NBC Airs Trump Message After FCC Commissioner Flags ‘Equal Time’ Concerns Over Harris SNL Appearance
NBC aired a message from former President Donald Trump during Sunday’s broadcast of a NASCAR race and an NFL game, after FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr criticized Vice President Kamala Harris’ appearance on “Saturday Night Live” and accused the network of trying to evade an FCC rule requiring broadcasters to give rival candidates equal air time if they want it.
Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and actress Maya Rudolph appear ... [+]
According to the Hollywood Reporter, a video message from the former president aired right after the end of Sunday’s NASCAR playoff race, where Trump urged viewers to vote and warned that electing Harris would trigger a “depression.”
The same ad aired again at the end of the network’s broadcast of the NFL Sunday Night Football game, the report added.
The Trump campaign received a total of 120 seconds of free commercial time on the network—roughly similar to Harris’ SNL appearance.
On Sunday, NBC filed an “Equal Time” notice with the FCC saying the Democratic candidate for President “appeared without charge on NBC's Saturday Night Live…for a total period of…one minute and 30 seconds.”
The NBC filing came after Carr accused the network of structuring Harris’ appearance in a way that evades federal law requiring broadcasts to “comparable time and placement to all legally qualified candidates when the Equal Time rule is triggered.”
Carr—a Trump appointee and front runner to be the agency’s chair if the former president wins—said the SNL episode aired just “50 hours or so before election day”, which complicates the implementation of the rule, as it allows candidates seven days to “request their Equal Time from the broadcast station.”
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The Trump campaign also criticized Harris’ appearance on SNL, saying the Democratic candidate: “has nothing substantive to offer the American people, so that’s why she’s living out her warped fantasy cosplaying with her elitist friends on Saturday Night Leftists as her campaign spirals down the drain into obscurity.”