Okay Jim, and I will take it. Because of course, another story this morning that we mentioned a number of times is Disney, which owns ABC — not that large or important a part of the overall company. Nonetheless, it did pull Jimmy Kimmel Live off the air yesterday, the late-night show. This after comments by the show's host about the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Now, those comments did prompt a regulatory threat by FCC Chair Brendan Carr. And we're now joined by Chairman Carr. Good to see you, Chairman. Always nice to have you join us on CNBC. You know, I guess I'd start off by asking, did you play a role in this beyond your public comments? I believe they took place yesterday morning on a podcast in which you said, we can do this the easy way or the hard way in terms of changing conduct on Kimmel. Or you said there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. Was that enough, in your opinion, to spur this move by Disney, or were you involved beyond that?
I think there's a much bigger shakeup that's underway right now. I think people are trying to focus narrowly on the specifics here, but if you just back up, I think ever since President Trump won the election, it's created a permission structure for markets, including the media market, to rationalize. And again, if you look at the ratings for late-night television, they've been an absolute nosedive for years. But for some reason, these companies felt like they had to continue to subsidize it. And I think that's ending. And again, I think your viewers get this, but think about the business side of this. You have the national programmers, Disney, that create this content, and you've got individually licensed TV stations all across the country. And they're required — they've been for years required — to respond to the needs of their local communities and viewers. I think it was those local communities and viewers that were saying, you know, we don't like this stuff anymore. And so Nexstar was the first mover here. So we're going to preempt this program. We're going to block it out. Again, that's what you're supposed to do. A healthy, functioning market. I think, again, people sort of focus on, you know, narrow specifics, but there's a much bigger shift that's taking place right now in the media ecosystem. And frankly, I think that's a good thing.
Yeah. No. And you mentioned obviously Nexstar and Sinclair, and they clearly played a role in the decision by Bob Iger and Dana Walden at Disney to suspend Kimmel. We don't know for how long, by the way. But I would take issue, perhaps, with your contention somehow that these companies are keeping these broadcasts on the air not because they're profitable, but for another reason. I mean, I follow these companies closely, as you well know and have for years. And I can tell you, their leaders are very focused on making sure that every opportunity they have to create profits is one that they take. So, you know, they must be still making money in some way. You really believe that, that it's simply a partisan move on their part to maintain these broadcasts?
I think you can certainly make that argument. Just look at Colbert, right. The reporting that came out after Colbert was canceled is that his show was losing $50 million a year. Why were they losing $50 million? And again, I think there's a lot of commentary on late night having shifted dramatically over the last ten years. It used to be that they would go for laugh lines, and it's shifted to going for applause lines. They went from being court jesters that made fun of everybody, as should happen — you should parody everybody. Trust me, I'm getting my fair share of parodies. That's fine. But they started replacing that and becoming court clerics and enforcing a very narrow worldview. And I think that just tanked the business model. Again, President Trump has sort of unlocked the ability of companies to say, you know, we need to go a different direction. Just again, look at the ratings. It's just not there.
No, the ratings — but ratings have come down across the board as a result of, of course, people just don't watch nearly like they did. I mean, I can go back, and so can my colleagues too, remembering though the times of Johnny Carson. Now again, to that point, Chairman, I mean, you know, the administration in power was typically the subject of most of his jokes, as would seem to be the case now. I mean, these are comedians we're talking about. This is not the news.
Well, look, I can tell you Jimmy Kimmel is no Johnny Carson. And the issue that arose here, where lots and lots of people were upset, was not a joke. It was not, you know, making fun or pillorying me or the administration or the president. It was appearing to directly mislead the American public about a significant fact that is probably one of the most significant political events we've had in a long time, certainly the most significant political assassination we've seen in a long time. And so I think...
Anybody is going to try and defend what Kimmel said. And I certainly defer to the decision-making of the company itself in terms of saying this was beyond the bounds. But I do wonder, and I think many people do, whether you really are just targeting comedians who, you know, who typically through the years have made fun of political figures in a way that, because the president simply is offended by it.
