Transcript of Inside the Government’s Crackdown on TV

From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. When Stephen Colbert announced that the government's increasingly aggressive stance toward late night meant that he could not air a planned interview with a Democratic Senate candidate, it sent chills throughout the media. And then, this past weekend, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission threatened to punish news outlets over coverage of the war in Iran. Today, my colleague Jim Rutenberg explains how the White House is trying to shape media coverage of its agenda—and just how far it's willing to go in its crackdown on network television. It's Wednesday, March 18th. Jim Rutenberg, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me. 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 FCC, 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 dust-ups he's had with late night, most recently with Stephen Colbert.

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 the 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 wanna 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 onerous 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 Stephen Colbert Show of CBS.

And remind us what happened with Colbert. 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 has 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 gonna apply it. So a few weeks later, when Stephen Colbert books Tallarico on his show, Tallarico is now in a primary campaign against Jasmine Crockett. CBS's lawyers notify Stephen Colbert and his producers, "Hey, you could have a problem here." with the FCC, 'cause you have an equal time issue potentially. And Stephen Colbert and the network disagree to the extent to which CBS told him not to air an interview with Tallarico or whether they were just warning him, but— You know, you know who is not one of my guests tonight? That's Texas State Representative James Tallarico. Stephen Colbert goes on his show and says that he's been told he can't have Tallarico on. Now, he can 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. 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. 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.

And just to be clear, in this specific example with Colbert, the FCC didn't tell CBS it couldn't have Tellerico on the show. What we saw was more of a preemptive move by CBS to avoid incurring the wrath of the FCC. That's exactly right.

This is not an example of Brendan Carr or the FCC saying, "Hey, Stephen Colbert 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.

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.

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. And 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. Stephen Colbert'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's 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. Hmm. One that has over the years let it sort of coast along beyond the reach of the regulators quite a bit. And so the FCC said, look, 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.

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

Well, it's kind of a long story. And it starts really with the rule we are talking about, the equal time rule. Let me bring you, if you will, back to the 1920s. Please. My favorite time. We are broadcasting over WAM, operates on a frequency of 1120 kilohertz. 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. Mm-hmm. 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. We're gonna issue licenses for the exclusive use of certain station frequencies. But in return, because of this power you are going to have, we are gonna 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.

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?

Right. It's got to have the same. You can't like give them time at 4 in the morning. Right? Right. It's got to have similar ratings. It's got to be free and it's got to be the same amount of time. 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. Hmm. Sometimes you have 20 people running for the same office, and 17 of whom don't have a shot in heck. I'll say.

Good. This is a clean family show. No FCC guidance for this.

So they needed to be the good one. But in all seriousness, 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 we 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. 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.

And they're getting added because the government realized that we should not be refereeing the minutes of airtime on a news broadcast because a news broadcast should be dictated based on what is newsworthy.

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: bona fide news. That's legit news that newspeople are gonna be trusted to present to the best of their ability that will be nonpartisan, journalistically valid, and serving the public interest.

Mm-hmm.

00:11:21

So that becomes the new understanding of the equal time rule. But the rule still very much applies to anything that might be considered entertainment. So if you have a candidate come on a game show or something, that would trigger the equal time rule. If you have a candidate on a news show, the equal time does not apply. Very simple, right? In the 1950s, it makes a lot of sense. These two worlds are Pretty much completely separate. Got it. 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. How so? So you have on the one hand more and more entertainers entering the world of politics. Someday when the team's up against it— 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. [ARCHIVE CLIP, RICHARD NIX] Ask them to go in there with all they've got. Win just one for the Kipper. [Speaker:LATIF] 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 airtime 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. [Speaker:LULU] Mm-hmm. And then at the same time, it's coming back the other way. [Speaker:ANNOUNCER] Governor Bill Clinton! [Speaker:JAD] You have politicians trying their hand at entertainment. They're increasingly showing up on late-night talk shows. [MUSIC] Bill Clinton, he sort of changes the game. He goes on Arsenio Hall'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. Did you ever think about playing professionally? Yeah, and I liked it tonight. I liked being on the other side of the posse. Yeah. Speaking of what your drummer said— What? He said if this music thing doesn't work out, you can always run for president. 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.

