Indecent Disposal: FCC and the Censoring of Late-Night

Deborah L. Jaramillo looks at the relationship between the FCC and the television industry over time.

By Deborah L. JaramilloOctober 3, 2025

• Television

• Politics

• History

IF THE CANCELLATION of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in July came as a shock, the suspension of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel on September 17 felt more like an omen. The whiplash of Kimmel’s return the following week does little to restore faith in our institutions, instead shining a light on the profound uncertainty lurking within them. In one sense, we can say Kimmel’s suspension was triggered by a threat from FCC chairman Brendan Carr—an admonition to ABC to cleanse the air of Kimmel’s critiques or else. Kimmel’s monologue on September 23 exploited this by featuring a Hollywood mafioso type—Robert De Niro channeling his Goodfellas character—as the new FCC chair. Valid and brilliantly funny, that explanation only begins to address the web of relationships and interactions almost a century in the making.

At the center of Kimmel’s story are station groups Sinclair and Nexstar, which are eager for a merger; ABC, a network with affiliates owned by these groups; and the agency that has regulated broadcast television since 1934 and has the power and the backing of the president to set the proposed merger on fire: the Federal Communications Commission. Despite the sizable amount of blame to go around, the most vocal backlash has targeted the regulator.

While the anger and accusations of censorship and government overreach are warranted, the longer story of television broadcasting prods us to understand the relationship between the FCC and the networks—and the television industry more broadly—in less absolute, more historical terms. The intersection of TV programs, network/industry autonomy, and FCC regulation has consistently brought the sausage-making out of the factory and into public view. The reputations these entities have acquired through these more public disputes are misleading shortcuts: they threaten to freeze the story in this political moment and drag the “who” without understanding the “how” and the “why.”

An independent body whose members are appointed by the US president, the agency has acquired (erroneously) a reputation as a stuffy censor across popular culture. (Depending on your age and cultural touchstones, you may remember the FCC from its dealings with such performers as George Carlin, Howard Stern, and Eminem; from such shows as NYPD Blue and Family Guy; or from the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” of the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. My personal favorite is from the short-lived Adult Swim show Moral Orel, where the wicked and prudish town spinster is named Francis Clara Censordoll.) But the FCC’s job is much bigger than just responding to complaints about programs, and its history is, in many ways, the history of our ability to communicate with each other throughout most of the 20th century and even today.

The FCC’s association with program content has overshadowed its work in telecom infrastructure or merger review, and the current climate shows how these are intertwined. The FCC is often pegged as the villain in a conflict over decency or freedom of expression, yet we accept that someone—even on cable—imposes standards of decency or propriety on our shows before they air. Although it may seem that we don’t want that someone to be the government, the nation’s viewers have a long track record of calling on the FCC to right the so-called wrongs of TV.

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In the past few months, CBS and ABC executives have sacrificed two popular late-night performers to preserve the chances of two successful merger reviews by the FCC: the canceling of Stephen Colbert and, with it, the closing of the Late Show institution, and the brief but consequential suspension of Jimmy Kimmel. Obviating the pressure exerted by the White House, Brendan Carr has claimed that Kimmel’s references to recent political violence ran counter to the public interest mandate, which has been in place for broadcasters since the 1920s. Public anger erupted over what the FCC can and cannot do—a question of jurisdiction that has haunted the FCC since its inception.

Few stories are better situated to showcase the government-industry back-and-forth than the creation of the 1951 Television Code. Similar to Hollywood’s Production Code, the TV Code was the broadcast industry’s attempt to standardize taste and decency on-screen. Replete with power struggles, hysterical accusations, and viewer outrage, the Code helped to usher into the home free and clean commercial TV. It also stood as “proof” that the industry was its own best regulator of TV.

