Can the FCC crack down on broadcasters over content? Yes. Should it? Well …
Let’s start with Matt Taibbi’s understandable discomfort over the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel at ABC. Taibbi writes — accurately — that Kimmel always ranked as the worst of the late-night political clapterists, at least since Samantha Bee finally disappeared from the scene. Even Stephen Colbert didn’t match Kimmel’s ignorance and malice, Taibbi concedes. But still, Taibbi wanted a market response instead of a government intervention:
Of all the network late night acts, Kimmel’s was the most vicious and unredeeming, continually hitting new lows during the pandemic in particular, with the aforementioned AntiVax Barbie and his “Rest in Peace, Wheezy” monologue sure to go down as cultural anti-landmarks. Virtually everything he said in the Trump era was DNC messaging with a punchline, putting him on course to spend the afterlife doing laps in media hell with Keith Olbermann. With his ratings in freefall, Disney was going to drop the axe sooner or later.
But acting so quickly after Carr’s “easy way or the hard way” line opens a can of worms. Now the organic demise of legacy media (definitely happening, and at lightning speed too) can’t be an unmuddied story. What Carr described would reimagine the FCC as a press regulator in a full-on truth-arbiter role, in the spirit of Britain’s hated OfCom. That feels like a big jump from where the Administration was in February, when J.D. Vance lambasted Europeans in Munich for losing sight of basic tenets of democracy, including the “freedom… to make mistakes.”
We’ll get back to the OfCom comparison in a moment. Last night, FCC chair Brendan Carr refused to retreat from his activist position on enforcement of the “public interest” requirement for broadcast licenses. Carr told Sean Hannity that the FCC had abdicated its legitimate role in ensuring that public airwaves get used properly:
VIDEO: Brendan Carr, Chairman of the FCC, hops on “Hannity” to discuss Disney and ABC suspending Jimmy Kimmel and pulling “Jimmy Kimmel Live” indefinitely after pressure from Nexstar and Sinclair; this in the wake of Kimmel linking the Charlie Kirk assassin to MAGA. pic.twitter.com/NivQ2tkt0L
— Diamond Joe (@ItsDiamondJoe) September 18, 2025
In this argument, Carr makes a very important distinction about jurisdiction. The FCC issues licenses for broadcasters only pursuant to the Communications Act of 1934 and other legislation, ie, those whose signal goes out over the public airwaves. As Carr notes (and as I noted briefly last night), the FCC does not have jurisdiction over cable channels such as Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, or others. The FCC has absolutely nothing to do with online outlets either, nor newspapers. This is a key difference between the FCC and OfCom, which polices all media in the UK — and is politically corrupt, to boot.
Even so, why does Congress invest the FCC with the authority to terminate licenses for content or actions they consider to be “not in the public interest”? To understand that, one has to understand the nature of broadcasting. In the earliest days of radio, operators would “step on” each other’s broadcasts by using the same or close-by frequencies, ramp up power, and attempt to drive competitors into collapse by literally blocking their signals. Congress put an end to it by declaring the commercial broadcast spectrums to be a federal jurisdiction and to be public property.
To ensure the proper operation of commercial broadcast spectrums (radio and TV use different spectrums, ie frequency ranges), Congress gave the FCC to essentially grant and enforce local monopolies on specific frequencies. The FCC also regulates and restricts power output to ensure no overlap between broadcast areas for legit licensees. That’s all a broadcast license is — a grant of a monopoly on a specific ‘channel’ in a local area to one entity to the exclusion of all others.
Let’s take Los Angeles as an example. The local ABC TV affiliate is Channel 7, which is identified in the US as the frequency band 174 kHz – 180 kHz. (Trust me on this; I’m a former ham radio licensee, KJ6FR.) The FCC granted Disney/ABC the exclusive rights to broadcast on that frequency. If anyone else attempts to broadcast in that frequency range in LA, the FCC can and most definitely will shut down that transmitter and penalize its operators. In exchange for enforcing Disney’s monopoly on that broadcast frequency range, Disney has to agree to operate its station in the “public interest,” as determined and enforced by the FCC.
The FCC has mainly let its foot ease off that pedal in recent years, as Carr notes. Why? Most of the offensive material they would normally police has moved to cable or the Internet. The irony of this is that the FCC has largely stood down while the Biden administration essentially created its own OfCom at the State Department and HHS, funding “misinformation” policing that targeted mainly the online and cable-channel markets. The federal government created censorship regimes on platforms where they had no jurisdiction, while allowing broadcasters to exploit government-provided monopolies with carte blanche on blatantly false content with clear partisan and malicious intent.
Now, one can argue that the FCC really should use a more laissez-faire approach to enforcing the “public interest” clause. However, one can’t argue that the authority doesn’t exist and hasn’t been enforced in the past. And one cannot argue after the last few years of Big Brother-Big Tech censorship that Kimmel is some sort of anomaly. Kimmel’s harangue was precisely the kind of speech that the State Department (and HHS) kept shutting down via its Global Engagement Center, its partnerships with activist “monitors” like Newsguard, not just on media organizations but on Facebook and Twitter users.
And we weren’t using a government-provided broadcast monopoly as a speech platform, either.
That’s why Disney et al have little choice but to play along. They need the FCC to enforce the monopolies it grants in order for their broadcast stations to operate. If the FCC decided to stop enforcing its authority, pirate operators would waste no time interfering with their over-the-air connections to viewers, and that means lost revenue in a business that is already a thinner-margin enterprise already.
To use the theme from my headline: Disney (and even more so the affiliates) want the FCC on that wall. More importantly, they need the FCC on that wall, or at least their broadcast units do, radio as well as TV.
In the end, Kimmel isn’t worth the fight anyway. He was almost certainly headed for cancellation of a normal sort anyway, as Taibbi notes. Carr simply escalated the cost structure to accelerate that choice.
If we thought our job in pushing back against the Academia/media/Democrat censorship complex was over with the election, think again. This is going to be a long fight. If you want to join the conversation in the comments — and support independent platforms — why not join our VIP Membership program? Choose VIP to support Hot Air and access our premium content, VIP Gold to extend your access to all Townhall Media platforms and participate in this show, or VIP Platinum to get access to even more content and discounts on merchandise. Use the promo code FIGHT to join or to upgrade your existing membership level today, and get 60% off!
