Sen. Ted Cruz said FCC chair Brendan Carr’s comments about pulling ABC’s broadcasting license sounded more like an organized crime boss than a federal regulator.
Cruz made the comments on his podcast The Verdict Friday.
What they’re saying:
“If the government gets in the business of saying, ‘we don’t like what you, the media, have said, we’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like,’ that will end up bad for conservatives,” Cruz said.
Cruz went on to say that allowing the government to decide which speech it likes and doesn’t like and threatening to take media companies off the air was “unbelievably dangerous.”
“I like Brendan Carr, but we should not be in this business,” Cruz said. “We should denounce it.”
The Texas Republican currently serves as the chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which oversees the FCC.
Cruz warned that using the FCC and the government to determine what can be said sets a bad precedent that could allow Democrats to go after conservative hosts when they are in power.
“Let me tell you what will happen going down this road. There will come a time when a Democrat wins again, wins the White House,” Cruz said. “They will use this power, and they will use it ruthlessly.”
The senator added that there are already remedies in place, like lawsuits to combat comments that could be deemed as slander.
“It’s fine to say what Jimmy Kimmel said was deplorable. It was disgraceful, and he should be off-air,” Cruz said. “But we shouldn’t be threatening government power to force him off-air. That’s a real mistake.”
Jimmy Kimmel pulled off the air after comments made about Charlie Kirk
The backstory:
During Monday, Sept. 16 broadcast of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, the host accused the GOP of hitting “new lows” regarding how the party reacted to Kirk’s death.
“MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” Kimmel said earlier in the week. “Everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level, you can see how hard the President is taking this.”
Kimmel then mocked President Donald Trump’s reaction to Kirk’s death, who was the one announcing the conservative activist’s death to the nation.
“[Trump is] at the fourth stage of grief construction, demolition, construction. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish,” Kimmel said during Monday’s show.
Carr said in an interview that Kimmel was playing into a narrative that Kirk’s shooter was a “MAGA Republican motivated person” and that Kimmel’s conduct was “really, really sick.”
“They have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with it, an obligation to operate in the public interest,” Carr said. “But frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Carr went on to say that companies could find ways to change conduct and take action or “there’s going to be additional work for the FCC.”
“The FCC is going to have remedies that we could look at,” Carr said. “Again, you know, we may be called to be a judge on that.”
After playing the interview during Friday’s podcast, Cruz said Carr’s interview was “straight out of Goodfellas.”
“That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it,'” Cruz said.
Cruz said he was happy that Kimmel was fired, saying he was “not funny” and his comments were “reprehensible.” He also called ABC’s decision to pull the show a “smart business decision.”