Left-wingers went off the deep end over the weekend after GOP Texas Senator Ted Cruz appeared on ESPN’s GameDay with many erroneously wondering how ESPN could get away with breaking FCC rules. But FCC chairman Brandan Carr jumped to social media to explain how the criticism is off base and noted that ESPN didn’t break any rules by having Cruz on the show.
Cruz jumped on the show help explain the Protect College Sports Act during Saturday’s Texas-Ohio State game, a decision that an ESPN insider called an “easy decision,” according to Awul Announcing.
Liberals seized on Cruz’s participation on the show in light of the FCC’s ongoing reviews of ABC and other broadcasters for violations of the FCC’s equal time rules in political content. Many left-wingers accused ESPN and the FCC of bias in favor of the Republicans allowing ESPN to break the rules.
With the accusations swirling, Carr jumped on his social media to explain why ESPN did not break any rules at all by having Cruz on the show to explain the Protect College Sports Act.
Carr explained that the Equal Time statute doesn’t apply to ESPN’s GameDay.
The Equal Time rules only apply to broadcast TV, not cable stations such as ESPN. The rules also only apply during elections, and currently Ted Cruz is not a certified candidate for anything.
Carr added:
The Equal Time statute does not prohibit anyone from interviewing anyone on broadcast tv. It is about more speech, not less. Congress wanted to ensure that voters would decide elections, not media gatekeepers picking winners and losers by providing preferential airtime to some candidates and not others.
Indeed, when the statute applies, it simply requires broadcast stations to offer comparable time and placement. And comparable does not necessarily mean an interview by the same person on the same program either.
Carr also blasted Texas Democrat Senate candidate James Talarico for pushing the “hoax” that the FCC was preventing him from appearing on various TV shows, “for the purpose of getting clicks and donations.” Carr added that Talarico, “he’s banking on people not understanding the statute or operating as partisan lemmings.”
Carr also went on to point out that over-the-air broadcasters are in a different position because the U.S. government assures them that they won’t have competitors trying to over broadcast on their frequencies.
Broadcasters are unique. The FCC gave them free licenses worth many billions of dollars to use a public resource (spectrum). They are given a government sanctioned monopoly on their broadcast frequencies, too. If anyone else wants to use that same public resource (spectrum) for the purpose of expressing their own views, the government will not let them—it will eject anyone else that tries to use a broadcaster’s licensed spectrum.
This means that Americans are subsidizing the distribution of broadcast programs over a public resource to the tune of many billions of dollars. We don’t do that with cable or anything else.
To guarantee this government assurance, broadcasters on radio and TV promise to act in the public interest, and that is where the equal time rules come into play.
Carr, though, blasted some of these license holders, adding, “But some broadcasters want to break their deal with the American people. They want to keep their free access to billions of dollars worth of spectrum, of course. They are less eager these days to abide by their public interest obligations.”
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