Rachel Abrams: Jim Rutenberg, welcome back to the show.

Jim Rutenberg: Thanks so much for having me.

Rachel Abrams: Jim, we've turned to you a few times on the show now when we have questions about the media and free speech and government intervention. And just this last weekend, in fact, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the SEC, threatened media companies by basically implying in a tweet that he would revoke station licenses that ran with coverage of the Iran war that he called quote hoaxes and distortions. And between that and the dustups he's had with Late Night, most recently with Steven Colbear, we wanted to have you on yet again here today to explain to us what we are seeing play out on our television screens. What happened over the weekend with Chairman Carr's tweet was part of a pattern. He's been making threats like this since he started as a chairman at the start of Trump's term to warn stations away from certain content the administration doesn't like. And this one was extra alarming to people because it was a governmental threat against station licenses at a time of war when information is at a premium where the public really needs to understand what's going on. But one thing I want to say here is this veiled threat he was making, it's really legally dubious. The FCC can't go willy-nilly grabbing licenses because it disagrees with the content. In fact, it's totally prohibited under the law. It does have control over stations licenses, but what he's talking about to take away licenses from television stations, it's a very ownorous legal process. So, we'll see how that plays out. But we do have other test cases that are part of the same campaign where the FCC is really saber rattling in a way that we haven't seen in decades. And we have seen how far it can go and how serious the effects can be. And most notably where we've seen the rubber really meet the road has been of all places with late night television, more specifically the Steven Coar show of CBS.

Rachel Abrams: And remind us what happened with Coar.

Jim Rutenberg: Well, it really starts in January. The FCC notifies broadcasters that we are going to apply a rule called the equal time rule to late night television. And it says that when candidates for office are on non-news programming, there have to be an equal amount of time to all candidates running for a certain office. They need equal time on that station. You're all on notice. We're going to apply it. So a few weeks later when Steven Cobar books Telerico on his show, Telerico is now in a primary campaign against Jasmine Crockett, CBS's lawyers notify Steven Coar and his producers, hey, you could have a problem here with the FCC because you have an equal time issue potentially. And Steven Cobear and the network disagree to the extent to which CBS told him not to air an interview with Telerico or whether they were just warning him.

Steven Colbert: But you know, you know who is not one of my guests tonight? That's Texas State Representative James Terico.

Jim Rutenberg: Steven Coar goes on his show and says that he's been told he can't have Terico on. Now, he can't have him on YouTube, which doesn't fall under the FCC. And because my network clearly doesn't want us to talk about this, let's talk about this. And he really does call attention to this campaign from this old agency that people sitting at home hadn't heard of or hadn't heard about in years.

Steven Colbert: You might have heard of this thing called the equal time rule. Okay, it's an old FCC rule that applies only to radio and broadcast television.

Jim Rutenberg: He makes a big stink out of this. Let's just call this what it is. Donald Trump's administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV.

Rachel Abrams: And just to be clear, in this specific example with Co Bear, the FCC didn't tell CBS it couldn't have Telerico on the show. What we saw was more of a preemptive move by CBS to avoid incurring the wrath of the FCC.

Jim Rutenberg: That's exactly right. This is not an example of Brendan Carr or the FCC saying, "Hey, Steven Cobar can't have that person on." But what is absolutely true here is that there's no discussion inside of CBS if the FCC does not issue this new guidance on late night television in January, which is putting the whole late night world, the whole network world on notice that we're really going to be watching you here. And in so many years of covering this, Rachel, it was the first time that I had seen a moment where a content decision was made at a major network involving politics in direct reaction to a newly declared policy on the federal government level.

Rachel Abrams: Something I've been wondering about though, Jim, is just why late night? Because we've been hearing for years, right, that late night's numbers are declining. So, I don't really understand why the administration would choose to focus on this segment of television in particular.

Jim Rutenberg: Well, I'll tell you, and I've talked to some of the people involved on the conservative side in this effort, and what they will say is that broadcast television is free and every American can get it without needing a cable subscription, without needing an internet subscription. So, it has a reach that nothing else has to this day. And where ratings might not be what they once were, it also lives on online, Steven Coar's bits, Jimmy Kimmel's bits, they bounce around online in a way other comedy bits don't. And that is in part because of this broadcast platform they have that it's still worth something. It's still valuable. But I think that there's a big reason that the administration is going after late night in this moment. And it's not just about reach. It's about sort of the evolution of late night television over the years. Throughout the course of TV history, late night has carved out this really unique role in the landscape. One that has over the years let it sort of coast along beyond the reach of the regulators quite a bit. And so the SEC said, "Look,

Jim Rutenberg: maybe this hasn't been applied in a really long time, but we are going to hold you to this equal time standard and you better come correct."

