Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) scolded FCC Chair Brendan Carr for threatening ABC host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke he made in the days after Charlie Kirk was murdered.
During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Wednesday, Schatz noted that Carr had effectively threatened to pull ABC's broadcast license if the network did not take Kimmel off the air.
"Chairman Cruz said I think it is unbelievably dangerous for the government to put itself in the position of saying we're going to decide what speech we like, and what we don't, and we're going to threaten to take you off the air if we don't like what you're saying," Schatz told Carr. "Do you see this issue the same way as the chairman?"
"Well, my position on this is pretty clear," Carr replied. "We have a public interest standard that Congress has put into the law, and there's a number of very specific rules and doctrines that flow from that, the broadcast hoax rule, the news distortion rule."
"So you think you have jurisdiction over political satire?" the senator pressed. "That one is a yes or no. Do you have jurisdiction or not?"
"We have jurisdiction with respect to the broadcast airwaves uniquely to ensure that their operations are in the public interest," Carr insisted.
The chair refused to say whether there were conservative satirists whom he would investigate.
"So I'm a little confused because it seems to me that in subsequent conversations, I forgot after Ted [Cruz] and John Thune and Dave McCormick and others said, this seems like a little much for you, Chairman, that you went out and you said, that was fake news," Schatz observed. "I'm not going after Jimmy Kimmel. And now you're saying you have a perfect right to go after Jimmy Kimmel, and I'm wondering which one it is."
"No, two different things," Carr argued. "Democrats at the time were saying that we explicitly threatened to pull a license if Jimmy Kimmel wasn't fired. Never happened."
"I mean, you're kind of tiptoeing through the tulips here, right?" Schatz interrupted. "Because what you actually said is they have a license granted by us at the FCC that comes with an obligation to operate in the public interest. We can do this the easy way or the hard way."
"This stuff, at least up until the last year, has been out of character, and it will not age well," he added. "And it will not age well on the conservative side of the aisle and the liberal side of the aisle. This is not American FCC behavior."