Brendan Carr’s Abuse Of FCC ‘Equal Opportunity’ Rule Completely Blows Up In His Face
from the great-job,-buddy dept
Yesterday we noted how CBS fecklessly tried to prevent Stephen Colbert from broadcasting an interview with Texas Democratic State Representative James Talarico. Which, as you’ve probably already seen, resulted in the interview on YouTube getting way more viewers than it would have normally, and Texas voters flocking to Google to figure out who Talarico is:
In short, Brendan Carr’s continual threats and unconstitutional distortion of the FCC’s “equal opportunity” rule (also known as the “equal time” rule) resulted in a candidate getting exponentially more attention than they ever would have if Brendan Carr wasn’t such a weird, censorial zealot.
If only there was a name for this sort of phenomenon?
Despite a lot of speculation to the contrary, there’s no evidence the GOP specifically targeted Talarico in any coherent, strategic sense. This entire thing appears to have occurred because CBS lawyers — focused on numerous regulatory issues before the Trump administration, didn’t want to offend the extremist authoritarian censors at Trump’s FCC. It’s always about the money.
CBS (and ABC, NBC, and Fox) have been lobbying the FCC for years to get ride of rules preventing them from merging. CBS (read: Larry Ellison) has managed to get his friend Trump conducting a fake DOJ antitrust inquiry into Netflix’s planned acquisition of Warner Brothers, so they can then turn around and buy Warner (and CNN) instead. They’ll need to remain close with the administration for that to work out.
CBS tried to do damage control and claim they never directly threatened Colbert, but you can tell by the way they’re being a little dodgy about ownership of those claims (demanding no direct attribution to a specific person “on background”) they likely aren’t true:
Colbert’s response to the claim he wasn’t threatened was… diplomatic:
Amusingly some of the news outlets covering this story (like Variety here) couldn’t be bothered to even mention that CBS has numerous regulatory issues before the Trump FCC, which is why they folded like a pile of rain-soaked street corner cardboard at the slightest pressure from the Trump FCC.
As we’ve noted repeatedly, Brendan Carr has absolutely no legal legs to stand on here. His abuse of the equal opportunity rule is equal parts unconstitutional and incoherent. CBS (and any other network with bottomless legal budgets) could easily win in court (I wager they could even get many lawyers to defend them pro bono), but Ellison (and his nepo baby son) have a much bigger ideological mission in mind.
Filed Under: brendan carr, censorship, equal opportunity, equal time, fcc, first amendment, james talarico, stephen colbert, streisand effect
Companies: cbs
Comments on “Brendan Carr’s Abuse Of FCC ‘Equal Opportunity’ Rule Completely Blows Up In His Face”
I mean what happened is that Republicans made vague claims and statements of intent, and CBS and it’s pedophile loving leadership chose self censorship out of fear.
That’s exactly what their intent was. To scare everyone away from it.
This is the current administration writ large. Previous norms, intentions, understandings, legal precedents, etc do not matter to them. They will argue that they can do what they want by whatever flimsy argument they can make in the moment.
See also Noem changing site inspection rules for Congresspersons based on weasel wording about funding bills and fungible spending.
See also the administration arbitrarily canceling asylum cases to just immediately deport people who were following legal procedures.
Et cetera, et cetera, et alia, ad infinitum
And then our local Lord Haw-Haw will come in and confirm for us that everything Trump does is legal because democracy is actually just mob rule, the Constitution is optional, and Trump has a mandate through his historical landslide victory of less than half of the popular vote.
Re:
our local Lord Haw-Haw
That’s a hell of a call-back.
The only thing missing from Carr’s announcement was his Gestapo uniform–must have left it in the closet till the next WH meeting.
How could he have possibly known this could backfire?
I mean aside from Kimmel?
The amusing thing to me is that Colbert is now in his Lame Duck session; unless he does something that’s specifically a firing offense, he’s around until May and then he’s gone. So there’s really not much CBS or the Trump government can do to muzzle him (other than, I guess, threaten to no longer provide him legal support).
I look forward to two more months of hard hitting entertainment.
Re:
Legally, CBS may not have any responsibility to actually air the show, as long as they’re paying the staff. And they could go after anyone posting clips online without permission, for copyright infringement (for which one could probably be fired).
If they do have to air the show, “burning off” is a common practice in television—air it in the worst timeslot the contract allows, maybe even on an alternate network.
Anyway, the blowing up in Carr’s face is not “complete” till Carr is gone.
Re: Re:
How effective is throwing a show onto a worse timeslot when the youtube channel exists ?
Dumping multiple episodes at a time isn’t an option for a show that is filmed the same day it airs.
Re: Re: Re:
If they got very hostile toward Colbert, I assume none of this stuff would show up on “the” YouTube channel. Maybe on some unofficial channels which would be quickly hit with copyright takedowns.
Back to your question, it’s probably surprisingly effective. Many people don’t know how to share videos without involving corporate platforms, and don’t know how to save data from those platforms. I might brag about how I and many other people will manage to get copies from our “usual places”, but we’re a very different audience from those regularly watching the show. Even actual muzzles aren’t expected to be 100% effective.
That’s when they air it now. Is that a free choice, or a contractual requirement? I don’t think any of us have seen Colbert’s contract. If there’s a loophole, don’t be surprised when media executives exploit it (see “Hollywood Accounting”). And even if there’s not a loophole, they could breach the contract anyway, betting on having better lawyers than Colbert (see Hollywood Accounting again, considering people less famous than Stan Lee and Peter Jackson).
Carr’s only real goal here is to try pleasing the “nostalgic, geriatric TV addict” who happens to also be his boss.
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/boilingfrogs/colbert-talarico-trump-carr-fcc/
Yes it does.
In addition to Talarico, I’m sure The Verge is also getting a lot of positive attention for being among the rapidly-shrinking number of news outlets that actually have journalistic standards.
It has effectively nothing to do with Barbara Streisand. Nope. :)
I see what you did there.