Rachel Abrams: How did late night end up getting such a privileged position and and end up with that carve out that you mentioned?

Jim Rutenberg: Well, it's kind of a long story and it starts really with the rule we were talking about the equal time rule. Let me bring you if you will back to the 1920s.

Rachel Abrams: Please, my favorite time.

Jim Rutenberg: We are broadcasting over WAM operates on a frequency of 1120 K. People forget this, but when radio was new in the 1920s, the government and the radio industry are grappling with this new thing, radio. It's doing something that's never been done in human history. It is reaching millions of people at once electronically with sound, very evocative.

Jim Rutenberg: But the industry was having a very hard time at the beginning of the radio days because anyone could get a transmitter and throw up a signal on any frequency. And so radio was a complete mess. Competing signals, static. The industry needed government to come and sort it out. So government basically said, "We're taking control of this.

Jim Rutenberg: We're going to issue licenses for the exclusive use of certain station frequencies, but in return, because of this power you are going to have, we are going to expect you to do certain things to make sure it's used responsibly. This could really affect politics because whoever owns the station will get to dictate everything what people think, right? So, what they came up with were rules that said you couldn't use a radio station to give one-sided versions of the most controversial issues in town. You can't give one candidate the advantage. And so the equal time rule comes about to say if you give one candidate advertising time at a certain rate for a certain amount of time then you have to give the other and if you have one on you have to have the other on. This is now we're talking about candidates. They have to be candidates.

Rachel Abrams: And just to explain that a little bit, the protocol here is that the network has to figure out some way to give the other person some program, some advertisement that gets like what the same reach or

Jim Rutenberg: right, it's got to have the same, you can't like give them time at 4 in the morning, right? Right.

Rachel Abrams: It's got to have similar ratings. It's got to be free and it's got to be the same amount of time.

Jim Rutenberg: So over the years, this transfers over to television, but society is continually evolving. Politics is continually evolving. Media is continually evolving and by the 1950s the way this gets applied all these rules it starts to change for instance around debates.

Rachel Abrams: sometimes you have 20 people running for the same office and 17 of whom don't have a shot in heck I'll say

Jim Rutenberg: good this is a clean family show no FCC guidance for this

Jim Rutenberg: so they're needed to be the good one but in all serious What do you do when you have 17 candidates all clamoring for equal time? The stations were able to argue quite convincingly, we need an exemption here. We can't have debates where you have to give 17 candidates equal time every time. It's just completely unworkable. We have to be left to our own devices when it comes to something like a debate.

Jim Rutenberg: That's a news event. News judgment has to reign supreme there where the news people decide who is worthy of the debate. So news gets exempted. documentaries, they're basically news, too. They need to be exempted. So, you have all these exemptions getting added.

Jim Rutenberg: Yeah. There's this presumption that news people operate in good faith. They do their best. The government has to stay out of their way. And they apply a term to this idea, bonafide news. That's legit news that news people are going to be trusted to present to the best of their ability that will be nonpartisan, journalistically valid and serving the public interest.

Rachel Abrams: Mhm.

Rachel Abrams: Got it?

Jim Rutenberg: But over the years, the worlds of entertainment and news, they start to come together a lot more. And applying this equal time rule starts to get a lot more complicated.

Rachel Abrams: How so? So you have on the one hand more and more entertainers entering the world of politics.

Jim Rutenberg: Someday when the team's up against it.

Jim Rutenberg: Exhibit A, Ronald Reagan. Most people knew him as an actor before he was running. He's now a politician. And he runs for governor of California, then president.

Ronald Reagan: Ask him to go in there with all they've got. Win just one for the Kipper.

Jim Rutenberg: That's causing problems for stations that run his old movies and they're all over TV. So candidates who are running against him can go to the stations and say, "Hey, I want 2 hours of free air time to make up for that." And those television stations would stand to lose a lot of money if they have to start giving away 2 hours of time.

Rachel Abrams: Mhm.

Jim Rutenberg: And then at the same time, it's coming back the other way.

