America has been through a lot in the last decade. From the chill-inducing Russia collusion hoax following Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory to the media silencing of speech surrounding COVID-19-era policies, and from the coverup of the Biden family scandals to the Biden administration’s “whole of society approach” to speech suppression, the radical left has pushed the Overton window further and further away from the Founders’ vision of liberty.
Through it all, the left has owned censorship.
Yet, these last couple weeks, centering on the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, have pushed even the political right to the limit on what speech is constitutionally-protected.
Seemingly caught up in the fray of an overwhelmingly emotional and pivotal moment in modern American history, there have been missteps in the wrong direction.
From Rep. Clay Higgins’s (R-LA) diatribe, calling for the censorship and blacklisting of individuals online and their near outright expulsion from the public sphere, to Attorney General Pam Bondi echoing the left’s anti-‘hate speech’ language before attempting to walk it back in a clarifying X post, some on the political right have gotten it oh, so wrong.
But Republicans and conservatives that have called out ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel are not the same.
MRC President David Bozell eloquently described that difference in a piece on Fox News,
“Cancel culture has always been about silencing dissent and enforcing conformity to the liberal agenda. Christians who refused to march in lockstep with new orthodoxies were stripped of jobs, deplatformed, denied banking services and hounded from public life. Conservatives never demanded that liberals change their private beliefs — only that liberals stop weaponizing those beliefs to punish dissenters.
“What’s happening now looks different. Private companies are distancing themselves from employees who smeared a man murdered in cold blood. Businesses don’t exist to serve radical ideology. They exist to serve customers. When an employee brings shame on the company by cheering violence, a corporation has every right to say: not on our watch.”
But the left has shifted its focus to a new favorite boogeyman, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr. Some of the same leftists that joked about President Donald Trump’s Twitter ban are crying hypocrisy, suggesting that Carr violated the First Amendment when he called out Kimmel on a podcast.
The backdrop: Nexstar Media Group preempted Jimmy Kimmel Live! “indefinitely” after the Media Research Center exposed video of Kimmel claiming that MAGA was “desperately trying” to portray Kirk’s killer as not “one of them,” and after Carr called out ABC parent company Disney for potential “news distortion.” Sinclair Broadcast Group, another local television affiliate, did similarly as Nexstar. But just a week later, Kimmel is set to make his return Tuesday night.
So, does that make the left right to cry hypocrisy on Carr?
For starters, Disney temporarily dumping Kimmel is not the same as when A&E suspended Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame. To the contrary. There is a vast difference between broadcast television programming and cable or satellite television programming.
Put plainly, unlike cable or satellite television, broadcast stations receive what amounts to a government subsidy via a license for use of the “public’s airwaves.”
Per the FCC website, Congress has directed the FCC to regulate broadcasting, which includes creating various rules related to authorizing television broadcast stations and rules related to broadcast programming and operations with which stations “must comply.”
For broadcast stations, the FCC has stated that “each radio and television licensee is required by law to operate its station in the ‘public interest, convenience and necessity.’”
Is that really a hair worth splitting? Why, yes. It is.
The FCC further states that “Broadcasters — not the FCC or any other government agency — are responsible for selecting the material they air,” and the FCC is responsible for determining whether granting licenses to such broadcast stations “would serve the public interest.”
That includes local broadcast channels under Disney.
It’s hard to argue that unrepentant Kimmel spreading “falsehoods” on national television serves the public interest, as Bozell noted in a piece on Fox News:
“Kimmel’s case is especially egregious. He used ABC’s platform to tell millions of viewers that Charlie Kirk was shot by a supporter, a claim completely untrue. Kimmel should have known what had been widely reported over the weekend: The killer is a left-wing radical.
“Kimmel could have corrected the record as soon as the indictment came out Tuesday, but he didn’t. He could have walked into the studio, looked into the camera and said plainly that he was wrong. He didn’t. He could have honored the grieving family by admitting he maligned their husband and father. Again, he didn’t.”
As Carr wrote in an X post, “Broadcast TV stations have always been required by their licenses to operate in the public interest—that includes serving the needs of their local communities. And broadcasters have long retained the right to not air national programs that they believe are inconsistent with the public interest, including their local communities’ values. I am glad to see that many broadcasters are responding to their viewers as intended.”
So, did Carr go too far, or was Carr just doing his job: reclaiming the role the left has for so long abdicated in which the FCC regulates broadcasters who are not “serv[ing] the public interest”?
Carr laid out the Trump administration’s position on Fox News with Will Cain, saying, “The key point here is that these were local TV stations licensed by the FCC that have a public interest obligation to serve their local community. They pushed back on Disney and said, ‘We don’t think that this type of programming is responsive to the needs of our viewers in Utah, in Pennsylvania, and that’s exactly the way the system was supposed to work from the get go. But we haven’t seen it in a very long time.”
So, in a nutshell, Carr appears to have just been doing his job. For the longest time, legacy media outlets and their local broadcast affiliates have been allowed to air content that serves only a sliver of the public, not the broader public interest. Those days, it seems, may be coming to an end.
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
