A surprise appearance by Kamala Harris might have galvanized this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live, but it might also have landed it in hot water. According to a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission, the sketch—in which Maya Rudolph’s satirical portrayal of the Democratic candidate for president sat hand-in-hand with real-life vice-president Kamala Harris—was a violation of the agency’s long-established equal-time rules, which require licensed broadcasters to offer all major candidates a platform, not just the candidate of the broadcaster’s choice.
The cry of foul came from the FCC’s former general counsel Brendan Carr, who was nominated by both President Joe Biden and then-President Donald Trump to the five-member commission. Posting to X (formerly Twitter), the self-described senior Republican on the commission wrote that the SNL cold open “is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule.”
“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct - a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election,” Carr wrote of sketch, continuing, “Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns.”
This isn’t the first time Saturday Night Live has raised FCC-related eyebrows with an election-eve appearance. In on November 1, 2008, then-Republican candidate for president John McCain appeared on SNL in the show’s cold open and again during “Weekend Update." That near-election timing was enough to spur musings that Democratic candidate Barack Obama should have demanded a comparable amount of screen time from NBC. (The then-senator didn’t, and—spoiler alert—he won that election anyway.)
The show has a rich history of presidential candidates appearing as themselves, including Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and, of course, Donald Trump, whose 2015 turn as host reportedly involved consultations with his bodyguard about whether or not certain sketches were funny. That same year, former FCC chair Tom Wheeler, who had been appointed to his position by Obama, vowed to vigorously enforce equal time rules during the 2016 presidential election.
The rules, which originated with the Radio Act of 1927 but were adapted and altered through the 1960s, require “any licensee of a broadcast station who permits any person who is a legally qualified candidate for any public office to use a broadcasting station to afford equal opportunities to all other such candidates for that office in the use of such broadcasting station.”
It’s a rule that’s attracted particular attention as influence over public opinion has shifted from radio and TV to social media. The FCC currently has no jurisdiction when it comes to powerful platforms such as Meta and X (formerly Twitter), the latter of which has—in the words of the New York Times—been turned into a reflection of owner Elon Musk’s personal views in the months leading up to the election. It’s worth noting that Carr has been a defender of Musk, announcing in April that he opposes efforts to “weaponize the government” against the far-right-leaning mogul.
According to the New York Times, sentiments and misinformation spread on those FCC-unregulated platforms are responsible for a remarkable spike in xenophobia and hate speech. Meanwhile, the FCC is here to fight the real enemy: Comedic outlets like SNL and Jimmy Kimmel Live, which was fined $395,000 in 2019 after it used a simulated Emergency Alert System tone to punctuate a monologue joke, another shocking violation of clearly society-saving agency policies.
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