Back in 1963, Richard Nixon needed to rehabilitate his image after he lost his race for California governor. He went on the ”Tonight” show with Jack Paar and played the piano.
Bill Clinton’s appearance on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” where he delivered a rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel” on the saxophone,was considered a breakthrough moment in his triumphant 1992 campaign for the White House.
those memorable segments demonstrated how the desk-and-sofa format could be a tool in the politician’s arsenal for shaping public opinion away from the pesky probing of journalists. It became a way to reach viewers who did not regularly watch TV news.
But those days may become a relic of broadcast history as Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr is calling for stronger enforcement of a broadcast regulation rule requiring TV and radio broadcasters to offer equal time to all legally qualified opposing political candidates.
With the new guidance – which legal and media experts said would be hard to enforce and could stifle free speech – the FCC questioned whether late-night and daytime talk shows deserve an exemption from the equal-time rules for broadcast stations using the public airwaves.
It’s the trump White House’s latest salvo against the network late night talk show hosts, primarily Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and jimmy Kimmel, who pound away at President Trump nightly in their monologues and offer ample airtime to his political opponents. The rule also would affect daytime shows such as ABC’s “The View,” which is under the purview of the Disney-owned network’s news division.
The equal-time rule has been around for decades but rarely has been enforced in recent years. It did come into play during the 2024 presidential campaign when NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” booked Democratic candidate Kamala Harris to appear in a sketch.
NBC filed an equal-time notice with the FCC stating that Harris had appeared on the network for one minute and 30 seconds. Campaign officials for Trump contacted the network and asked for time and they were given two free 60-second messages that appeared near the end of its telecast of a NASCAR playoff race and during post-game coverage of a “Sunday Night Football” telecast.
Experts consider the rule to be antiquated,designed for a time when consumers were limited to a handful of TV channels and a dozen radio stations if they lived in a big city.The emergence of cable, podcasts and streaming audio and video platforms – none of which are subjected to FCC restrictions in terms of content – have greatly diminished customary broadcast media’s dominance in the marketplace.
“I think it’s very hard to look at trying to regulate over-the-air broadcasters in the same way today as the FCC would have done, you know, 50 years ago,” said Jeffrey McCall, a communications professor at DePauw University. “The rule was put in place in an era of scarcity which we really don’t have anymore.”
Michael Harrison, a media consultant and publisher of the radio trade journal Talkers, said the equal-time rule will unfairly burden radio and TV broadcasters that are struggling to compete against tech companies that largely have unfettered access to consumers and are not subject to FCC rules.
“Carr’s plan would even further handicap federally licensed television and radio platforms that are already facing an existential crisis as they are being eaten alive by unregulated digital media in an increasingly noisy marketplace,” Harrison said. “Carr’s plan is just rhetoric to give the impression that the FCC still has relevance in programming regulation.”
McCall expressed dou
