LEILA FADEL, HOST:
For more on ABC's announcement and what we might see from the Republican-controlled FCC going forward, we turn now to Brian Stelter. He's the chief media analyst at CNN. Brian, good morning and welcome to the program.
BRIAN STELTER: Hi. Good morning.
FADEL: So what do you think were the biggest factors Disney was weighing when it decided to bring Kimmel back tonight?
STELTER: Well, let's start from the premise that Disney did not want to sideline Kimmel to begin with. He is a beloved star at ABC. He's one of the biggest faces of the network. This network did not want to be forced into a position where it looked like it was caving to President Trump again. After all, it paid a settlement to Trump last December in a case that many legal scholars thought ABC could have won if it decided to go to court. So this is a situation that ABC did not want to be in. But it was under tremendous pressure under a period of hours on Wednesday, right before the program was about to air again. So it essentially tried to hit the pause button to try to calm this down. Now, I would actually argue that a week later, this has not calmed down. This is actually going to be a bigger controversy now...
FADEL: Yeah.
STELTER: ...Because people have chosen their sides. And for all of the liberals, for the moderates, for the Disneyland fans who are happy that Kimmel's coming back, now you have Trump voters and MAGA loyalists and MAGA media influencers who are ticked off and are vowing to try to punish Disney in new ways. So it's a tug-of-war situation, and you can feel people on both sides tugging back and forth.
FADEL: Interesting. So maybe just the start of what's to come. The FCC chair, Brendan Carr, had said last week he could do things, quote, "the easy way or the hard way." Most people took that as a threat.
STELTER: Right.
FADEL: He then said it was not meant that way, that the FCC's role is being distorted. I mean, what do you make of that?
STELTER: The FCC's role is being distorted because the FCC does not actually have as much concrete power here as Carr and President Trump have claimed. It would be very hard to actually revoke a local station license. These stations are not actually under an immediate threat from the FCC. What they're under is this public pressure campaign. What Carr has been doing is called jawboning. I remember him starting to do this almost a year ago when he started sending letters to Disney and other media companies promising to open investigations and probes into the companies.
Even though, you know, Carr doesn't have that much concrete power, he has a lot of power to physically bully or pressure these companies. And that may help explain why Sinclair is not willing to air Kimmel tonight. But I think it goes deeper than that. Sinclair is a conservative company that wants to stand with Trump's America. So I think in some ways, what we're seeing here is the unspooling of what we used to call broadcast. You know, broadcast media isn't so broad anymore if you have some stations refusing to air the national program.
FADEL: Interesting. So you think the Sinclair broadcasting decision is both political and concerns over the bullying.
STELTER: Yes.
FADEL: What's your assessment of what media organizations, not just ABC, can expect going forward from the FCC?
STELTER: The pressure is going to continue because there have been so many episodes where Trump has been emboldened, where Carr has been emboldened. There are going to be more of these skirmishes. In fact, some of them might involve Disney. One of the factors that Disney CEO Bob Iger has to consider is that he has pending business before the government - a pending deal involving the NFL, for example. Will we see the government try to punish Disney in some form? Well, if the DOJ or the FCC takes action against Disney, a lot of people are going to assume that it all comes back to what a late-night comedian is saying. And that's not how America's regulatory regime has worked up until now. This is a dramatic change from what we've seen from past administrations.
FADEL: Brian Stelter is chief media analyst at CNN. Thank you very much for your time and your insights.
STELTER: Thank you.
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