Inside the Government’s Crackdown on TV

From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. When Stephen Colbert announced that the government's increasingly aggressive stance toward late night meant that he could not air a planned interview with a Democratic senate candidate, it sent chills throughout the media. And then, this past weekend, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission threatened to punish news outlets over coverage of the war in Iran. Today, my colleague, Jim Rutenberg, explains how the White House is trying to shape media coverage of its agenda and just how far it's willing to go in its crackdown on network television. It's Wednesday, March 18. Jim Ruttenberg, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Jim, we've turned to you a few times on the show now when we have questions about the media and free speech and government intervention. And just this last weekend, in fact, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the SEC, threatened media companies by basically implying in a tweet that he would revoke station licenses that ran with coverage of the Iran war that he called, quote, hoaxes and distortions. And between that and the dust ups he's had with late night, most recently with Stephen Colbert, We wanted to have you on yet again here today to explain to us what we are seeing play out on our television screens. What happened over the weekend with chairman Carr's tweet was part of a pattern. He's been making threats like this since he started as the chairman at the start of Trump's term to warn stations away from certain content the administration doesn't like. And this one was extra alarming to people because it was a governmental threat against station licenses at a time of war when information is at a premium where the public really needs to understand what's going on. But one thing I wanna say here is this veiled threat he was making, it's really legally dubious. The FCC can't go willy nilly grabbing licenses because it disagrees with the content. In fact, it's totally prohibited under the law. It does have control over stations licenses, but what he's talking about to take away licenses from television stations, it's a very onerous legal process. So we'll see how that plays out. But we do have other test cases that are part of the same campaign where the FCC is really saber rattling in a way that we haven't seen in decades. And we have seen how far it can go and how serious the effects can be. And most notably, where we've seen the rubber really meet the road has been, of all places, with late night television, more specifically, The Stephen Colbert Show of CBS. And remind us what happened with Colbert. Well, it really starts in January. The FCC notifies broadcasters that we are going to apply a rule called the equal time rule to late night television. And it says that when candidates for office …