Jim Rutenberg: Governor Bill Clinton, you have politicians trying their hand at entertainment. They're increasingly showing up on late night talk shows. Bill Clinton, he sort of changes the game. He goes on Narcino Paul's show, late night program, and he doesn't just sit and talk about the issues or make himself relatable. He goes and he plays the saxophone. Mr. Hip,

Rachel Abrams: did you ever think about playing professionally?

Bill Clinton: Yeah. And I liked it tonight. I like being on the other side of the posy.

Rachel Abrams: Yeah.

Bill Clinton: Speaking of what your drummer said, what he said, if this music thing doesn't work out, you can always run for president.

Jim Rutenberg: Is that news entertainment? It's all mixing together now. And this pitches the whole late night world into this regulatory legal nether region that no one quite knows what to do with.

Jim Rutenberg: Finally though, in the mid200s, the FCC has to weigh in.

Rachel Abrams: And what happened then?

Jim Rutenberg: Well, it has to do with the Tonight Show when it was hosted by Jay Leno. In 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor in California, he found a very friendly platform with Jay Leno and the Tonight Show on NBC.

Jim Rutenberg: Unashamedly bringing showbiz to politics, Arnold Schwarzenegger chose the Jay Leno Tonight Show to announce he's running for office. When Schwarzenegger announced that he was running for governor of California, he did it on Leno.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: And this is why I'm going to run for governor of the state of California.

Jim Rutenberg: Leno, I have to note, also had spoken at a Schwarzenegger victory party. I mean, Leno and Schwarzenegger were like having it was like a buddy movie.

Jay Leno: Welcome back. We're talking with the governor of California, Arlo Schwarz. I still get a kick out of saying that. The governor of California because we go back 20 You and I were the Playboy Club together in 77. The Playboy Mansion. Remember that

Jim Rutenberg: and Schwarzenegger was on Leno again and again and again.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: I've been working on my impression of you.

Jay Leno: Man, this is the worst impression I've ever heard. What's the matter with you?

Arnold Schwarzenegger: And things such as that. You say it's so bad.

Jay Leno: You see how bad this is? Do I talk like that?

Arnold Schwarzenegger: You talk exactly like that.

Jay Leno: I'm going to reinstate the car tax for you.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Really? Really?

Jay Leno: All right. I'm out of here.

Jim Rutenberg: Now, fast forward to when Arnold's running again. He's now governor for reelection in 2006. And the Democrat, Phil Andelites, starts saying, "Hey, this isn't fair. Leno is giving Schwarzenegger this huge platform. They're friends." So, Angelus says, "Hey, I want equal time." And the FCC is going to have to adjudicate here because NBC is not inclined to give it. And the FCC takes a look and says, you know what, this is a bonafide news interview. We do not think it's being used for partisan purposes, so we are going to say that the Tonight Show is exempt here. Now, it was very specific to that situation, but all of late night took that to mean if the FCC said that's okay, then that was sort of taken as all right, well, that's an extreme case and that's fine, so off we go. So basically because the FCC decided that this case still counted as bonafide news, the rest of late night interpreted that to mean we must have really broad latitude. We can do whatever we want. We can have whoever we want on for however long and we are not subject to these rules pretty much. I mean and the FCC did not enforce it. So after this Leno ruling and after late night takes this as a sort of blanket exemption, we have another shift in late night that we should really note here.

Jim Rutenberg: and that's in the Bush years the late night hosts start becoming even more political.

Stephen Colbert: Nice to see you. LET'S START TONIGHT WITH OUR CONTINUING COVERAGE ON MESOPOTAMIA.

Stephen Colbert: As you know we went to Iraq.

Jim Rutenberg: They're led a little bit by John Stewart. How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? Um, I would say 30,000 more or less.

Jon Stewart: Well, it's nice to see the president estimating casualties with the same inflection you use to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar.

Jim Rutenberg: He's not under the FCC thumb the same way. He's on Comedy Central with his Daily Show,

Rachel Abrams: right? He's on cable, not broadcast.

Jim Rutenberg: Yes, but also Stuart is having amazing success, so he's influencing the broadcast guys. Good news. The White House has now released a 35page plan entitled Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. President Bush refuses to set a timetable uh for reading it, but he thinks that it

Stephen Colbert: times right now. President Bush doing his best to respond to the crisis. I love that that gets giggles when that's not even a joke. That's just

Jim Rutenberg: and much more sort of liberal leaning

Stephen Colbert: occasion. Ladies and gentlemen, today was the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump winning the presidency. Now, the traditional one-year anniversary gift is paper. So, if you want to get Trump something, you can't go wrong with a federal indictment. That's right.

