Brendan Carr

So the government in broadcast, but not cable, not streaming, picks winners and losers.

They say you get a license and necessarily that means your friend or your neighbor don't get the license.

And so when you broadcast, you're supposed to stand in the shoes, not just of yourself,

which is what you do on cable and everything else.

It's a public trust model.

You're supposed to operate in what we call the public interest and to look out for the views and interests of those that were denied by the government, a license.

And so one of those specific stature requirements is called equal time.

And the idea here was that Congress didn't want media gatekeepers

picking winners and losers in elections.

They wanted individual people, the voters to make those decisions, but they knew that the powerful broadcasters could put a thumb on the scale and tip elections by putting preferred candidate on the airways and denying others.

So they said equal time, if you're going to have one candidate on provide equal time for the other.

And it's funny for me to see people claiming that this is censorship.

It's the opposite of that.

There is nothing about the equal time rule that would ever prohibit anybody from having any candidate on the air.

It simply says their opposition candidates should get an equal opportunity potentially

Well, one reason that's slightly different than the fairness doctrine is the fairness doctrine said, if you're going to cover a controversial issue of public importance, right then and there, you got to give the left perspective and the right perspective.

But the equal timing is you can have just one candidate on your broadcast TV or radio program, but at some point in the future, uh,

A different host, a different time, they get equal comparable airtimes.

It doesn't require you to do it in the moment the same way that the Fairness Doctrine would have done.

But Congress admitted and said, you know what, let's create some exceptions to this.