Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the FCC, claimed there was no White House pressure on him to make the unprecedented order forcing Disney’s ABC to reapply for spectrum licenses on an accelerated schedule — a move that came as President Trump has called for Jimmy Kimmel to be fired over a joke the late-night host made about First Lady Melania Trump.
Speaking to reporters Thursday after the FCC’s April open meeting, Carr said “there was no pressure from the outside” on the matter. He maintained the agency’s official position that the ABC license review is due to the agency’s investigation into Disney’s potential violations of discrimination rules via its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices — not because of “speech.”
That said, Carr said Trump has “every right” to call for ABC to fire Kimmel, as does the First Lady, adding, “There’s a lot of people who agree with the president on this one.”
Asked if the Kimmel joke would play a part in the FCC’s review of the ABC licenses, Carr said Disney is “going to have to come in and demonstrate that they’ve been operating in the public interest” — and he that said as part of the process “anybody can file petitions” requesting the agency deny ABC’s license renewals, which the FCC will review.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday evening, Carr posted a riposte to a commenter on X who took aim at the FCC chief. A user named Brian Christopher tagged Carr in a post that said “This dude @BrendanCarrFCC is a whole bitch. Can’t wait till the next president replaces his goofy ass.”
To that, Carr responded with a meme drawn from NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” quoting a line delivered by Ron Swanson (played by Nick Offerman): “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”
It was not an atypical response from Carr, who, like others in the MAGA-verse, fire back at critics using memes meant to convey bravado and defiance.
Officially, the FCC’s Media Bureau, in its April 28 order, said it was calling in ABC’s licenses for eight owned-and-operated stations for early review pursuant to an investigation into Disney and ABC over potential violations of the FCC’s “prohibition on unlawful discrimination.”
But the timing of the order left a clear impression that the FCC was acting in response to outrage by Trump and others over Kimmel’s comedy bit in which he said Melania had the “glow of an expectant widow.” That segment on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” came two days before the real White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25 was thrown into chaos after an armed man charged through a security perimeter outside the ballroom before he was apprehended and subsequently charged with an assassination attempt on the president.
The optics of the situation — in which it seems as if the FCC is trying to punish or intimidate ABC over Kimmel’s joke — drew condemnation from advocacy groups and lawmakers.
In a statement Wednesday, Curtis LeGeyt, president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters, said about the order, “The FCC’s broadcast license renewal process must be grounded in predictability, fairness and transparency, principles reflected in the license terms Congress established and later extended. The Media Bureau’s nearly unprecedented request for one company to quickly reapply for all of its licenses — rather than utilize its traditional enforcement process — runs contrary to these principles and creates significant uncertainty for all broadcasters.”
Asked about the NAB’s statement, Carr on Thursday referenced religious broadcasters’ objection to Kimmel. “NAB’s gonna say what the NAB’s gonna say, I get it… I guess Disney’s a member of NAB. But broadcasters are not all with NAB on this,” Carr said. “We have the National Religious Broadcasters that filed a petition with the FCC calling on the FCC to take action on Disney” with respect to Kimmel’s Melania joke.
The NRB on Monday said it asked the FCC to investigate ABC following Kimmel’s joke about Melania Trump on the April 23 episode of the late-night show, which, the group asserted, “when viewed in context, raise[s] serious concerns about the normalization and potential incitement of political violence.”
Among those criticizing the FCC’s move against ABC was Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. “It is not government’s job to censor speech, and I do not believe the FCC should operate as the speech police,” Cruz said about the accelerated license review of the ABC-owned stations.
Carr told reporters Thursday, “I agree with Senator Cruz that the FCC shouldn’t be in the business of being the ‘speech police.’ What we have to do as an agency is to enforce our rules and regulations, and there are rules about nondiscrimination that are unrelated to speech that we have been pushing across the board. And that’s the basis for the early renewal in the Disney case.”
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