Jim Rutenberg: They're often saving their sharpest barbs for Trump especially, but Republican politicians across the board.

Stephen Colbert: Please welcome back to the Late Show, Vice President Joseph R. Biden.

Jim Rutenberg: And over the years, more and more of their guests are Democrats.

Joseph R. Biden: Like, can you run down to the kitchen in your underpants in the middle of the night if you're hungry?

Stephen Colbert: I mean, I could. I I don't.

Joseph R. Biden: You don't. No.

Stephen Colbert: Is there someone in

Jim Rutenberg: and that continues to harden through the Trump years? So, that late night, you know, when Leno is there with Schwarzenegger, this is shocking, years later. Now, late night has become much more a forum for politics and one that does favor one side of the spectrum.

Jim Rutenberg: But the FCC, whether it's under Democratic control, Republican control, even Trump's control in the first term, the FCC is letting it mostly happen. They're not really waiting into late night until last year. We'll be right back.

Rachel Abrams: Okay. So, Jim, that decision that you described about Leno from the FCC, that basically became the prevailing wisdom that guided late night for years, even though Late Nightight was becoming more and more partisan. So tell us about how the enforcement by the federal government of that old rule starts to pick back up like when and how did that come to a head?

Jim Rutenberg: Well, it comes to a head because of this littleknown lawyer from Wisconsin named Daniel. Sir,

Rachel Abrams: I love your your old schoolness, right? like we're not get the phone like we're going to have an actual recorder like

Jim Rutenberg: and I got to spend a lot of time talking with him including a visit in Milwaukee and it's kind of a long journey he goes on to become really one of the chief antagonists of late night TV right now

Daniel Sur: I start out as a free market conservative right and

Rachel Abrams: ABC debate.

Jim Rutenberg: Yeah, the ABC debate.

Jim Rutenberg: That was your first one. But as he tells it, things change for him in the fall of 2024 when he watches that first and only debate between Donald J. Trump and Kla Harris.

Daniel Sur: The factchecking seems so egregiously one-sided.

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Jim Rutenberg: Trump is saying things like, "They're eating the cats and they're eating the dogs in Springfield, Ohio. The moderators are cutting in to fact check him. They're not factchecking Kla Harris." Trump is furious. After the debate, he says they ought to take ABC's license away because one thing I want to remind people is in Trump's first term, what you did hear him say a lot of the time was pull their license. Pull their license.

Jim Rutenberg: And sir, he's hearing Trump and he's been thinking about this. What does that mean? How do you pull a license?

Daniel Sur: And so we do what lawyers do. We research it. You know, we read the law. We get into it.

Jim Rutenberg: And he learns about the history that you and I just spoke about. The Federal Communications Commission has always said

Daniel Sur: it looks at the law and all these laws are based on this idea in the law. The public interest, convenience, and necessity.

Daniel Sur: Like I just I can't believe given that they're public airwaves that, you know, it's essentially a unreported unregulated campaign contribution to the Democratic party. It's like how is that legal?

Jim Rutenberg: What he said was, look, I didn't even realize the extent of these public interest rules. And so to him, it's shocking that these networks are allowed to behave this way.

Daniel Sur: Seem to be this, you know, massive one-sided love fest.

Jim Rutenberg: He's always thought that they're biased.

Daniel Sur: The media also holds its own kind of power that needs to be held accountable. That's part of

Jim Rutenberg: and he sees that you can make challenges to certain stations if you think they're in violation. And he files a complaint against an ABC station in Philadelphia. It happens to be where the debate happened. He could have filed it at any station, but that's where he does it. And he goes on when Trump is screaming bloody murder about a CBS interview with Kla Harris on 60 Minutes that Trump is alleging was edited to make her look better. Sir finds a way to file a complaint against the FCC on that. He finds a term called news distortion. He brings a complaint on that basis. But the idea in both of these cases is that these networks are so partisan that they are not serving the public interest and that what they are presenting is not bonafideed news. It's partisan content meant to sway the audience.

Rachel Abrams: So what Daniel sir, this lawyer is doing with these complaints is he's basically going back in time and he's saying the FCC wanted to make programming not biased, right? But the carveouts that they subsequently made for news where they said that you know what, if you're a news program, we trust your journalistic judgment. Go forth. He's basically saying that does not apply in today's world. these news programs, they need more of a referee. And so these complaints are basically saying we need to take a much closer look at these networks to see if they're actually running a foul of the regulations.

