Veteran Washington Post columnist George Will at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland on March 6, 2014 (Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock.com)
With ABC/Disney having lifted their suspension of "Jimmy Kimmel Live," the show returned to the airwaves on Tuesday night, September 23.
The late-night comedian had a lot to say about the suspension, which occurred because of pressure from Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr. When Carr objected to comments Kimmel made about the suspect in Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk's murder, Tyler Robinson — who Kimmell argued was motivated by MAGA ideology rather than leftist ideology — ABC/Disney suspended "Jimmy Kimmel Live" indefinitely.
An enormous outcry followed, and countess defenders of Kimmel argued that Carr conducted himself like a mob boss when he threatened ABC/Disney with retaliation if they didn't fire Kimmel — a point that Kimmel made with a humorous yet scathing skit in which actor Robert De Niro portrayed Carr while drawing on his characters in the Martin Scorsese crime movies "Goodfellas" and "Casino."
Never Trump conservative George Will is highly critical of Carr in his September 24 column for the Washington Post, arguing that his actions might endanger a key policy of Ronald Reagan-era conservatism: the end of the Fairness Doctrine.
"The Trump administration is exuberantly public about its censorship aspirations," Will writes. "They are connected only to its ambitious agenda to curate American culture to the liking of the president and his epigones. Fortunately, Brendan Carr, President Donald Trump's choice to chair the Federal Communications Commission, is a person of helpful coarseness. The law empowering the FCC to require that broadcasters operate in 'the public interest' assumes two things that Carr demonstrates cannot be assumed: That vague terms such as 'the public interest,' allowing vast discretion to those construing them, will not be twisted for partisan purposes. And that the Senate will not confirm presidential toadies to positions where they can infuse unintended meanings into statutory language."
Will adds, "If, someday, some defibrillator restores Congress' heartbeat, the legislators might legislate about this."
The FCC was established in 1934 under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and its Fairness Doctrine was introduced in 1949 when Harry Truman was president. But in 1987, when President Ronald Reagan was in office, the Fairness Doctrine was abolished.
Will views the Fairness Doctrine as anti-free speech and fears that it will make a comeback in some form thanks to President Donald Trump, Carr and other MAGA Republicans.
"We might soon see an attempt to resurrect a discredited doctrine," Will argues. "To complete its comprehensive repudiation of actual conservatism, the Trump administration might try to undo one of Ronald Reagan's finest achievements: abolition of the misleadingly named and abusively implemented Fairness Doctrine…. The Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to devote a reasonable amount of time to each side of a controversial issue. How much was reasonable?"
Will adds, "Who, and by what metric, would measure the threshold at which an issue became sufficiently controversial? Who would decide how many sides there were to an issue?"
George Will's full Washington Post column is available at this link (subscription required).