Finally, though, in the mid-2000s, the FCC has to weigh in.

And what happened then?

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. Unashamedly bringing showbiz to politics, Arnold Schwarzenegger chose The Jay Leno Tonight Show announced he's running for office. When Schwarzenegger announced that he was running for governor of California, he did it on Leno. And this is why I'm going to run for governor of the state of California. 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. Welcome back. We're talking with the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I still get a kick out of saying that, the governor of California. We go back 20— you and I were at the Playboy Club together in '77. The Playboy Mansion, remember that? And Schwarzenegger was on Leno again and again and again. I've been working on my impression of you. Man, this is the worst impression I've ever heard. What's the matter with you? And things such as that you say, it's so bad.

You see how bad this is? Do I talk like that? You talk exactly like that. I'm gonna reinstate the car tax for you. Really? Really? Now fast forward to when Arnold's running again. He's now governor for reelection in 2006. And the Democrat, Phil Andelidis, starts saying, "Hey, this isn't fair. Leno is giving Schwarzenegger this huge platform. They're friends." So Andelidis says, "Hey, I want equal time, and the FCC is gonna have to adjudicate here." because NBC's not inclined to give it. And the FCC takes a look and says, "You know what? This is a bona fide 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." That 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 bona fide 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. And that's in the Bush years, the late night hosts start becoming even more political. Well, let's start tonight with our continuing coverage of Mesopotamia. As you know, we went to Iraq. They're led a little bit by Jon Stewart. How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? Um, I would say 30,000, more or less. 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. He's not under the FCC thumb the same way. He's on Comedy Central with his Daily Show. Right. He's on cable, not broadcast. Yes, but also Stewart is having amazing success, so he's influencing the broadcast guys. This is good news. The White House has now released a 35-page plan entitled "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." President Bush refuses to set a timetable for reading it, but he thinks that— And all of late night starts getting much more political.

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. And much more sort of liberal leaning. 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. They're often saving their sharpest barbs for Trump especially, but Republican politicians across the board. Please welcome back to The Late Show, Vice President Joseph R. Biden. And over the years, more and more of their guests are Democrats.

Can you run down to the kitchen in your underpants in the middle of the night if you're hungry?

I mean, I could. I don't. You don't? No. 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. 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 wading into late night until last year.

We'll be right back. 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 night 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?

Well, it comes to a head because of this little-known lawyer from Wisconsin named Daniel Serre.

I love your old-schoolness, right? Like, we're not just gonna have the phone, like, we're gonna have an actual recorder.

Yeah, that's great. 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.

I start out as a free market conservative, right?

Right. So Daniel Cerr is basically a rising star conservative lawyer. He had worked for years on, you know, real classic conservative causes. And a couple years ago, with a colleague of his, he founded a nonprofit law firm called the Center for American Rights. They are not doing anything, and never in his career, from what I could see, had he done anything relating to television broadcast rules, the FCC.

It really started with the debate. ABC debate. Yeah, the ABC debate. 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 Kamala Harris.

The fact-checking seems so egregiously one-sided.

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 fact-checking Kamala 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." And sir, he's hearing Trump and he's been thinking about this. Well, what does that mean? How do you pull a license?

00:21:30

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

00:21:36

And he— learns about the history that you and I just spoke about.

The Federal Communications Commission has always said—

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

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

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.

"Seem to be this, you know, massive one-sided love fest." He's always thought that they're biased. "The media also holds its own kind of power that needs to be held accountable." 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 Kamala 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 bona fide news. It's partisan content meant to sway the audience.

00:23:04

[Speaker:LULU] So what Daniel Curr, 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 carve-outs 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 afoul of the regulations.

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 talk 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 CIR represents this new strain 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 Rosenworcel, asked her enforcement division at the FCC to take a look at these CIR complaints. And 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 a Fox station in Philadelphia relating to stolen election coverage on Fox News back from 2020. So they're all invalidated.

So how much of a deterrent is that to Daniel Cerr to get all of his complaints thrown out?

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.

And remind us quickly, who is Brendan Carr and what does he believe?

