Fox News host Bill Hemmer asked a very direct question to the chair of the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday morning—and Brendan Carr gave a very indirect answer.
“Did President Trump have anything to do with the cancellation of Colbert’s show?” the America’s Newsroom host asked of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which CBS axed last Thursday days after Colbert needled the network’s parent company for agreeing to a $16 million settlement with Trump.
Carr told Hemmer to “keep in mind [the] broader dynamic” before launching into a minute-long monologue about “broadcast media outfits and the New York and Hollywood elites.”
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Stephen Colbert’s name did not come up for the first 30 seconds of Hemmer’s rant, which characterized legacy media sources as “nothing more than a partisan circus.”
“There are a lot of consequences that are flowing from President Trump deciding, ‘I’m not gonna play by the rules of politicians in the past and let these legacy outlets dictate the narrative and the terms of the debate,’” Carr said.
At the end of Carr’s winding point, Hemmer pressed him to answer the question.
“I asked a very direct question, and I did not hear a yes or no in your answer. I heard a maybe,” Hemmer said.
Carr said that “ultimately, these are business decisions for CBS to make.”
Notably, Hemmer declined to ask Carr to comment on South Park‘s new season premiere, in which the townspeople of fictional South Park are sued by Trump and urged to settle so that they don’t “end up like Colbert.”
The season premiere that dropped on Thursday also featured multiple scenes mocking Trump’s “teeny-tiny” penis, just hours after Paramount reached a $1.5 billion deal with the show’s creators to produce 50 new episodes over the next five years.
Colbert’s cancellation and the conspicuous timing of CBS’s decision have led to a public outcry over the Trump administration’s litigious stance toward media companies.
Multiple Democratic politicians have called for greater transparency from Paramount about its reasons for cancelling Colbert’s show, which was the highest-rated show in its time slot.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who had been investigating Paramount’s proposed merger with Skydance, has opened an investigation into Paramount’s interactions with the Trump administration.
Fox News is one of the few legacy media outlets that Carr has not investigated for claims of media bias during his chairmanship.
