FCC Reinstates Complaints Against Major Broadcasters Regarding 2024 Election Coverage
The allegations suggest that the broadcasters exhibited a bias favoring the Democratic candidate.
On Wednesday, Brendan Carr, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), reinstated three complaints that were previously dismissed by his predecessor just before President Donald Trump took office.
The renewed complaints originate from the Center for American Rights, a conservative legal organization based in Chicago. They target the stations of three major networks: NBC, ABC, and CBS, focusing on their coverage during last year’s presidential election.
One of the complaints involves WNBC-TV in New York, which is accused of breaching the “equal time” rule by featuring then-Vice President Kamala Harris in a “Saturday Night Live” skit on November 2, just before the election.
An additional complaint points to ABC’s Philadelphia affiliate, WPVI-TV, claiming bias during the presidential debate held on September 10, where moderators frequently fact-checked Trump while allowing Harris to go unchecked.
Recently, the outgoing chairwoman of the FCC, Jessica Rosenworcel, dismissed the three complaints and another submitted by the progressive group Media and Democracy Project. This latter complaint claimed that Fox-owned WTXF-TV should lose its broadcast license due to its reporting on voting machines during the 2020 election.
In reviving the complaints, the Trump FCC noted that the previous dismissals were “issued prematurely, based on an insufficient investigatory record for the station-specific conduct at issue.”
Chairman Carr, who assumed office on Monday, refrained from commenting on the reinstated complaints but has previously criticized NBC for Harris’s appearance on SNL. He characterized the Democratic candidate’s appearance as a “clear and blatant effort to evade” the FCC’s “equal time” rule, which mandates broadcasters to provide equal airtime to opposing political candidates during non-news programming.
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, one of the two Democrats on the commission, criticized Carr’s decision to reinstate the complaints.
“We need to uphold the protections of the First Amendment alongside the limitations expressed in the Communications Act.”