Cruz seemed satisfied with the answer and changed the topic to the FCC’s management of spectrum. After that, much of the hearing consisted of Democrats pointing to Carr’s past statements supporting free speech and accusing him of using the FCC to suppress broadcasters’ speech.

Senate Democrats criticize Carr’s Kimmel threats

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked Carr if it “is appropriate to use your position to threaten companies that broadcast political satire.” Carr responded, “I think any licensee that operates on the public airwaves has a responsibility to comply with the public interest standard, and that’s been the case for decades.”

Klobuchar replied, “I asked if you think it’s appropriate for you to use your position to threaten companies, and this incident with Kimmel wasn’t an isolated event. You launched investigations into every major broadcast network except Fox. Is that correct?”

Carr noted that “we have a number of investigations ongoing.” Later, he said, “If you want to step back and talk about weaponization, we saw that for four years in the Biden administration.”

“Joe Biden is no longer president,” Klobuchar said. “You are head of the FCC, and Donald Trump is president, and I am trying to deal with this right now.”

As he has in the past, Carr claimed today that he never threatened ABC station licenses. “Democrats at the time were saying that we explicitly threatened to pull a license if Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t fired,” Carr said. “That never happened; that was nothing more than projection and distortion by Democrats. What I am saying is any broadcaster that uses the airwaves, whether radio or TV, has to comply with the public interest standard.”

In fact, Carr said on a podcast in September that broadcast stations should tell ABC and its owner Disney that “we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out because we, the licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocations from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.”