The FCC Has No Mandate to Police Speech in the ‘Public Interest’

TV and radio broadcasters have licenses from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-"and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest," according to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who has often insinuated threats to the licenses of companies that broadcast views with which he disagrees.

Most recently, Chairman Carr argued that a September 15 broadcast of a Jimmy Kimmel monologue -in which Kimmel said "the MAGA gang [were] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them"-was incompatible with licensees' public interest obligations. Carr went on to say, "we can do this the easy way or the hard way." The implication was that broadcast content should change, or the FCC would go after broadcasters' licenses.

But as Joe Kane writes in Broadband Breakfast, it isn't that simple. As the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed, the "public interest" standard is limited by the text of the Communications Act. Therefore, it doesn't have the breadth to support Chairman Carr's threatened actions. Rather, such actions would likely run afoul of a constitutional rule known as the nondelegation doctrine, not to mention the First Amendment.

Read the full commentary.