We are doing some different stuff in the media space now as compared to Trump 45. 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. At least coming into this second term. It doesn't seem to have been a focus, these public interest rules, for you previously, right? And in first term, like, it seems like a newer issue for you. Well— Is that partly a Daniel Surr showing up after ABC and saying, "Hey, wait a minute"? Well, I think Daniel Surr's been very helpful in pointing out not just, you know, the issue, but— And he will later tell me that Daniel Surr really lights the way for him. I do think that, you know, Daniel Surr has been doing tremendous work doing a lot of the research, bringing, you know, grounding his positions in historic FCC case law and precedent. I think it so speaks to what Trump wants to see in a second term in terms of a media that's going to behave differently toward him. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. And one of the first things that Carr does when he takes the chairmanship over after the inauguration is he reinstates all of those complaints, not the Fox complaint, Okay, so everything you're talking about is news, news, news, right?

So how does Daniel Serre take this from the news ecosystem and bring it into late night?

Well, interestingly, now Daniel Serre 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.

I would say late night is where the cultural power of celebrity is lent to the Democratic Party.

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

You watch the evening news. 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.

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. And that's against the LA station, ABC station. He says, basically, same idea. Kimmel is tilting his show toward one side, and this is unacceptable. And Rachel, literally days later, an assassin shoots and kills Charlie Kirk. And Jimmy Kimmel, as you'll remember, does this very controversial monolog. Right. Thank you for joining us after, um— Where he implies— that the shooter could be a MAGA fan. 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.

And this is a new low.

Last night, people, especially in Trump world, go crazy over that. He's either trolling or just stupid. I'm not sure which. Maybe both. Oh, I'm going with stupid on this one. A liberal comedian trying to pin this murder on a Trump person. He didn't imply it. He said it. Of one of our great heroes. One of the most asinine things I ever heard.

Conspiracy land, literally.

And, you know, it ends up that the person is not anything at all like that. It's negligence at best to not already know that if you're Jimmy Kimmel, but clearly he doesn't care. And so Carr— When you look at the conduct that has taken place by Jimmy Kimmel— in this maelstrom, steps up to say on a podcast, you know what? There's a very concerted effort to try to lie to the American people. This could be violative of the public interest. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to 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. I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. 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. So that's the beginning of it. But for SIR and Carr, late night is on the radar, which finally brings us up to January when the FCC under Carr really institutionalizes their push against late night.

You know, the Kimmel instance was a bit more ad hoc, right? That happened in the moment. But now they put out this formal announcement that says, here's the new policy. We are gonna 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 Sur, 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 Colbert interview getting taken off the air.

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 for bias and equal time violations. And The View— Obviously not late night. 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.

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?

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. 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 networks would win in court, do you want to be in court for months or longer with the federal government? Nobody wants it.

I wanna 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. Well, that is what Chairman Carr's saying.

He told me that personally, but he said it elsewhere time and time again that all I'm doing is enforcing the law. Mm-hmm. 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?

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

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'd 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 gonna 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 Serre would tell you there's a bigger play here.

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One of my hopes is that we clear the way for family-friendly, faith-inspired, patriotic content.

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

It's not just that balance means getting all this liberal stuff off the air, right? It's saying that red-state consumers deserve content they want out 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?

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?

That's the warning from those conservatives that still view the FCC and its power here as anathema to their ideology. So Senator Ted Cruz has warned that if this happens now under us, the Democrats are gonna 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.

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?

Rachel, I want to note, first of all, that there was more Republican blowback this weekend with Carr's Iran-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 toe 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 gonna be handled? And is the FCC gonna 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 gonna 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.

Jim Rutenberg, thank you as always.

Thanks so much for having me.

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 Larijani, the head of the country's Supreme National Security Council, and Brigadier General Gholamreza Soleimani, the head of a powerful militia aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The killings were announced hours before President Trump lashed out again against 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 desire any help to open the Strait of Hormuz and added that he was, quote, disappointed in NATO. 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." Today's episode was produced by Alex Stern, Ricky Nowitzki, Mary Wilson, and Diana Wynn.

It was edited by Rob Zipko with help from Michael Benoit, fact-checked by Susan Lee, and contains music by Pat McCusker, Marian Lozano, Dan Powell, Rowan Nimisto, and Alicia Baitoub. 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.