No, no, no. Look, again, broadcast TV is different. We're on a cable show right now. You don't have an FCC license. You don't have an obligation to serve the public interest. Podcasts don't either. Stand-up comedians, whether they're on lots of forms of communications, don't. And Kimmel is free to do that. But if you have a broadcast TV license, that means that you have something that very few people have, and you're excluding other people from having access to that valuable public resource, and it comes with an obligation to serve the public interest. And again, over the years, there's been a rule in place at the FCC that local TV stations get to preempt programming that they don't think meets the needs of their communities. But recently, these national programmers — ABC, Disney, Comcast, NBC — they've been exercising outsized control and power over those local TV stations. And there's been no pushback. And this is a very significant moment because local broadcasters are now pushing back on national programmers for the first time that I can think of in modern history. That's one of the things we want at the FCC. We want to empower local broadcasters that have the public interest obligation to push back on national programmers so that people have more choice.
That kind of — I mean, it's interesting. Some people hold some of your old posts, Chair Carr, including this one from 2019: 'Should the government censor speech it doesn't like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a mandate to police speech in the name of the public interest.' How do you square what you're saying with those old posts? And is there pressure now, for example, for Comcast to drop Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers the way the president suggested?
Well, two things. I've been very, very consistent when it comes to the internet. We want wide open, robust debate. And there's no public interest standard there. There's no licensing obligation there. But again, broadcast TV is simply different. Particularly during COVID, we saw this massive surge in censorship on the internet by Facebook, by previous owners of Twitter, and I pushed back very strongly there. But again, broadcast is different. They've got a license, and they're free to go on the internet and do whatever they want. But if they want to keep access to those valuable airwaves, I've been clear: we're reinvigorating the FCC enforcement of public interest. And it's a good thing. I mean, look, trust in the media is at an all-time low. It used to be more trusted than Congress. At least they could say. But now they've fallen beneath Congress. I think, you know, gas station sushi probably polls better in terms of trust than the legacy broadcast media right now.
Jim Cramer. According to the New York Times late Wednesday — I'm just quoting here — 'Sinclair, another owner of many local TV stations, said that it would also suspend Mr. Kimmel's program and call on Mr. Kimmel to apologize and make a meaningful personal donation to Mr. Kirk's family, the activist political group Turning Point USA.' Do you think that's an appropriate remedy of the situation?
I think Sinclair has every right to call for that. Again, Sinclair affiliates with Disney, they take Disney content. They have a contractual relationship with Disney. And that's between the two of them to figure out, you know, what's going to make sense to make both of them comfortable with the relationship going forward. Again, over the years, it would be unthinkable for Sinclair, for Nexstar, for local TV stations to actually say, you know what, we're not going to take this particular programming that's coming out of New York and Hollywood and send it to Pennsylvania and Utah. And so the idea that local broadcasters feel like they can push back — I think that's a much, much healthier dynamic for the country right now.
While we have you — and I'm not saying we won't come back to Kimmel — I did want to hit on something I reported a lot on over the last couple of weeks, which was the spectrum sale, something you and I actually discussed back in May at Milken, from EchoStar. Two big deals: $23 billion to AT&T, another $17 billion to SpaceX. You know, there are some who believe — including the Wall Street Journal editorial page, I shouldn't say believe — who questioned why you didn't just take the spectrum back on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, because frankly EchoStar did not do what it said it would with spectrum over the years. They had it, and therefore garner $40 billion in revenues for the U.S. taxpayer instead of for Charlie Ergen.
Well, I think first of all, we would have to make a determination that EchoStar had not, in fact, met their build-out milestone. We raised significant questions about that. EchoStar responded to those questions and addressed it. At the end of the day, I just think the public interest was better served by finding a way to load that spectrum. Spectrum is the key to making everything we have wirelessly connected. It's going to enable us to do mobile AI, and we need to move more of these airwaves in a way that's going to load up the data. In my view, EchoStar wasn't doing that. And so they've now decided to sell a big chunk of the spectrum to AT&T, another large chunk of spectrum to Starlink, and it's going to unlock really great new innovations for the country. One, to help bring Americans across the digital divide, including in rural parts of the country. And two, this next generation of connectivity, direct-to-cell, is going to be part of it, where you go straight from your smartphone, right, to a satellite. This 50 MHz of spectrum is going to unlock that. And I'm just really excited about the potential competition there. And again, I think that's one where President Trump — we would not have been able to bring this deal together but for his strong leadership. And again, rather than going through enforcement and revocation, which could be years, right, that spectrum would have been sidelined. It's now going to go into the hands of people immediately.
