President Donald Trump’s media attack dog admitted that the Federal Communications Commission took an unusual step in its long-simmering feud with Disney.
Brendan Carr, the chairman of the newly MAGAfied agency, said the FCC’s decision to call in the licenses of eight ABC stations for early renewal was one that hasn’t been made in decades—and denied that it had anything to do with a Jimmy Kimmel joke that ticked off the first lady.
Just a day after Melania Trump publicly complained about a joke on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last month, the FCC sent Disney a letter demanding license renewal applications for eight ABC stations even though they weren’t due for several more years. Stations receive licenses from the FCC to broadcast their programming over publicly owned airwaves.
Carr acknowledged in an interview with the Financial Times that the FCC took a rare step against Disney.
“It’s probably been 50, 60 years or longer since the FCC has used this tool,” he told FT’s U.S. media editor Anna Nicolaou, who noted that he sounded “almost pleased by the shock it caused.”
“If you didn’t take us seriously, now you should,” Carr warned.
In a segment that spoofed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Kimmel joked that the first lady had a “glow like an expectant widow.”
It didn’t sit well with Melania, who said “Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country.”
“People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate,” she said in a scathing statement. “Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”
As if on cue, news of the FCC’s early-renewal action broke the next day. But Carr insisted that the timing was coincidental.
“We have to make the decisions based on where we are in the enforcement [and] investigative matter, and to some extent, ignore how that’s going to play in the court of public opinion,” he told the FT.
Asked whether he consulted with President Donald Trump before sending out the order, he replied: “Well I don’t, you know, get into conversations that I have or don’t have with the president… This was a decision that we made inside the building.”
Last week, ABC hit back at the FCC by pushing back against the agency’s “unprecedented” and “counterproductive” probe of The View.
“The Commission’s actions threaten to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech, both with respect to The View and more broadly,” ABC wrote in the filing on behalf of their Houston affiliate, KTRK.
