This weekend’s Saturday Night Live featured a few surprise guests, including Pete Davidson, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine — oh yeah, and Vice President (and presidential candidate) Kamala Harris, who turned up in the episode’s cold open. Harris’s cameo likely did not strike many people as a potential violation of campaign rules — and yet FCC commissioner Brendan Carr argued that that was precisely what had taken place.
In a lengthy thread on Twitter/X, Carr explained his logic, calling Harris’s appearance “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule.”
As The Hollywood Reporter‘s Zoe G. Phillips explained, the situation was a little more complicated than that — the FCC itself told Phillips that Carr’s comments did not represent official agency policy, for one thing. (Carr is one of five commissioners; he was appointed to the role in 2017.) Phillips also noted that the Equal Time rule also puts the onus on political candidates to request, well, an amount of broadcast time equal to what their rivals have received.
That said, Carr did have one relatively solid piece of evidence to bolster his own position: comments made by SNL‘s Lorne Michaels last month in which Michaels cited the Equal Time rule to explain why neither Harris nor Donald Trump was likely to appear on the show.
Kamala Harris Wasn’t the Only Big Political Cameo on This Week’s “SNL”
All that and John Mulaney, tooIn the end, NBC opted to offer the Trump campaign 90 seconds of time on the network, the equivalent to the amount of time Harris had spent onscreen in the SNL sketch. As Deadline’s Glenn Garner and Ted Johnson report, that resulted in a short video of Donald Trump addressing the camera running during NBC’s coverage of a NASCAR race on Sunday. Late on Sunday night, The Hollywood Reporter also revealed that the same Trump spot had also aired during NBC’s Sunday Night Football.
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