FCC chairman unconvincingly claims he never threatened ABC station licenses

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr wants you to know that he never threatened to revoke TV licenses if Disney refused to suspend Jimmy Kimmel. The problem for Carr is that lots of people heard him do exactly that last week. "There's a lot of Democrats out there that are engaged in a campaign of projection and distortion," Carr said during an on-stage interview at the Concordia Summit yesterday. "The distortion is they're completely misrepresenting the work of the FCC and what we've been doing. I saw there's a letter from some Senate Democrats that said the FCC threatened to revoke the license of Disney and ABC if they didn't fire Jimmy Kimmel, and that did not happen in any way, shape, or form." While Carr complained that Democrats interpreted his comments as a threat to Disney, he didn't mention that his comments were also interpreted as a threat by several prominent Senate Republicans. Disney suspended Kimmel's show last week after Carr said ABC affiliates could have licenses revoked for "news distortion," but reinstated Kimmel yesterday after facing backlash from the public. Kimmel will be back on the air on many ABC-affiliated stations, but not those run by Nexstar and Sinclair, which have replaced Jimmy Kimmel Live! with news and other programming.Read full article Comments