Jim Rutenberg: Yeah, exactly. But the reason it really caught my eye is I've studied these rules, how they came about for years and years. And my conservative sources when I talked to them about media have always said, "These rules are an abomination. They violate everything we believe in as conservatives. We don't want the government messing in content and so we shall not really take rules like this seriously. And Daniel Sur represents this new strain

Jim Rutenberg: of conservative in the Trump era that's saying no no no we went too far. Now you know I'll let people draw their own conclusions about the conservative movement that felt this so loudly and now is saying that it doesn't. But what he is saying is that we as conservatives believe in the market but sometimes the market doesn't solve all problems. And in this case, it's gotten so biased and the market's not solving it. And so, why have we allowed this to happen? I'm going to file these complaints. And before the Biden administration leaves office, the FCC chair Jessica Rosenorsal asked her enforcement division at the FCC to take a look at these sir complaints and they found that they carried no weight. There was no legal merit to them. So, they rejected those. And for good measure, they also threw out a complaint lodged by a liberal group against the Fox station in Philadelphia relating to stolen election coverage on Fox News back from 2020. So they're all invalidated.

Rachel Abrams: So how much of a deterrent is that to Daniel Sur to get all of his complaints thrown out?

Jim Rutenberg: Well, it's not a deterrent at all because Brendan Carr, the incoming FCC chair, was publicly kind of validating sir's complaints and taking them very seriously.

Rachel Abrams: and remind us quickly who is Brendan Carr and what does he believe?

Brendan Carr: Yeah, we are doing some some different stuff in the media space now as compared to Trump 45.

Jim Rutenberg: So Brendan Carr is a longtime FCC commissioner had been a staff level lawyer before that. So very rooted in communications law but very much Trump's kind of guy come at least coming in to this second term. It doesn't seem to have been a focus these public interest rules for you previously, right? And and in first like it seems like a newer issue for you. Is that partly a Daniel sir showing up after ABC and saying, "Hey, wait a minute."

Brendan Carr: Well, I think Daniel's been very been very helpful in in pointing out not just, you know, the issue, but

Jim Rutenberg: and he will later tell me that Daniel Sur really lights the way for him. I I do think that, you know, Daniel Sur has been doing tremendous work um doing a lot of the research bringing, you know, grounding his positions in, you know, historic FCC case law and pressing. I think

Jim Rutenberg: and it so speaks to what Trump wants to see in his second term in terms of a media that's going to behave differently toward him.

Brendan Carr: Thank Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Jim Rutenberg: And one of the first things that Carr does when he takes a chairmanship over after the inauguration is he reinstates all of those complaints. not the Fox complaint.

Rachel Abrams: Okay. So, everything you're talking about is news, news, news, right? So, how does Daniel Ser take this from the news ecosystem and bring it into late night?

Jim Rutenberg: Well, interestingly, now Daniel Sur has the wind at his back, right? He's got the ear of the FCC chair. He's cooking with gas on this issue and he starts to look around and he notices that there's an even bigger opportunity than broadcast news. And that's when he comes to late night.

Daniel Sur: I would say late night is where the cultural power of celebrity is lent to the Democratic party.

Rachel Abrams: How are these late night hosts able to so tilt their programming toward the Democrats?

Daniel Sur: You watch the evening news.

Jim Rutenberg: Yeah. It may have a slant that makes you think about the world a certain way, but that's different from seeing your favorite actors and your favorite influencers and your favorite comedians constantly showering praise on those same politicians.

Jim Rutenberg: And he writes a letter to Carr citing some studies showing that late night is like they have more liberals on. And in early September, he actually files a complaint against Jimmy Kimmel.

Jim Rutenberg: And that's against the LA station, ABC station. He says, you know, basically same idea. Kimmel is tilting his show toward one side. And you know, this is unacceptable.

Rachel Abrams: Mhm.

Jim Rutenberg: And Rachel literally days later, an assassin shoots and kills Charlie Kirk.

Jim Rutenberg: And Jimmy Kimmel, as you'll remember, does this very controversial monologue,

Jimmy Kimmel: right? Thank you for joining us after

Jim Rutenberg: where he implies that the shooter could be a MAGA fan

Jim Rutenberg: with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can

Jim Rutenberg: and this is a new low

Jim Rutenberg: people especially in Trump world go crazy over that.

