FCC Chair Brendan Carr got an unexpectedly sharp grilling from CNBC’s Sara Eisen on Monday, who openly questioned the “suspicious” timing of his agency’s escalating attack on Disney-owned ABC — pointing directly to President Donald Trump’s recent demand that Jimmy Kimmel be fired.
Carr, who has emerged as one of the most aggressive enforcers in Trump’s second term, recently called eight ABC TV station licenses in for early review, a move Disney has blasted as a transparent effort to chill protected speech.
Eisen wasn’t buying Carr’s explanation that the timing was coincidental.
“And it has nothing to do with Jimmy Kimmel — just because the timing was suspicious, right?” Eisen pressed. “It came right after the president called for the firing of Jimmy Kimmel for that distasteful joke he made about Melania.”
Carr insisted the early renewal order had nothing to do with Kimmel and everything to do with a sprawling DEI investigation into the entertainment giant.
“The renewal of the Disney license — the early renewal order that we directed — was based on where we were in the enforcement of that DEI case,” Carr said, claiming the FCC has evidence of “potentially a systematic policy within Disney to hire, to promote, to compensate based on race and gender.”
“If that turns out to be the case, that’s a pretty big problem,” he warned, “and it’s one that we’re going to want to take action on at the FCC.”
Carr framed his crusade as a continuation of his first-week move to end DEI at the FCC itself, saying people would be “shocked” to learn the agency had been “spending millions and millions of dollars promoting DEI.”
But Eisen kept the pressure on, noting that even one of Carr’s own commissioners had broken ranks. She pointed out that a Democratic FCC commissioner told Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro that ABC “has been a victim of a sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control.”
“That’s pretty unusual for a regulator at a federal agency to basically say an investigation by that agency is without merit,” Eisen said.
Carr brushed off the dissent, saying “there’s always robust disagreement” inside the agency. He insisted his FCC is simply holding broadcasters to a different standard than “a cable channel, a YouTube, or a newspaper.”
“Perhaps other agencies and other FCCs would look the other way,” Carr said, “but we are now holding broadcasters accountable across the board.”
The chair also confirmed the FCC is digging deeper into “The View,” another ABC property that has drawn Trump’s ire. Disney has fought back hard, filing a regulatory petition accusing Carr of trying to shape media content to his liking.
Carr suggested Disney’s real beef is with federal law itself — specifically equal-time rules for political candidates — and accused the company of claiming “The View” is “a bona fide news program.”
“We’ll see what the FCC says about that,” he said.
Asked whether he’d be comfortable with a future Democratic FCC wielding similar power against conservative media, Carr deflected by pointing to the Biden era, claiming Democrats “claimed far more sweeping powers” for “overtly partisan political reasons.”
“Democrats pressured cable companies to drop Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax,” Carr said. “The list goes on and on of actual weaponization. But you don’t hear about that because a lot of the national news media just runs cover.”
His bottom line: “Let’s just apply the law in an even-handed and fair way.”
Disney’s broadcast licenses now hang in the balance, with Carr making clear that if the agency doesn’t find the company met “the public interest standard,” the licenses could be set for a hearing — and potentially yanked altogether.
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