It's hard to imagine that one of the animating issues in the final days of the 2024 presidential campaign would be a decades-old regulation enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). But that makes this the perfect time to talk about abolishing the equal time rule.
As Reason reported last month, the Constitution Party's Randall Terry used his presidential campaign to weaponize FCC regulations and force broadcasters to air his anti-abortion ads. Under the "equal opportunities requirement"—a federal regulation more often called the equal time rule—if a candidate for public office appears on a licensed broadcast station, the station must "afford equal opportunities" to all other candidates for the same office, with exceptions for "bona fide" news coverage.
