FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez signaled that she's open to relaxing some broadcast-ownership rules, called for a clearly defined public interest standard, and again condemned FCC “censorship and control” efforts in her latest “First Amendment Tour” speech Thursday evening. “While one set of outlets is defunded, stripped of licenses or publicly admonished, others are quietly promoted and cleared of regulatory obstacles,” Gomez told a modest crowd at the University of Mississippi. The Trump administration’s goal “is not to reduce bias or to ensure balance, but to engineer a media environment that echoes the government's worldview.”
Wednesday was the start of the first fiscal year in over 50 years without federal funding for public broadcasting stations, and public broadcasters are starting to cut programming and even making plans to eventually go dark in some parts of the country, said America’s Public Television Stations CEO Kate Riley in interviews. “It feels like every day an announcement comes from another station talking about the services that they're having to cut, the layoffs they're having to make,” Riley said. “Our sense is that this is really just the beginning, and that this is going to be a rolling wave of these types of station cuts and reductions in services over the coming months.”
The FCC voted unanimously Tuesday to seek comment on relaxing local broadcast-ownership limits, even as protesters at the crowded meeting called FCC Chairman Brendan Carr “the censorship czar” and he continued to deny that his recent comments about Jimmy Kimmel were a threat.
Broadcasters, MVPD groups and public safety entities largely agree that the FCC's plans to revamp emergency alerting are a good thing, but they differ on the direction they want those plans to take, according to comments filed in docket 25-224 by Thursday’s deadline.
Nexstar and Sinclair Broadcast planned to cease preempting Jimmy Kimmel Live! and air the show on their ABC affiliates Friday night, said news releases Friday afternoon. A source familiar with the situation told us that Disney made no editorial or content concessions prior to the announcements.
President Donald Trump threatened ABC again Tuesday, the same night that host Jimmy Kimmel returned to the airwaves in most markets and two days after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr denied attempting to intimidate the network. “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this,” Trump said in a post Tuesday night on Truth Social. “Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative.” Trump has threatened ABC and other networks repeatedly for years (see 2410100050).
Nexstar said Tuesday it would join Sinclair in continuing to preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live!, despite the show's return to ABC's lineup starting Tuesday night, while FCC Chairman Brendan Carr continued to insist on social media that he didn't cause Kimmel’s suspension.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s comments pressuring ABC and broadcast companies to cease airing Jimmy Kimmel Live! were condemned by lawmakers and some conservative publications and groups over the weekend, including the Cato Institute, the National Review and the Free State Foundation. In a Concordia Summit Q&A on Monday, Carr said Kimmel’s show being taken off the air -- just hours after he publicly warned of possible FCC action against ABC and urged broadcasters to preempt it -- was “a business decision” and “not because of anything that’s happening at the federal level.”
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s use of agency threats against Disney, ABC and local broadcasters on Wednesday led to Jimmy Kimmel Live! being pulled from the air within hours, and Carr is widely expected to keep repeating the tactic, academics and attorneys said in interviews Thursday.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr signaled in a podcast interview posted Wednesday that the FCC could act against ABC and parent company Disney if they don't discipline late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over comments related to the political affiliation of the man arrested in the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. First Amendment attorneys told us that policing the speech of late-show monologues is outside FCC authority.