At the time the TV Code was drafted, the FCC was known to be weak, understaffed, underfunded, and dwarfed by an industry that had key alliances in political circles. Exploiting that situation, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB)—the broadcast industry’s trade association representing networks and stations—mustered the rhetoric of antiauthoritarianism to tighten its grip on commercial TV and assure viewers they could open their homes to a new guest. Believing they were pivotal in breaking “free the broadcasters from the chains which government [was] trying to fasten upon the industry,” as NAB president Justin Miller put it, the trade association pitted their idea of the public interest—the marriage of democracy and capitalism—against the FCC’s.

Both the FCC and its predecessor, the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), were created by legislation designed to manage the implementation of emerging communication technologies: wireless telegraphy, telephone, and radio. As with other industries, the regulator would help rather than hinder the industry’s growth while ensuring that the public interest was served. What the public interest actually was, no one would say concretely; over the years, notable commissioners James L. Fly, Wayne Coy, Fridea B. Hennock, Newton N. Minow, Nicholas Johnson, and Mark S. Fowler each brought their own interpretation to the job.

The fury that erupted over Carr’s invocation of “the public interest” stemmed not just from his transparent performance as the president’s stooge but also from the maddening vagueness of the term. Historically, the differing and uneven applications of the term, informed by priorities of the administration in power, have offered conflicting understandings of what television should be.

In the 1940s, however, the networks had a clear understanding. Having established their dominance in commercial radio, NBC and CBS (with ABC in tow) moved into TV with the capital, the affiliate relationships, and, in some cases, the technology to plant their flags. As a result, television’s identity as a commercial medium, rather than a public good, was nearly inevitable. The intensity with which the networks claimed television as their own helps to explain the woefully late creation of a national public television system—a delay that echoed the intentional marginalization of noncommercial radio decades before the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. With flags planted, after years of research and squabbling over manufacturing patents, commercial television launched in the late 1940s, guided in part by the trade association that had helped commercial radio navigate the FRC and the early years of the FCC.

Not equipped to anticipate the direction technology would take, Congress left the FCC’s purview poorly defined, and the commission historically has found its limits in the courts. The approach imparted to the FRC, once championed by Herbert Hoover during his leadership at the Department of Commerce, became the standard: the FCC’s job would not be to police but to work with the industry to ensure a properly functioning marketplace. That said, the FCC’s power to issue broadcast licenses and investigate antitrust violations, as well as its responsibility to answer to the public, meant the regulators made the broadcasting industry uncomfortable from the start.

As technical difficulties plunged networks and stations into a license freeze in 1948, pausing the growth of television indefinitely, viewers with access to TV service struggled with programs that challenged their sensibilities about gender, race relations, and American “decency.” The FCC was no stranger to listener complaints, but complaints from television viewers threw the commission into an even more fraught arena. The public could now see—on tiny screens, of course—the violence, romance, men, women, wrestlers, and comedians they had previously only heard via radio. The FCC replied to angry viewers by recounting Section 326 of the Communications Act of 1934, which forbade the FCC from tampering with content, but many viewers clamored for, even demanded, government censorship.

Most letter writers complained about sex and violence, but topics ranged from satire to religion, sports blackouts to communism, and program cancellations to respect for the president and the flag. Disapproving viewers characterized TV as a free-for-all with nudity, vulgarity, and disrespectful humor. In reference to a joke in a 1951 episode of The Red Skelton Show that referred to a half-dollar as a “Truman Dime,” the offended viewer wrote that Skelton had “violated his privileges” and “should be removed from the air.” Another viewer protesting Your Show of Shows, Sid Caesar’s NBC variety show, argued that the ridicule of President Harry Truman was “a breach of plain ordinary good conduct” and “should not be permitted to go unnoticed.” They concluded: “Who was guilty and what should be done about it is your business.”

The very existence of a regulator meant citizens expected action when the industry ignored their frustration. FCC commissioners concerned for the well-being of viewers were seemingly incensed at what the networks were airing, but their replies to viewers slyly noted the commission’s inability to touch programs and directed viewers to contact their stations and, significantly, the NAB, which was working on a set of standards for TV programs.

