Kamala Harris’ appearance on “Saturday Night Live” this weekend was a “clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule,” FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote this weekend on X, prompting NBC to air a pair of Trump ads during peak watch hours Sunday.
“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct — a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election,” Carr wrote.
“Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns,” Carr added. However, a senior adviser for the Donald Trump campaign told Fox News that “SNL” didn’t invite the former president on the show.
In response, NBC aired a Trump spot during a NASCAR playoff race and the same spot again during Sunday Night Football on Sunday evening. The spot saw Trump directly addressing the camera.
“SNL” executive producer Lorne Michaels insisted to the Hollywood Reporter in an interview published last month that he had no plans to invite Harris or Trump on the show, pointing to the same equal time requirement cited by Carr.
“You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal-time provisions,” Michaels said. “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.”
The Equal Time rule requires radio and television broadcasters to offer the same access to candidates who are competing for office. The rule was established in 1927 to prevent stations from manipulating election outcomes by providing only one point of view to listeners or viewers.
Harris joined a visibly emotional Maya Rudolph for the show’s cold open on Saturday night. After Rudolph sat down at a vanity mirror and said, “This is it. The last campaign stopped in Pennsylvania. I wish I could talk to someone who’s been in my shoes, you know, a Black, South Asian woman running for president, preferably from the Bay Area,” the real Harris sat down on the alleged other side of the mirror and said she knew how Rudolph felt.
The pair engaged in an energetic back and forth that concluded with their promise to “keep calm-ala and carry on-ala.”
