Jimmy Kimmel Says FCC’s Demands Are ‘Latest Attack on Free Speech’

As the Federal Communications Commission considers new equal-time mandates for late-night talk shows and daytime talk show The View, Jimmy Kimmel accused the government agency and its Donald Trump-appointed chair, Brendan Carr, of a partisan attack on free speech.

“Trump and his Brendan Carr-tel is coming for us again,” Kimmel said on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Thursday, referring to Carr’s previous threats over the comedian’s Charlie Kirk assassination comments. “They’re reinterpreting long-agreed-upon rules to stifle us.”

As Kimmel explained to viewers, the equal-time rule emerged in the Radio Act of 1927 and later applied to television, mandating that over-the-air broadcasters “give equal time for legally qualified candidates” in a political race. But a 1959 amendment exempted bona fide newscasts and news interviews, allowing broadcast networks to “interview one candidate without having to interview all of them,” Kimmel said.

Talk shows then started to host candidates, and the FCC determined in 2006 that Jay Leno’s Tonight Show interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was then running for governor of California, was a bona fide news interview and therefore exempt from equal-time rules.

“And that’s how every talk show has 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 the air. It’s his latest attack on free speech.”

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Kimmel pointed out that broadcast TV is no longer a dominant medium and that the FCC isn’t coming after conservative-leaning channels like Fox News, Newsmax, One America News, and Real America’s Voice.

“Equal Time was designed to limit how much influence broadcasters have over public opinion. But we’re not the only thing on television anymore,” the host explained. “We’re a small fish now. We used to be the whole pond. Now we’re part of this enormous Las Vegas buffet of, like, we’re the mashed potatoes on the buffet. And the FCC now wants to mash us even more. … I want to just point it out because it is another example of this administration trying to squash anyone who doesn’t support them.”