Kimmel Broke FCC Rules. Brendan Carr Was Right To Notice

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has done the impossible: He got ABC to consider the tone of its often offensively partisan programming and make a change. Disney-owned ABC abruptly pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! from its broadcast lineup late Wednesday, hopefully ending Kimmel’s ugly career.

The move is more likely in response to Carr’s threat of consequences for ABC, issued on The Benny Show podcast with Benny Johnson, than Kimmel’s unfunny, untrue monologue insulting the conservative movement while it mourns the senseless loss of one of its brightest lights.  

“We 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,” Kimmel said.

It was a tone-deaf pack of lies. The alleged assassin is not MAGA. At 22 he is not a kid. And he has numerous overtly leftist characteristics. Kimmel tried to throw his viewers off the scent of the truth, and, with a sickening mirth, kicked hurting people while they are down. The few fools who still watched his show surely assumed his words were true. Many people get their news from so-called comedy monologues and assume the premise of the “joke” is at least accurate.      

Kimmel straight-up lied to his audience, violating FCC regulations that prohibit news distortion or a hoax. According to the regulations:  

The broadcast by a station of false information concerning a crime or catastrophe violates the FCC’s rules if:

• The station licensee knew that the information was false;

• Broadcasting the false information directly causes substantial public harm; and

• It was foreseeable that broadcasting the false information would cause such harm.

Kimmel seems wise enough to know what he was doing by flippantly blaming the murder on “the MAGA gang,” certainly causing “substantial public harm.”

While there is room in space for more satellites for cable TV, there is a limited amount of bandwidth for local, terrestrial television and radio broadcasters. Instead of one company owning the airwaves, they belong to the public. That is why local stations, like the ABC affiliates that used to air Jimmy Kimmel, are required to hold an FCC license and serve the public interest.

This is why you may hear the f-word on cable, but not so much on terrestrial stations. Violations may lead to the FCC pulling the broadcaster’s license. So, yes, we have free speech, but local broadcasters must be careful about how they communicate if they want to keep that license. Propagandists like Eli Lake will loudly and wrongly say, “That’s a violation of the first amendment.” No, it is not.

“The public interest means you can’t be running a narrow, partisan circus and still be meeting your public interest obligations,” Carr said. “It means you can’t be engaging in a pattern of news distortion.” He added that he could see Kimmel being suspended, but that barring a suspension, the FCC has “remedies.”

“This also strikes me as sort of conduct that, to some extent, shows some sort of desperate irrelevance. I mean, we’re sort of exiting an era where the three main … legacy broadcast networks could control and dictate the narrative to the American people,” Carr said. “One thing that President Trump did when he ran for office is he ran directly at that legacy media establishment. He smashed the facade that they get to control what we say, what we think, the narrative around events, and we’re seeing a lot of consequences.”

“NPR has been defunded, PBS has been defunded, Colbert is retiring,” Carr continued. “Joy Reid is out at MSNBC. Terry Moran is gone from ABC, and it is now admitting that they are biased. CBS has now made some commitments to us that they’re going to return to more fact-based journalism, and so I think you see some lashing out from people like Kimmel, who are, frankly, I think, talentless and are looking for ways to get attention, but, you know, their grip on the narrative is slipping.”

After that conversation, Nexstar Media Group, a primary ABC affiliate, released a statement saying it would “preempt” [run something else in place of] the show “for the foreseeable future beginning with tonight’s show.”

“Nexstar strongly objects to the recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets,” the statement said.

 “Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located,” Andrew Alford, president of Nexstar’s broadcasting division, said in a statement. “Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time, and we have made the difficult decision to preempt his show in an effort to let cooler heads prevail as we move toward the resumption of respectful, constructive dialogue.”

Sinclair, Inc., “the nation’s largest ABC affiliate group,” also issued a statement decrying Kimmel’s comments, pressuring Kimmel to apologize to the Kirk family, and announcing its ABC stations would run a tribute to Charlie Kirk during Kimmel’s timeslot. Sinclair also praised Carr for his comments regarding Kimmel’s lies.

“Mr. Kimmel’s remarks were inappropriate and deeply insensitive at a critical moment for our country,” Sinclair Vice Chairman Jason Smith said in a statement. “We believe broadcasters have a responsibility to educate and elevate respectful, constructive dialogue in our communities. We appreciate FCC Chairman Carr’s remarks today and this incident highlights the critical need for the FCC to take immediate regulatory action to address control held over local broadcasters by the big national networks.”

Carr deserves a full five-star review for using the power of his position to inform ABC of the consequences the outlet should have already been familiar with, and for giving them a chance to do the right thing.

Perhaps viewers will return to ABC if it can come up with programming that is honest, entertaining, and inoffensive.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.