Unidentified Speaker: Is he either trolling or just stupid? I'm not sure which. Maybe both.

Unidentified Speaker: Oh, I'm going with stupid on this one. a liberal comedian trying to pin this murder on a Trump person.

Unidentified Speaker: He didn't imply it. He said it

Unidentified Speaker: of one of our great heroes.

Unidentified Speaker: One of the most asine things I ever heard.

Unidentified Speaker: Conspiracy land.

Jim Rutenberg: And you know, it ends up that the person is not anything at all like that.

Unidentified Speaker: It's negligence at at best to not already know that if you're Jimmy Kimmel, but clearly he doesn't care. And so Carr,

Brendan Carr: when you look at the conduct that has taken place by Jimmy Kimmel

Jim Rutenberg: in this mastrom steps up to say on a podcast, you know what?

Brendan Carr: There's a very concerted effort to try to lie to the American people.

Brendan Carr: This could be violative of the public interest.

Brendan Carr: These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action frankly on Kimmel or, you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. ABC's hereby basically on notice.

Unidentified Speaker: I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.

Jim Rutenberg: I can do this the easy way or the hard way. And the implicit threat there is that ABC station licenses can be in trouble. And ABC does suspend Kimmel's programming for several days. This is like the first real shock to the system that wow, the FCC is now really coming for late night.

Jim Rutenberg: So, that's the beginning of it. But for sir and car, late night is on the radar, which finally brings us up to January when the FCC undercarr really institutionalizes their push against late night. You know, the Kimmel instance was a bit more ad hoc, right? That happened in the moment.

Jim Rutenberg: But now they put out this formal announcement that says, here's the new policy. We are going to apply this old standard of equal time to the late night talk shows more regularly. You're on notice. By the way, that Leno exemption that was for Leno in 2006. We do not see it as applying to anything else. You've all been getting away with something and there's a new sheriff in town and it's over. So basically this lawyer from Wisconsin, Daniel Sir, who had no previous experience in media law, he's the one who essentially put the equal time rule on Brendan Carr's radar, right? And that is what has gotten us to this moment, this campaign that we are now seeing from the FCC against late night and ultimately this Colbear interview getting taken off the air.

Jim Rutenberg: very much so. And what's also clear is that this campaign is ongoing now. It's been announced in the last several weeks that in fact the FCC is investigating The View.

Rachel Abrams: for bias and equal time violations.

Jim Rutenberg: And The View, obviously not late night,

Rachel Abrams: not late night, but it's a talk show and it's if anything, The View is a very powerful television show, still seen across the country, delves into politics with pretty reliable voters who watch it every day.

Rachel Abrams: How exactly is Carr proposing going after these shows? like not only what are the mechanics of that but can he just unilaterally undo the exemption here?

Jim Rutenberg: I mean on the exemption what he's arguing is that he's not undoing anything that that exemption was for Leno and it doesn't apply. Now, there's something very important that we have to mention here, and that is that legally I've yet to find a lawyer who has said, "Yes, the FCC has a very strong case to take away licenses in XYZ case that Brendan Carr is talking about." It's just nobody thinks that.

Jim Rutenberg: The networks themselves don't think that. But the threat itself is very powerful. It's not in any major media company's interest to be on the wrong side of the federal government when the federal government's willing to dangle punishment. So, you know, even if the network should win in court, do you want to be in court for months or longer with the federal government? Nobody wants it.

Rachel Abrams: I want to embody Daniel Sur's argument for a moment and perhaps Brendan Carr's perspective as well that television should be less biased. We should get this partisanship out of our programming. That goes back to the spirit of when these laws were first created. So I can imagine why people would feel like late night television has gotten away with something for very very long and this is a correction back to the initial positive spirit with which these rules were intended.

Jim Rutenberg: Well, that is what Chairman Carr is saying. He told me that personally, but he said it elsewhere time and time again that all I'm doing is enforcing the law.

Rachel Abrams: M

Jim Rutenberg: and I've heard from a lot of experts here, even liberal policy experts who actually think the FCC's on solid ground here in terms of the equal time rule that late night has strayed too far, but even they question is Carr evenly applying the rules. Could you should you be applying this then to talk radio? You could make an argument that talk radio could fall under this equal time rule if they have guests on within certain election windows. Sean Hannity is on Fox News at night, but he's got one of the biggest talk shows in radio, millions of listeners. Should he get into trouble if he has a political guest on around an election?

