FCC's Carr Wrongly Claims SNL Appearance Violates the Agency's 'Equal Time' Rules

UPDATE: On two occasions during its Sunday-night programming, NBC gave the Trump campaign free commercial time. According to press reports, this was the network’s response to Harris’ brief SNL appearance.

On X, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr claimed that Vice President Harris’ appearance on SNL was “a clear and blatant effort to evade the equal time rule.” This was as inaccurate before the Trump ads aired on Sunday as it is now. The Equal Opportunity rule, 47 C.F.R. 1941(c), does not require that broadcasters affirmatively reach out to candidates to offer equal time. The FCC’s own fact sheet on its website explicitly spells this out: “the station is not required to seek out opposing legally qualified candidates and offer them Equal Opportunities.”

Despite Carr’s claim, there is no evidence that the network was trying to avoid the rules. Broadcasters have no legal obligation to set aside broadcast time for opposing candidates, unless the candidates request it. Equal-opportunity requests are commonplace in the final days of a national election, and broadcasters typically honor them.

WASHINGTON — On Sunday, Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris’ appearance the previous evening on NBC’s Saturday Night Live is a “clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule.”

There is no grounding for these claims in the FCC’s actual rules and guidance on this subject, which state that stations must entertain timely requests for equal time, but are not required to seek out opposing legally qualified candidates and offer them Equal Opportunities.

Free Press Action Co-CEO Jessica J. González said:

“It’s bizarre that a sitting FCC commissioner would engage in such a blatant and wrongheaded attempt to curry favor with a presidential candidate. But this is just the sort of reckless behavior we’ve come to expect from Brendan Carr. You’d expect an FCC commissioner to be familiar with his own agency’s regulations. Instead Carr seems willing to concoct falsehoods if it means he’ll get noticed by the former president. 

“It’s no secret around Washington that Carr is desperate to become the FCC chair should Trump be elected president. First Carr wrote a chapter in the widely discredited policy platform for Project 2025, a far-right master plan to disassemble U.S. democracy. Now he’s making grossly inaccurate claims about communications law to win points with the former president.

“Carr should actually read the regulations on which the equal time rule is based. According to those rules, former President Trump is welcome to seek equal time from NBC broadcast stations, though to the best of my knowledge he hasn’t done so. It’s no surprise to hear many candidates making outlandish and inaccurate claims during election season, but we should expect our purportedly independent regulators to know better."