The Federal Communications Commission’s only Democrat commissioner said the time has come for the regulatory agency to clearly define what it means for a broadcaster to serve in the “public interest.”
Anna Gomez, in remarks Thursday at the University of Mississippi’s Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation, said that local TV and radio stations are required to meet certain public interest standards, despite the fact that the agency has never defined what that means.
“I have called for the commission to initiate a rulemaking to define what it means by ‘the public interest,'” Gomez said, according to The Desk. “Otherwise, we’re just regulating against what we don’t like, and that is a direct violation of the First Amendment.”
Licensed TV and radio stations have typically pointed to news and community events programming as evidence of operating in the public interest, but Gomez said that some regulators have weaponized the public interest obligation of broadcasters in recent years to censor certain political and social opinions.
She reportedly pointed to the case last month in which FCC Chairman Brendan Carr reminded broadcasters about their FCC obligations after late-night host Jimmy Kimmel criticized President Donald Trump and Republicans after the assassination of conservative leader Charlie Kirk.
In his monologue, Kimmel accused Republicans of attempting to mischaracterize the background of the alleged Kirk shooter for political gain. Kimmel also said Trump’s reaction to Kirk’s killing was akin to that of a “4-year-old mourning a goldfish.”
ABC News announced that Kimmel’s show was suspended indefinitely due to the comments, but ABC’s parent, The Walt Disney Company, later decided the show could resume production. Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair, Inc., announced that they will not carry Kimmel’s show on their ABC affiliate stations, but later lifted those suspensions.
The Desk reported that Nexstar and Sinclair have pending deals that require approval from the FCC, but each company said those deals did not factor into their respective decisions to pull “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Carr has said that the broadcasters decided to yank the show based on their own “public interest obligations” and not as a result of his influence.
During the FCC’s open meeting Tuesday, Carr reiterated that point and said that the agency had failed to uphold the public interest requirement in the past.
“I think for several years or decades, the FCC has walked away from enforcing the public interest standard when it comes to local broadcasters,” Carr said, according to The Desk. “I don’t think the FCC walking away from enforcing the public interest standard has been a good thing.”
In her speech on Thursday, Gomez reportedly agreed that broadcasters should be held to a certain standard, as a condition of being allowed to use publicly held frequencies, but said that the requirement was at risk of being weaponized for political purposes due to the lack of a clear definition of the term “public interest.”
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