The FCC on Wednesday issued guidance to ensure that programming on broadcast television must comply with political equal opportunities requirements and end what one expert referred to as “DNC TV,” Breitbart News has learned exclusively.
Decades ago Congress put protections in place through the Communications Act of 1934 to ensure that broadcast television ensures equal access to legally qualified candidates for office regardless of political affiliation. Under Section 315 of the Communications Act, if a broadcast station permits any legally qualified candidates to use its facilities, then it shall provide equal opportunity to all other legally qualified candidates for that office.
Congress in 1959 adopted limited exceptions to the equal opportunities requirements by amending Section 315 to exempt the equal opportunities requirement by a legally qualified requirement for any bona fide newscast, bona fide news interview, bona fide news documentary, or on-the-stop coverage of bona fide news events.
The FCC Media Bureau guidance noted that Congress amended Section 315 to reflect concern that broadcast stations would too broadly apply the exemptions in service of a political agenda.
“Indeed, the FCC has specifically noted that certain programs that might otherwise be exempt would be excluded from an exemption category if the program was ‘designed for the specific advantage of a candidate,'” the guidance stated. It continued:
The federal equal opportunities regulations operate to prevent broadcast television stations, which have been given access to a valuable public resource (namely, spectrum), from unfairly putting their thumbs on the scale for one political candidate or set of candidates over another. These regulations, which do not apply to cable channels or other forms of distribution, represent, in codified form, the decision by Congress that broadcast television stations have an obligation to operate in the public interest — not in any narrow partisan, political interest. [Emphasis added.]
NBC gave President Donald Trump free commercial time in November 2024 during a NASCAR race after former Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live for one minute and 30 seconds.
Then-Commissioner Carr said at the time that this was a “clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule.”
He wrote, “The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct — a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election. Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns.”
The equal political opportunities exemption changed in 2006 when the FCC determined the interview portion of The Tonight Show with Jay Leo qualified as a bona fide news interview. This was the first time that the exemption applied to a late-night talk show, which primarily offers entertainment, not news coverage. This decision runs counter to a 1960 precedent when the Commission decided that the Jack Paar program, also referred to as the Tonight Show, was not deemed to have bona fide news interviews.
The FCC emphasized in its guidance that the broadcast television industry has taken the 2006 staff-level decision to mean that virtually all similar entertainment programs, including daytime or late night, are exempted from equal opportunities requirement under the bona fide news exemption.
“Importantly, the FCC has not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify for the bona fide news exemption,” the FCC Media Bureau guidance wrote.
Daniel Suhr, the president of the Center for American Rights (CAR), praised FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s guidance in an interview with Breitbart News.
“We’re thrilled that Chairman Carr is taking another important step on behalf of viewers to ensure better broadcasting and the end of left-wing bias on the part of the networks. I think we all know that daytime and late night talk shows have really just become DNC TV,” he said.
“As the President rightly says they are just arms of the Democratic Party at this point. I think you need to look no further than the Media Research Center statistics that show you know, 99 percent of guests are liberal and left wing. One hundred percent of politicians are Democrats on, you know, [Stephen] Colbert or [Jimmy] Kimmel or The View, and… none of that is in the public interest.”
“The fundamental premise of the FCCs and really Congress’s policy in this area is that that we need equal access and that the airwaves should not be twisted into a propaganda machine for just one party,” he added.
The View enflamed controversy recently after an actress tearfully claimed that her mother had shielded her eyes from allegedly seeing a lynching victim “hanging from a tree” when she was a child living in Columbus, Ohio. As Breitbart News reported, according to America’s Black Holocaust Museum, there has never been a lynching in Columbus.
The Media Research Center (MRC) found that The View often has to issue “legal notes” when they would accuse someone of a crime or controversial statements or practices. Some controversial claims on The View include:
- Claiming that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was at the head of the protests at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
- Multiple members of the show implied and/or claimed that President Trump and Elon Musk stole the 2024 presidential election.
- Sunny Hostin, one of the show’s hosts, said Trump was “certainly” “guilty of insider trading” for sending out a social media post touting the stock market.
- Trump and his voters were accused of being responsible for the mid-air collision of an Army Blackhawk helicopter and a commercial airliner just outside Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC.
- Co-host Joy Behar accused Elon Musk of being “pro-Apartheid” before quickly walking back the claim.
Suhr said the 2006 staff-level decision about the Tonight Show with Jay Leno led the networks to drive a “bus through what was supposed to be a narrow exemption.”
The MRC in late December found that late night comedy shows went six months with 99 percent leftist guests, the same as the first six months of the past year, and the last six months of 2024. Guests included former first lady Michelle Obama, former Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ). These shows include ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.
CAR last September filed a complaint against late night television host Jimmy Kimmel, saying that his jokes overwhelmingly attack the Republican Party over Democrats, he “lopsidedly” hosts Democrat politicians, and that his donations to Democrats represent a financial conflict of interest under FCC policy.
The CAR president described the years since the 2006 staff-level as an “abdication” of the FCC’s responsibility to enforce the public interest rule and said that Carr is “rightly taking up the responsibility Congress has given the Commission and is starting to enforce the law again in a meaningful way.”
Carr moved to revive the enforcement of the public interest rule after Jimmy Kimmel falsely said that Charlie Kirk’s assassin may have been part of “MAGA.”
“When you have a broadcast license, there’s a public interest standard, which means you have to operate consistently with the public interest, and one of the things that the FCC has in our case law and our precedent is this concept of a news distortion complaint,” Carr said last September.