Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told NBC’s Meet the Press that Carr threatening Disney was “absolutely inappropriate,” and that “Brendan Carr has got no business weighing in on this.” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) posted on X that “my colleague, Ted Cruz, said it looked just like Goodfellas. As a First Amendment guy myself, I think he’s probably got it right. You don’t have to like what somebody says on TV to agree that the government shouldn’t be getting involved here.”
“A fairly explicit threat to punish Disney”
Legal experts at the libertarian Cato Institute and the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI) also described Carr’s comments as a threat. “It’s hard not to read [Carr’s statement] as a fairly explicit threat to punish Disney if they didn’t take Jimmy Kimmel off the air, and that’s exactly what ABC did very shortly thereafter,” said Thomas Berry of the Cato Institute. The AEI’s Daniel Lyons described the Kimmel suspension as “part of a long, unfortunate FCC tradition of ‘regulation by raised eyebrow,’ where informal threats shape media behavior without formal action.”
While government coercion of private companies can violate the First Amendment, TV station owners are free to make decisions about what content they air. Carr described what happened with Disney as organic pressure from station owners who are frustrated by the increased power of Disney and other national programmers.
“Local TV stations for the first time in a long time stood up and said, ‘We don’t want to run that program,'” Carr said yesterday, contending that “Disney on its own made the business decision not to have him air for some period of time.”
The protests are coming not from individual stations but from two large companies that own dozens of stations: Sinclair and Nexstar. Both companies said they would not air Kimmel’s show upon its return but would continue discussions that might eventually bring Kimmel back to their stations. “Sinclair is the largest owner of ABC stations, with 38 across the country,” while “Nexstar operates 28 ABC affiliates,” The Hollywood Reporter wrote today.
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