I have written about regulatory overreach in the past, but I never imagined that I would witness such egregious examples as those emerging south of the border.
If you somehow missed it, ABC/Disney suspended the Jimmy Kimmel show following some “ill-advised” comments by Kimmel about the assassin of Charlie Kirk. Let’s face it, trying to find humour from a political assassination demonstrated questionable judgment.
Too soon? The funeral hasn’t taken place yet. In today’s polarized environment, the subject should have been treated like kryptonite by any national programming host.
So, from a purely commercial perspective, it would have been understandable and fair game for ABC/Disney to intervene.
But, the timeline of events show that the decision was catalyzed by a comment from Brendan Carr, the chair of the FCC:
There’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters. Frankly, I think it’s really sort of past time that these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say “Listen, we’re going to preempt. We’re not gonna run Kimmel anymore, until you straighten this out, because we the licensed broadcaster are running the possibly of fines or licensed revocation from the FCC, if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.”
So, I think again Disney needs to see some change here. But, the individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it’s time for them to step up and say this garbage, to the extent that it’s what comes down the pipe in the future, isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities. But, this sort of status quo is not acceptable where we are.
Some additional context is warranted.
The FCC’s own website notes that the regulator cannot interfere with what is said on the air, with a extremely narrow exceptions, including news distortion. So it is interesting that FCC Chair Carr used that term in reference to Jimmy Kimmel.
I would not have considered late night talk shows to be news programming. And if news distortion is prohibited for comedians and talk show hosts, I think that would mean the end of the opening monologues for most of those shows.
Still, the thinly veiled threat toward licensed local stations stung Nexstar, America’s largest broadcasting group, with 200 stations in 116 markets, serving 220M people. A month ago, Nexstar entered into a $6.2B agreement to acquire TEGNA, a deal requiring FCC approval. Not surprisingly, Nexstar announced that it would preempt the Jimmy Kimmel show, and not carry it on its stations – precisely the remedy suggested by the FCC Chair.
With a giant hole in its coverage area, Disney/ABC pulled the plug.
Would commercial considerations have led to a similar outcome anyway? After all, the comedic lines were in poor taste and were certain to offend a large swath of Americans. We’ll never know. But the FCC Chair had no business making those threatening comments.
In Canada, we have experience with regulatory chairs making comments that resembled summary judgments. In my view, it was inappropriate regulatory overreach.
When I ran The Canadian Telecom Summit, for many years, the CRTC Chair would speak, often in an interview format. Open files were clearly off-limits.
We should not expect regulators to be cloistered for their terms, unable to speak to the media or the industry. However, perhaps we should be talking about what are the appropriate boundaries? I am also conscious of this week’s on-air antisemitic rant by Radio-Canada’s Washington correspondent. How should a regulator respond to such an incident?
As Canada moves to introduce legislation on hate and the promotion of terror, limits on speech freedoms are being more clearly defined. How should regulators ensure timely reactions to violations?