The chair of the FCC went live on Fox News, of all channels, to argue that ABC is alienating his audience. [1]

You can't make this stuff up.

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/fcc-chair-brendan-carr-defends...

Almost sounds like a canned reaction to, say, threatening a network over covering leaked Epstein details. Other late night hosts better watch themselves or the FCC might accuse them of “alienating their audience”.

It’s absolutely an overreach and there’s no chance this is the high water mark. Things are going to get much, much worse before there’s any hope of things calming down.

> feels like an overreach, maybe

How can it not be an overreach ?

that "maybe" could power a medium sized city

It feels like an overreach because it is.

“Maybe?”

Regulating “false information?”

There was no false information and the substance of the clip is just video of a person responding to a question.

If regulating false information is actually a part of the FCCs job, Fox "News" should have been shut down long ago.

FCC doesn't regulate cable stations. Local municipalities do have contracts with cable companies for enforcing community standards. Would be funny if blue cities just started forcing Faux News to be dropped as a matter of preventing dissemination of harmful lies and distortions.

As much as I dislike Faux News (I dislike CNN too, and I lean left), I feel like silencing "fake news" is a slippery slope because for one reason or another, the US population doesn't understand what "facts" are, so red cities would probably just drop CNN on the pretense of it being "fake news," and then everyone just gets forced into their little bubbles and everyone loses.

> The FCC does have the strange task of regulating "false information"

https://progressive.org/op-eds/weve-always-known-fox-news-is...

I guess Fox is next then. After all, the FCC is definitely not going to be found anything less than even handed.

> I'm hoping that this is just the high watermark, and not the new standard.

I’ve been hearing a variation of this for at least 9 months. Can’t help but see Americans as frogs in the boiling water. Surely it can’t get hotter than this, can it?

> I'm hoping that this is just the high watermark, and not the new standard.

How long until Fallon and Myers after the president all but threatened them? Guess we’ll find out how high this water will go.

If I'm understanding it correctly, the FCC didn't actually do anything here. The FCC chairman made, at worst, a threat. ABC immediately pulled the show, and news article's link this to license approvals and such.

But if the FCC actually strong armed the media due to political reasons, would it stand up in the courts? Disney has more than enough money to fight it. One possibility is that they're using this as an opportunity to cut the show, which maybe they were leaning towards anyway. It effectively redirects blame to the FCC instead of the company that actually made the decision.

This reads as if you're unaware of the upcoming merger some of the parties involved would very much like the FCC to approve.

How often is there not some upcoming deal with some media company that has political content? It's not unusual at all, yet ABC is completely absolved of any responsibility in this case apparently.

They "didn't do anything" in the same way that a mob boss saying that someone should be "dealt with" didn't mean for that someone to be murdered.

Have you read that document?

> The FCC prohibits broadcasting false information about a crime or a catastrophe if the broadcaster knows the information is false and will cause substantial “public harm” if aired.

> FCC rules specifically say that the “public harm must begin immediately, and cause direct and actual damage to property or to the health or safety of the general public, or diversion of law enforcement or other public health and safety authorities from their duties.”

> Broadcasters may air disclaimers that clearly characterize programming as fiction to avoid violating FCC rules about public harm.

It’s very obvious that Kimmel didn’t cause, and couldn’t have caused, any public harm.