The lone Democrat-aligned FCC Commissioner on Thursday issued a follow-up statement in response to ABC’s decision to “capitulate to government pressure that violates the First Amendment and threatens free expression” by suspending indefinitely late-night talk host Jimmy Kimmel for making false statements about the alleged assassin of Turning Point USA founder and prominent conservative political activist Charlie Kirk.
“We cannot allow an inexcusable act of political violence to be twisted into a justification for government censorship and control,” Gomez said, adding to comments first shared late Wednesday by the Commissioner by taking her message far beyond “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” being yanked from ABC until further notice.
“First, an ABC reporter was told that his coverage amounted to hate speech and that he should be prosecuted simply for doing his job,” she said. “Then, the FCC threatened to go after this same network, seizing on a late-night comedian’s inopportune joke as a pretext to punish speech it disliked. That led to a shameful show of cowardly corporate capitulation by ABC that has put the foundation of the First Amendment in danger.”
In Gómez’s view, the Carr Commission “does not have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to police content or punish broadcasters for speech the government dislikes.”
And, should the Carr-led FCC were to take the “unprecedented step of trying to revoke broadcast licenses, which are held by local stations rather than national networks, it would run headlong into the First Amendment and fail in court on both the facts and the law.”
That statement is up for debate, as the Center for American Rights has filed a complaint against The Walt Disney Company’s ABC Owned Stations West Coast flagship — KABC-7 in Los Angeles — for Kimmel’s inaccurate comments about Kirk’s assassin during the monologue of Monday night’s program. As Chairman Carr has stated, NBC, ABC and CBS differ from FOX News because they are rooted in broadcast media, which must adhere to the public interest as they are regulated by the FCC. While FOX Television Stations and FOX News are clearly related, his point stems from the fact that MSNBC will soon be rebranded and spun from NBCUniversal, shedding its ties to the Comcast unit. Then, there’s ABC, which does not have a cable TV news network, nor does CBS. While the Media and Democracy Project sought to deny the license renewal of WTXF-29 in Philadelphia, a FOX Television Stations property, for airing what it said was false and misleading content pertaining to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, this content was fed from a cable TV network and not produced by the stations or FTS itself.
Gómez likely disagrees with sentiment. And, she argues, even the threat to revoke a license is no small matter. “It poses an existential risk to a broadcaster, which by definition cannot exist without its license,” she said. “That makes billion-dollar companies with pending business before the agency all the more vulnerable to pressure to bend to the government’s ideological demands. When corporations surrender in the face of that pressure, they endanger not just themselves, but the right to free expression for everyone in this country. The duty to defend the First Amendment does not rest with government, but with all of us. Free speech is the foundation of our democracy, and we must push back against any attempt to erode it.”
