The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is coming once again for shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live! with new guidance for “equal time” rules for broadcast interviews with political candidates.
On Thursday night, Kimmel himself unpacked the rules and Donald Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr’s “latest attack on free speech” (Carr’s threats toward ABC saw Kimmel’s show temporarily pulled off the air in September). The late show host said the FCC is “now trying to use equal time rules to prevent shows like ours and The View from conducting interviews with candidates. They’re reinterpreting long agreed upon rules to stifle us.”
So, what exactly are these rules and how do they affect talk shows? In his monologue, Kimmel broke it down, running through the impact of the 1927 Radio Act, which required broadcasters “to give equal time for legally qualified camps, meaning, if you put one candidate on the air, you had to offer the same amount of airtime to all the other candidates.”
As Kimmel explains, a 1959 amendment made exempt “what they call bonafide newscasts and bonafide news interviews from the rules governing equal time, and that allowed ABC, CBS, NBC, etc, to interview one candidate without having to interview all of them, which mostly applied to news programs, until years later, when talk shows started having candidates on.”
Kimmel’s examples include John F. Kennedy’s 1960 appearance on The Tonight Show with Jack Paar and Bill Clinton’s 1992 interview on The Arsenio Hall Show, both while campaigning for president. And Jay Leno’s 2006 interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger when campaigning for governor of California, which saw Democratic rival Phil Angelides file a complaint to the FCC demanding equal time — the FCC denied his request and the exemption for talk shows has remained to this day.
“They ruled that Arnold appearing on Leno, this was a bona fide news interview, even though it was a talk show and therefore not subject to those equal time rules,” said Kimmel. “And that’s how every talk show’s operated since then. Until this week, when Trump’s little ferret in the FCC, Brendan Carr, who, as you know, is doing everything he can to shut us up the easy way or the hard way, is trying to say we no longer qualify for the bona fide news exemption when it comes to interviewing candidates, which is a sneaky little way of keeping viewpoints that aren’t his off air.”
“I have no idea what the outcome of this is going to be,” Kimmel concluded. “I wanted to point it out, because it is another example of this administration trying to squash anyone who doesn’t support them.”
