Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr said Jimmy Kimmel appeared to "directly mislead" Americans about facts regarding conservative leader Charlie Kirk's assassination.
Carr spoke about Kimmel while being interviewed on CNBC Thursday, one day after ABC suspended the late-night host's show indefinitely following comments he made about the Turning Point CEO's murder last week.
In his monologue on Tuesday, Kimmel said that "we hit some new lows over the weekend 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 to score political points from it."
Prosecutors earlier Tuesday brought a murder charge against Tyler Robinson, the man accused of assassinating Kirk, and outlined evidence, including a text message confession to his transgender partner and a note left beforehand saying he had the opportunity to kill one of the nation's leading conservative voices, "and I'm going to take it."
Carr, who hours before ABC announced Kimmel's show was being pulled off the air, suggested the FCC might take action against the network and parent company Disney, said the host's comments were not intended to be comedic in tone.
"The issue that arose here, where lots and lots of people were upset, was not a joke," he told CNBC's David Faber. "It was not making fun or pillorying me or the administration or [President Donald Trump], it was appearing to directly mislead the American public about a significant fact [about] probably one of the most significant political events we've had in a long time, for the most significant political assassination we've seen in a long time."
"So I think that's categorically different."
Carr explained that ABC and the other major networks have different responsibilities than cable networks.
"Broadcast TV is different. We're on a cable show right now. You don't have an FCC license," Carr told Faber. "You don't have an obligation to serve the public interest. Podcasts don't either. Stand-up comedians — whether they're on lots of forms of communication — don't, and Kimmel is free to do that."
"But if you have a broadcast TV license, that means you have something that very few people have, and you're excluding other people from having access to that valuable public resource, and it comes with an obligation to serve the public interest."
Carr added that an FCC rule allows TV stations to preempt programming "that they don't think meets the needs of their communities."
"Recently, these national programmers — ABC, Disney, Comcast, NBC — they've been exercising outsized control and power over those local TV stations, and there's been no pushback," Carr said.
"This is a very significant moment because local broadcasters [are] pushing back on national programmers, for the first time that I can think of in modern history, and that's what we want at the FCC. We want to empower local broadcasters that have the public interest obligation to push back on national programmers so that people have more choice."
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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