The complaints allege that the broadcasters had bias in favor of the Democratic candidate.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr on Wednesday revived a trio of complaints his predecessor dismissed just days before President Donald Trump took office.
The reinstated complaints all come from the Center for American Rights, a Chicago-based conservative legal group. They target stations of three major broadcasters: NBC, ABC, and CBS, and focus on their coverage of last year’s presidential election.
One complaint is brought against WNBC-TV in New York for allegedly violating the “equal time” rule by allowing then-Vice President Kamala Harris to appear in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch on Nov. 2, the weekend before the election.
Another targets ABC’s Philadelphia affiliate, WPVI-TV, alleging bias during the Sept. 10 presidential debate, where moderators frequently fact-checked Trump while leaving Harris’s statements unchallenged.
A third one
accuses WCBS-TV, a CBS-owned station in New York, of engaging in “news distortion” over its handling of an interview with Harris on the “60 Minutes” program.
In a
teaser clip released online, which also appeared on “Face the Nation” on Oct. 6, Harris provided a lengthy response to “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker’s question about whether the United States lacks influence over Israel. However, the
final “60 Minutes” interview that aired on Oct. 7 featured a significantly shorter version of her response.
The two contrasting versions drew criticism from Trump supporters and the Republican candidate himself, who
demanded that CBS be investigated, accusing the network of trying to make Harris appear “more presidential” in the edit.
Trump later
sued CBS for $10 billion under Texas’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a law typically invoked in false advertising cases.
Last week, outgoing FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel dismissed the three complaints and another filed by the progressive advocacy group Media and Democracy Project. The latter complaint argued that Fox-owned WTXF-TV in Philadelphia should lose its broadcast license over its coverage of voting machines during the 2020 election.
“We draw a bright line at a moment when clarity about government interference with the free press is needed more than ever,” Rosenworcel
said in a statement at that time. “The action we take makes clear two things. First, the FCC should not be the president’s speech police. Second, the FCC should not be journalism’s censor-in-chief.”
In restoring the complaints, the Trump FCC said that the dismissals were “issued prematurely based on an insufficient investigatory record for the station-specific conduct at issue.”
Carr, who took over on Monday, declined to comment on reinstated complaints but has criticized NBC for Harris’s SNL debut. He called the Democrat’s cameo a “clear and blatant effort to evade” the FCC’s “equal time” rule, which requires broadcasters to give opposing political candidates the same amount of airtime on non-news programming.
“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct—a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election,” Carr
wrote on X on Nov. 2.
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, one of two Democrats on the panel, criticized Carr’s decisions.
“We cannot allow our licensing authority to be weaponized to curtail freedom of the press,” Gomez
said Wednesday, adding that federal law prohibits the FCC from censoring broadcasters.
“We must respect the protections of the First Amendment and the restrictions in the Communications Act.”
NBC, ABC, and CBS did not immediately comment. On Nov. 3, NBC aired
a message from the Trump campaign at the end of a NASCAR race and an NFL game in what many viewers see as an attempt to balance off Harris’s one minute and 30 seconds on SNL.