Rachel Abrams: Right. I mean, radio is not only the thing that started many of these regulations, but radio is huge.

Jim Rutenberg: Yeah. Talk radio is on a weekly basis millions and millions of people, millions. I mean, if you took the collective audience for talk radio every day across all the conservative shows, I mean, you dwarf a lot of what's on television in general. And there's even an argument that's getting made out there that in very technical terms, if you're going to really follow the letter of the law that when it comes to this very specific equal time rule, that cable could even fall under its terms, which of course would really open up a whole can of worms with networks like Fox News. So the application of the law could really go far if you're taking it that literally. But I think that there's a bigger play here and Daniel sir would tell you there's a bigger play here.

Daniel Sur: One of my hopes is that we clear the way for familyfriendly faith inspired patriotic content.

Jim Rutenberg: And the hope that Daniel Sir has, certainly that Brendan Carr has, is that they were going to forever now change the network dynamic.

Daniel Sur: It's not just that balance means getting all this liberal stuff off the air, right? It's saying that that red state consumers deserve content they want too from their broadcaster. And my hope is that as we, you know, see shifts in the media landscape, we get more of that, right?

Jim Rutenberg: and and and this is interesting because he's arguing that the FCC is not just going to oversee some kind of great balancing act here, but that it actually might use its power to promote a certain kind of programming for a certain kind of audience with a certain kind of taste, which sounds like an activist FCC, right? And I can imagine that some people might hear that and think, well, what happens if the other side of the aisle is in power?

Jim Rutenberg: That's the warning from those conservatives that still view the FCC and its power here as as anathema to to their ideology. So, Senator Ted Cruz has warned that if this happens now under us, the Democrats are going to do it to our people. Ben Shapiro has said that. Joe Rogan has made us issued a similar warning that if this happens here, the other side's going to do it. So there's a presumption among some on the right that this is opening up a Pandora's box that's best left closed.

Rachel Abrams: But clearly the administration is not persuaded by that argument. Right? Because as we said at the top of this episode, Brendan Carr over the weekend is basically doubling down on this strategy of going after coverage that he does not like and trying to influence coverage specifically of the war. What can we say about the various ways this could play out going forward?

Jim Rutenberg: Rachel, I want to note first of all that there was more Republican blowback this weekend with cars I ram related message, notably the Republican senator from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson. There was also a lot of back and forth on social media between policy experts and Carr himself and journalists as to what he could really do here. But that said, this is an amazing amount of pressure on the networks to tow the line during war with real threats of governmental punishment. And let's remember, aside from Iran, we also have the congressional midterms coming up this fall. What happens if some of those elections are disputed over these flimsy allegations of fraud we saw in 2020? How's that going to be handled? And is the FCC going to weigh in there? And then let's bring it back to the late night shows. The administration has made it clear that they see those as part of the political arena. Are these late night shows going to stop booking politicians altogether? The short of it is, you know, we'll wait and we'll see. But in our lifetimes, we have never seen the federal government get involved this much in content decisions and policing content decisions on broadcast television.

Rachel Abrams: Jim Rutenberg, thank you as always.

Jim Rutenberg: Thanks so much for having me.

Rachel Abrams: We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Israel said it had dealt double blows to the upper echelons of Iran's leadership on Tuesday, killing Ali Larjani, the head of the country's Supreme National Security Council, and Brigadier General Golza Sulammani, the head of a powerful militia aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The killings were announced hours before President Trump lashed out again NATO allies who have rebuffed his attempts to draw them into the war in Iran. Speaking in the Oval Office, he said the United States did not quote need or desire any help to open the straight of Hormuz and added that he was quote disappointed in NATO.

Rachel Abrams: And one of the United States top counterterrorism officials resigned on Tuesday, citing his opposition to the war in Iran and what he said was Israel's influence over the Trump administration's policies. The official Joe Kent is the first senior member of the administration to quit over the war. Quote, "I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran." Mr. Kent wrote in a letter to Mr. Trump, quote, Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

Rachel Abrams: Today's episode was produced by Alex Stern, Ricky Netski, Mary Wilson, and Diana Wyn. It was edited by Rob Zipco with help from Michael Benwa. Fact checked by Susan Lee and contains music by Pat McCusker, Marian Lozano, Dan Powell, Rowan Misto, and Alicia Bitube. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.