Did Harris violate 'equal time rule' before polls, FCC regulator questions VP's SNL skit

With just 48 hours left for the 2024 US presidential elections, a government communications regulator has claimed that Vice-President Kamala Harris’s surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live violates the “equal time” rules that govern political programming. A man named Brendan Carr, who is a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), said that Harris’s appearance is a “blatant effort” to evade the rule.

“This is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule. 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 on one candidate on the eve of an election,” Carr wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns,” he added.

This is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC's Equal Time rule.

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.… https://t.co/LliZF0po9t

— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) November 3, 2024

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What does the rule say? 

The FCC guidelines state that “Equal opportunities generally mean 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.”

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Soon after Carr’s claim, a spokesperson from the FCC issued a statement in this regard. “The FCC has not made any determination regarding political programming rules, nor have we received a complaint from any interested parties,” the body said.

Harris joined comedian Maya Rudolph at the start of the show. The comedy sketch mocked Trump’s recent rally speeches, including wearing an orange and yellow safety jacket, a riff on the ongoing garbage controversy, and pretending to fellate a broken microphone.

The vice president took part in the “mirror image” sketch opposite Rudolph, the SNL cast member selected to impersonate her, on the other side of a mirror.

“I’m just here to remind you, you got this because you can do something your opponent can’t do – you can open doors,” Harris told Rudolph, taking potshots at a video in which Trump was struggling to reach the handle of a garbage truck he briefly rode into a Wisconsin rally. “With a cool new stepmom-ala. Get back in our pyjama-las. And watch a rom-com-ala,” Rudolph said.

Interestingly, Harris’ appearance came months after SNL’s executive producer Lorne Michaels told the Hollywood Reporter that neither of the presidential candidates would be part of the show. “You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal time provisions,” Michaels told the American news outlet at that time.

“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 executive producer added.

Trump campaign reacts

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign also complained about Harris’s appearance on the show, saying that the Democratic presidential nominee “has nothing substantive to offer the American people, so that’s why she’s living out her warped fantasy cosplaying with her elitist friends on Saturday Night Leftists as her campaign spirals down the drain into obscurity”, spokesperson Steven Cheung told Fox News Digital.

Not only this but some viewers also pointed out that Harris’s sketch was quite similar to a sketch Trump was featured in with ex-SNL comedian Jimmy Fallon on Fallon’s The Tonight Show in 2015. “I knew that SNL sketch with Kamala Harris looked familiar…” radio host Ari Hoffman said in an Instagram post linking to the Fallon-Trump skit.