NBC violated the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) “Equal Time” rule by inviting Vice President Kamala Harris onto Saturday Night Live on the last weekend before the election, leaving no time for former President Donald Trump.
Harris appeared in the show’s opening scene, known as the “cold open,” opposite Maya Rudolph, who impersonates her on the program. (The setup copied Trump’s 2015 appearance on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.)
However, NBC had previously announced that it would not invite either candidate on the program. Producer Lorne Michaels told The Hollywood Reporter in September:
In a recent interview ahead of the show’s 50th season, SNL creator and long-running maestro Lorne Michaels revealed that he hadn’t reached out to the real-life candidates, and he didn’t intend to before the 2024 election. “You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal time provisions,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, and then clarified: “You can’t have the main candidates without having all the candidates, and there are lots of minor candidates that are only on the ballot in, like, three states and that becomes really complicated.”
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee whose appointment was renewed by President Joe Biden, posted on X (formerly Twitter) that NBC had violated the Equal Time rule:
The rule applies to broadcast radio and television, which utilize the public airwaves and therefore require FCC licensing.
It states: “FCC rules seek to ensure that no legally qualified candidate for office is unfairly given less access to the
airwaves – outside of bona fide news exemptions – than their opponent. Equal opportunities generally means providing comparable time and placement to opposing candidates; it does not require a station to provide opposing candidates with programs identical to the initiating candidate.”
There is no time left for Trump to appear on SNL.
Trump appeared on SNL in 2015, dancing to a parody of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” video. Liberal critics were outraged, as they were at almost every Trump appearance on a late-night comedy show, claiming that it “normalized” him.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.