Ok, fine. I’ll weigh in. 1. The Equal Time statute doesn’t apply to GameDay for several reasons. For one, when it passed the statute, Congress applied it to broadcast tv stations—not cable programs like GameDay. For another, Congress stated that the statute only applies to legally qualified candidates. The Senator is not one. 2. The Equal Time statute does not prohibit anyone from interviewing anyone on broadcast tv. It is about more speech, not less. Congress wanted to ensure that voters would decide elections, not media gatekeepers picking winners and losers by providing preferential airtime to some candidates and not others. Indeed, when the statute applies, it simply requires broadcast stations to offer comparable time and placement. And comparable does not necessarily mean an interview by the same person on the same program either. 3. This ties back to Talarico. He’s just running the same hoax he did a few months ago on Colbert for the purpose of getting clicks and donations—he’s banking on people not understanding the statute or operating as partisan lemmings. 4. More broadly, though, at least some people appear to take issue with a cable program choosing to interview one government official and not others. To the extent they’re pushing for greater balance in media, that might be a good thing. But to bring this back to the law, cable shows are different than broadcast programs. Broadcasters are unique. The FCC gave them free licenses worth many billions of dollars to use a public resource (spectrum). They are given a government sanctioned monopoly on their broadcast frequencies, too. If anyone else wants to use that same public resource (spectrum) for the purpose of expressing their own views, the government will not let them—it will eject anyone else that tries to use a broadcaster’s licensed spectrum. This means that Americans are subsidizing the distribution of broadcast programs over a public resource to the tune of many billions of dollars. We don’t do that with cable or anything else. In exchange for that free and exclusive right to use spectrum, broadcasters made a deal with the American people. They agreed to operate, not in their own narrow interests, but in the public interest. There are various rules and policies that they must follow. This sets them apart from newspapers and cable shows and podcasts. But some broadcasters want to break their deal with the American people. They want to keep their free access to billions of dollars worth of spectrum, of course. They are less eager these days to abide by their public interest obligations. Yet the Supreme Court has already ruled that holding broadcasters to their public interest obligations is not censorship or any sort of 1A violation. And Congress has charged the FCC with ensuring that broadcasters meet those public interest obligations, as required by their licenses. The agency should do so.

In 2006, Disney produced an ABC docudrama on the 9/11 attacks that was based on the 9/11 Commission report. Democrats strongly disagreed with how it portrayed the Clinton Administration. Senator Schumer and other Democrats wrote a letter to Disney’s CEO and called on him to “cancel this broadcast.” Their letter said that Disney’s ABC benefits from free broadcast licenses predicated on their obligation to operate as public trustees. They said that “Nowhere is this public interest obligation more apparent than in the duty of broadcasters to… promot[e] an open and accurate discussion of political ideas and events.” The letter called on Disney “as a beneficiary of the free use of the public airwaves to cancel this factually inaccurate and deeply misguided program.” Former President Clinton also called Disney’s CEO and insisted that he stop the show. Many other Democrats also weighed in. Disney responded by making significant, last minute changes to the key scenes, and Disney has never aired or released the docudrama after the original showing.