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The Honorable Justin Miller, president of the NAB when commercial TV launched, oversaw the organization’s folding of TV stations into the association in 1944 and became these stations’ vocal proponent. A fierce critic of earlier attempts to reform radio, Miller was no friend of the FCC. He had predicted in a 1947 speech that self-regulation was the only way to prevent the FCC from resorting to the Nazi playbook:

If the time shall ever come when an agency of government controls—directly or indirectly—the program content of radio broadcasting, we shall have put into the hands of that agency the same weapon as that which Hitler used in Germany and the dictators of other countries have used in theirs.

In 1949, he accused government agencies of being “lawless” and of “threaten[ing] freedom.” Content to mix and match political ideologies, he also blamed “guileful Marxists” for exaggerating the networks’ power with the intention of transferring broadcasting into government hands.

In a 1948 exchange of correspondence between Miller and FCC commissioner Robert F. Jones (which Jones made public), Miller likened Jones’s methods to those of Joseph Stalin after Jones hinted that the industry’s delay in implementing color TV standards “might well lead to” an antitrust investigation. As with Carr’s reference to “remedies that we can look at” and his more insidious remark that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” these barely veiled threats made in public appearances, publications, and elsewhere continue to be a common, if ethically dubious, FCC practice.

This method of indirect influence peppered FCC speeches in the 1950s and grew more insistent as viewers inundated the commission with letters. In one speech Commissioner Sterling remarked that “justified wrath at [the industry’s] excesses may unfortunately lead to pressures for an unjustified censorship.” A speech by Commissioner Coy similarly warned, “The question of just how bad poor taste can get before it verges over into downright obscenity or indecency may be settled one of these days if the present drift in that direction is not checked.” The more specific threat came in 1951, when Coy implied that if the networks didn’t clean up their act, the FCC would begin exploring the viability of subscription TV.

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The swift drafting and approval of the TV Code in late 1951 was most certainly a response to the FCC’s indirect influence, as well as to the multiple bills introduced in Congress to tame TV content. Harnessing the anti-fascist sentiment of the postwar years and the anticommunism of the Cold War, the NAB employed inflammatory rhetoric to advocate for a commercial paradigm unhindered by the government. Portraying itself as the victim of an authoritarian agenda that sought to chill speech and punish free enterprise—and intent on keeping noncommercial and subscription television out of the conversation—the NAB created an internal mechanism to police programs. The beliefs and values of the TV Code persist in contemporary television, and the regulatory culture it benefited from, in which the industry overpowers reform efforts and decides for itself what the public interest is and how best to serve it, continues to undermine a healthy media ecosystem.

The FCC’s recent, blustery maneuvers belie the agency’s historical weaknesses that have enabled its current weaponization by the sitting president. In commercial TV’s earliest days, the industry’s ability to shape television benefited from a regulator that needed the full-throated support of Congress but did not have it. The commission lacked funds and staff, which made it vulnerable to industry lobbyists and lawyers pleading TV’s case. The threats the FCC directed at the industry may have spurred action in the form of a code, but the code only legitimized commercial TV and conflated it with the public interest, shutting down talk of non-commercial or subscription TV in the process. In deferring to the NAB’s code and accepting the industry’s interpretation of the public interest, the FCC relinquished some of its ability to regulate according to its own interpretation. In other words, this early showdown over program decency shows how the commission can be susceptible to the full-court press of an industry, or even a president.

In 1952, a woman wrote to the FCC to complain about the CBS game show Strike It Rich. In her letter, she said she didn’t know what the FCC did, but she was angry enough to find out. As turbulent as Kimmel’s suspension has been, the by-product is that people are looking at TV and its regulator as important battlegrounds in the struggle for democracy. ABC’s reinstatement of Kimmel, and Nexstar and Sinclair’s restoration of Jimmy Kimmel Live! to their stations’ schedules, should not be permitted to bandage the wound inflicted by a set of institutional entanglements established over 100 years ago and made significantly more dangerous by increased media consolidation and decreased levels of accountability.

The Colbert and Kimmel situations are not normal, but given the ways regulation and self-regulation have operated thus far in the media industries, they were not improbable and likely not the last of their kind.