti-free-speech left is now pretending to be pro-free-speech, despite having cancelled or economically boycotted (or straight-up assassinated) every speaker on the right for at least 12 years. None of the latter-day Free Speech Absolutists said anything about the firing of Roseanne Barr or Gina Carano. Even now as they fulminate about the real Free Speech Martyr Jimmy Kimmel -- he lost a show, and that's terrible, and Charlie Kirk lost his life, which apparently isn't really something to be bothered about -- they don't even say, retrospectively, "Looking back, it appears the intolerance shown to Roseanne Barr and Gina Carano was also wrong."
No, they're sticking to their claim that of course conservative speech can be punished, because it's deplorable, but leftwing assassination-bait speech cannot be, because left-wingers are aristocrats with far more rights and privileges than the peons and serfs.
On that, Roseanne Barr made some news. I think. At least I never heard this before.
She says that she knows who is responsible for her cancellation -- Barack and Michele Obama, who she said both called ABC to demand her firing.
Now, Obama was technically a former president when he used his power to compel the firing of Roseanne, but who are we kidding? At least half of the federal bureaucracy remained loyal to him as if he were the serving president. He was letting them know the Democrat Party was demanding this firing, and that there would be consequences for non-compliance with the dictator's commands.
Mary Katherine Ham has a point: People are saying Kimmel's dangerous Russian disinformation was "just a joke."
No, it wasn't.
Mary Katharine Ham
@mkhammer
This is a smaller quibble in this discussion but it's bugging me. The assertion isn't a joke! I'm not being cute and saying it wasn't funny. It just wasn't even attempting to be a joke. The goof on Trump and construction was a joke. The first part is just a false statement.
Yes, exactly. Every late-night "joke" has the same structure: First you introduce the fact you're going to make a joke about, then you tell the joke.
Standard late-night joke structure:
Yesterday Ted Kennedy had lunch with his staffers (true, factual premise)...
... police divers recovered the bodies of the staffers from the river. (the joke, the fake made-up part)
That's a terrible joke, I know, but I'm just showing the set-up/punchline format. In late-night "comedy," the set-up is the true thing based on the day's events. The second thing is the made-up, fictitious joke. (Or "joke," in Kimmel's case.)
Kimmel wasn't telling a "joke" in his set-up. He was relaying the Fact set the coming joke would riff on. And the "Fact" he was pushing was the same "fact" the left had spent the entire week pushing: that a right-winger, possibly a "groyper," had murdered Charlie Kirk, but the right is running a False Flag operation to blame it on the left.
By the way, NPR is still pushing this lie.