Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said Thursday that the commission’s move to call in Disney‘s broadcast licenses for an early renewal was not related to President Trump’s call for ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel to be fired.
Instead, Carr said that the decision was sparked by an investigation launched over a year ago into Disney’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices, and that perceived lack of document production from Disney led to this week’s letter.
“It felt to us like they were playing rope a dope, and weren’t being entirely forthcoming with the production,” Carr told reporters at the FCC‘s April open meeting, which was livestreamed. “If they produced the documents on the original deadline, I don’t think we’d be in the same temporal moment as we are right now.”
“The FCC has rules on the books: You can’t discriminate based on race and gender, and there was evidence that had been submitted that that’s what Disney was doing,” he added. “I understand that anything that we do is is now framed as ‘in the wake of’ in the headlines, and I understand that’s how it is, but we’ve got to make these decisions based on where we are in the investigations and what is best for next steps in that enforcement proceeding in the headlines can be what the headlines are, but that was the basis for our decision.”
In fact, Carr was pressed whether President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump’s call to fire Kimmel played any role, and he denied it.
“There was no pressure from the outside. There was no suggestion from the outside. There was no call for agency action from the outside,” Carr said. “The First Lady has expressed her view. The President has expressed his view. I think over time here, you’ve heard me speak to these issues a lot. There’s a lot of people that agree with the President on this one.”
That said, Democratic FCC commissioner Anna Gomez pushed back on Carr’s argument, telling reporters, “This is clearly a pretext. I mean, give me a break.”
“This is just another part of the pattern of harassment and retaliation in order to bend Disney to this administration’s will,” she added.
Carr was also asked about Senator Ted Cruz’s comments that he does not believe the FCC should be policing speech.
“I agree with Senator Cruz that the FCC shouldn’t be in the business of being the speech police,” Carr said. “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 pushing across the board. And that’s the basis for the early renewal in the Disney case.”
And Disney may not be the last one. Another company that has been a target of President Trump, NBC owner Comcast, is also being investigated over its DEI policies, and Carr suggested that there could be more to come on that front.
“I don’t have an update right now on where we are in that Comcast one, but we’ve been very consistent across the board about what we view as invidious forms of DEI discrimination,” Carr said. “As deals have come before the FCC, we have required people to look at their policies and make sure they don’t have what we think is invidious forms of DEI.”
