I may have been the only conservative to have benefited from the "Fairness Doctrine".
The "Fairness Doctrine" instituted in the 1940s required stations to "balance" the politics their stations broadcast, and gave the FCC and activists a process to challenge stations' broadcast licenses for being not "balanced enough". Without the license, the station could not remain on the air; all that investment went out the window.
Staying in compliance with the doctrine required stations to either do laborious bean-counting to make sure hours of material overtly from one side of the spectrum were balanced by content from "the other side". Most station management didn't want to bother - they eschewed politics completely.
I was a 23-year-old kid, just out of college and working at my first big-city radio job at a pre-repeal talk station in the Twin Cities that had been getting complaints that its hosts were very diverse, with some union Democrats, some hippie Democrats, and some academic Democrats. They needed some diversity. As a fairly new conservative (I'd voted for Reagan barely 18 months earlier) I offered my services.
So much faith did the boss have in me that he put me on the air from 2-4AM weekend mornings.
And it was the perfect job for 23-year-old me. And I may have been the only conservative to have ever benefited from the Fairness Doctrine. And, my story notwithstanding, we are well rid of the doctrine, which served only the bureaucrats.
Ronald Reagan's repeal of the "Fairness Doctrine" in 1987 was a big win for free speech. The repeal of the Doctrine - or, put another way, getting the government out of regulating broadcast content - is still seen as opening the door to the rise of conservative talk radio, with Rush Limbaugh leading the likes of Hannity, Beck, Prager, and more to a position to influence politics and policy.
So I've got a big problem with the way the FCC's Brendan Carr is responding to the Jimmy Kimmel flap.
Let's be honest - Jimmy Kimmel wasn't funny. Almost 20 ago, Christopher Hitchens referred to Bill Maher's audience as a bunch of "Trained Seals" for the dreary predictability of their applause:
If we lived in a sane country, crybaby Jimmy Kimmel would have been fired 4 years ago..
— Inaktive Shooter (@Inaktiv_Shooter) September 18, 2025
“Rest in peace, wheezy”. pic.twitter.com/wxhzck6rq0
I think it may have been a teaching moment for Maher.
But without an audience that was essentially trained to be a laugh track, monologues from Kimmel, Colbert, Seth Meyers and the like might sound a lot more like sermons at dreary little churches on summer Sunday mornings when everyone's out fishing.
This was vintage Kimmel from four years ago:
If we lived in a sane country, crybaby Jimmy Kimmel would have been fired 4 years ago..
— Inaktive Shooter (@Inaktiv_Shooter) September 18, 2025
“Rest in peace, wheezy”. pic.twitter.com/wxhzck6rq0
ABC should have fired him for that alone - that, and the fact that his ratings were anemic at best,
Late-night TV has been a life-support system for left-wing 'comedy" for a long time - but as we saw with Colbert, when you hemorrhage enough money for long enough, it can't last forever.
The Disgust With His Remarks Was Palpable, And It Wasn't Going Anywhere On Its Own: You've all seen it and heard it, but here's what Kimmel said:
We hit some new lows over the weekend 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 to score political points from it.
Now, I've heard Kimmel fans say, "It was the truth! MAGA was denying he was one of them!".
Which presumes that Kimmel didn't really mean Tyler Robinson was a right-winger - a meme that a fair chunk of the left was spouting until thirty seconds ago, and some still are.
At any rate - Kimmel messed around, and he found out.
So - Kimmel, host of an expensive show with lousy ratings, said something stupid that got affiliates nervous enough to pre-empt him:
Nexstar Media Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: NXST), today announced that the company’s owned and partner television stations affiliated with the ABC Television Network will preempt “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” for the foreseeable future beginning with tonight’s show. Nexstar strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets.
“Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located,” said Andrew Alford, President of Nexstar’s broadcasting division. “Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time, and we have made the difficult decision to preempt his show in an effort to let cooler heads prevail as we move toward the resumption of respectful, constructive dialogue.”
People in broadcast media have been fired for much, much less. Just ask me.
The free market was going to take care of Kimmel, as it took care of Colbert, soon enough. Had we just left well enough alone, Jimmy Kimmel would likely be even more forgotten in a year than he was, if you believe the ratings, last Monday.
So Why Go Back To The Bad Old Days? In stepped Brendan Carr, Trujmp's FCC chair.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said Thursday that ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel appeared to “mislead” the American public about facts regarding conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s killing in the days leading up to his show’s suspension...ABC on Wednesday night said it was pulling “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air “indefinitely” because of the host’s comments, which linked Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
“The issue that arose here, where lots and lots of people were upset, was not a joke,” Carr said Thursday on CNBC.
He's right, of course. It was irresponsible - crass, even; the latest of many offenses for which responsible management would have fired Kimmel.
But this threat to bring government regulation in to regulate speech is a huge mistake.
On First Amendment grounds? Sure, why not?
If the First Amendment means anything, it means that federal bureaucrats may not punish private companies for giving a forum to politically disfavored speakers. @jacobsullum
— StridentConservative (@StridentConserv) September 19, 2025
Brendan Carr Flagrantly Abused His Powers To Cancel Jimmy Kimmel https://t.co/6h32wawpur pic.twitter.com/c0DLq29GUF
And it's a mistake for the Adminstration on purely political grounds; it allows the left to deflect the public outrage over the assassination of a very mainstream politial figure, and the left's ghoulish reaction to it, into a battle for freedom where they - the party that gleefully censored their opposition from 2017 to 2024, and ran on doing more of it - can plausibly call themselves fighters for the First Amendment.
And that's ignoring the precedent it will set for the next Democratic administration - something that far too many Republicans have forgotten can actually happen.
Just as they have forgotten what media was like the last time the FCC exerted that kind of control.
