The obscure FCC rule driving the Kimmel argument

The recent blowup over Jimmy Kimmel is driven by a lot of powerful currents in American life—grief, politics, business, freedom of speech. Underlying much of the debate, though, is one seemingly peculiar question about regulating the airwaves: Is “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” a news program? Kimmel was pulled off after a veiled threat by the Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, who reached back to invoke a rarely enforced tool in the agency’s quiver: its policy against “news distortion,” a loose, decades-old rule that makes a lot of First Amendment champions very uneasy, but which Chairman Carr has revived dramatically in his tenure. The news distortion rule—which prohibits significant, deliberate misrepresentations in broadcast journalism—is fairly obscure. It’s an informal doctrine that’s never been codified, and the FCC has concluded only once since 1982 that a newscast was distorted. That case was pretty egregious: Dateline NBC secretly rigged a General Motors truck with incendiary devices to stage a fiery test crash in a segment on gas tank safety. Even given the obvious deception, the FCC merely sent a letter admonishing NBC.