FCC Chair Brendan Carr has been in the news after threatening action against ABC, Disney, and Jimmy Kimmel for what he deemed unsavory comments in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death. He’s now defending his statements.
While appearing at the 2025 Concordia Annual Summit, Carr was asked about the situation.
He says he’s been wildly misrepresented.
“The reality is there’s a lot of Democrats out there that are engaged in a campaign of projection and distortion,” Carr said. “They’re completely misrepresenting the work of the FCC and what we’ve been doing. I saw there was a letter from some Senate Democrats that said the FCC threatened to revoke the license of Disney and ABC if they didn’t fire Jimmy Kimmel. That did not happen in any way, shape, or form.”
In his defense, Carr argued that he had simply “raised concerns about news distortion.” He added that his goal was to “empower local TV stations to serve the needs of local communities” against “national programmers like Disney, Comcast, and Paramount,” who aren’t subject to license renewals from the FCC.
“What’s happened over the years is that those national programmers have exerted more and more control and pressure on the local TV stations,” Carr continued. “They don’t feel like they can push back on the national programmers, even when they think there’s some content that they don’t think — in their judgment, not my judgment — makes sense for the local communities.
“What we saw here — and the reporting on this is very, very clear — is those local TV stations, for the first time in a long time, stood up and said, ‘We don’t want to run that program, at least right now.’ And reporting has shown that Disney itself reached out to Kimmel and had conversations with him, and it was a product of those conversations where Disney — on its own — made the business decision not to have them air for some period of time. We’ll see how that turns out.”
In an appearance on Benny Johnson’s podcast, Commissioner Carr said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” ABC subsequently announced Kimmel’s suspension hours later, after affiliate ownership groups Sinclair and Nexstar announced they would pre-empt his late-night program.
Carr later championed the moves from Sinclair and Nexstar, stating that they did “the right thing” and took “quick action” to being “responsive to the needs and values of the local communities you serve.” He concluded by noting his hope that “other broadcasters follow” the lead set forth by those two entities.
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