What Happened When I Asked Michael Shellenberger To Defend His Journalism

A case study in the perils of resentment-based politics

Back in October 2017, President Donald Trump was engaged — as always — in a feud with the broadcast networks that he believes treat him unfairly. He tweeted that “Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked.”

For obvious reasons, many people found this deeply concerning. After all, the government yanking TV stations off the air for political reasons isn’t something we do in the United States — rather, it’s the sort of deeply authoritarian move we associate with banana republics.

Trump’s bluster elicited a response from Jessica Rosenworcel, then and now a member of the Federal Communication Commission’s Board of Commissioners (she’s now the chairwoman). Writing in Cosmopolitan, she explained that Trump’s threat was 

fundamentally at odds with our constitutional tradition. It’s also wrong on process. It’s simply not how the broadcast licensing system works. 

The FCC does not license television networks like NBC, FOX, CBS, or ABC. It only licenses individual broadcast stations. Right now, there are roughly 1,800 full-power television stations across the country.

This hasn’t stopped far-right types from continually salivating over the prospect of their strongman president yanking the TV networks they don’t like off the air. You see this sort of thing from time to time, and it’s consistently egged on by Trump, who recently called for CBS to lose its license because he didn’t like an interview the network did with Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes (again, Rosenworcel stepped in to explain that no, that’s not how America or the FCC works). Trump so disliked the interview, in fact, that he filed a bizarre and chilling $10 billion lawsuit against CBS. The year 2025 is going to be very exciting.

Trump, then, has obviously contributed to an air of creepily authoritarian fantasizing about government censorship of mass media. In light of all that, a tweet I saw on November 3 shouldn’t have surprised me. It read, in part, “The FCC should revoke NBC’s license.”

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But it did surprise me, because the author wasn’t Trump or some far-right wacko, but Michael Shellenberger, an activist, journalist, author, and the founder of the very successful Public, a Substack-hosted publication. Shellenberger, who has also run for governor of California, is an ardent defender of certain liberal principles, as he himself will tell you. He chairs the Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech department at the University of Austin, and his bio describes him as a “leading expert on the suppression of speech.” A video interview with him that was just published last week was titled “Michael Shellenberger — Free Speech Is the Most Crucial Thing.”

How can you simultaneously think that free speech is an incredibly important principle and that the federal government should revoke NBC’s ‘license’? It’s a depressing story that demonstrates the brain-melting power of resentment-based politics.

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Let’s imagine NBC did have a license to lose. Why, according to Michael Shellenberger, should NBC lose its license? Because Kamala Harris briefly appeared on the November 2 episode of Saturday Night Live.

“NBC said it wouldn’t break the law, but it did,” wrote Shellenberger on Twitter the next day. “SNL nakedly boosted @KamalaHarris & @timkaine. This is brazen election interference. It was timed to avoid any chance of ‘equal time’ under law. A post-election fine will be too little too late. The FCC should revoke NBC’s license.”

We’ll get to the regulations in question shortly. But it really did jump out at me, even amid all the heat of pre-election Twitter, that a guy so committed to free speech would tweet something so deeply authoritarian.

But the more I read his tweets, the worse it got. The equal-time issue is one thing, but Shellenberger’s claims about Senator Tim Kaine, who appeared in a funny sketch making fun of both resistance libs and his own generic white-guy nature in that same episode of SNL, veered deeply into the land of deranged conspiracy theorizing:

In addition to illegally boosting @KamalaHarris, NBC’s Saturday Night Live last night did a skit *literally* aimed at boosting the name recognition of Sen @timkaine. Why? Perhaps because Kaine’s challenger @HungCao_VA just closed the gap & could win. It’s election interference.

That tweet included this screenshot of the then-current FiveThirtyEight tracking page for the race between Kaine and his opponent, Hung Cao:

Even a cursory look at Shellenberger’s own screenshot shows that Cao had not, in any meaningful sense, “closed the gap.” At the time, there was one poll by an outfit called Chism Strategies showing Kaine up two points only, but it was a clear outlier. Chism noted this fact on Twitter, writing, “Given our confidence in our methodology, we see no reason to hide or attempt to manipulate the results. The numbers are what they are.” Two other polls conducted during overlapping periods showed Kaine up 10 and 11 points, and at the time, the RealClearPolitics average — obviously a better way of gauging the state of a race than any one or two polls — showed that Kaine was up by 11, meaning there was almost no chance he would lose. (It looks like Kaine will end up winning by 8 percentage points.)

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Shellenberger is highly respected in some circles, and Public is an undeniable hit. But when you see someone tweet something like this, it makes you want to examine their work a little bit closer. Given that the poll in question came out on the same Saturday as the SNL episode which so agitated Shellenberger, he was positing a chain of events that was far, far too stupid to possibly be real. Something like:

1. SNL or NBC bigwigs catch wind of a single outlier poll in the Virginia senatorial race. Though the staffers/bigwigs are so into politics they are paying close attention to a fairly noncompetitive race, they also know so little about politics they misinterpret a single outlying poll as representing genuine trouble for Tim Kaine. They love Tim Kaine.

2. Because they love Tim Kaine so much (see (1)), within hours, a plot is contrived to save his candidacy. A sketch is written, a set is built or dragged out of storage, and Tim Kaine is flown up from Virginia.

3. Thanks to his appearance in the sketch, Kaine, who is seeking a third term as a Virginia senator following terms as Old Dominion’s governor and lieutenant governor — not to mention that time he ran for vice president — now enjoys enhanced “name recognition.”

Oh, and the sketch in question barely mentioned Kaine’s name (that was actually a big part of the joke).

Okay.

You can either be taken seriously as a thinker, or you can tweet wildly conspiratorial bullshit like this, but you can’t do both.

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At first I complained about the craziness of all of this on Twitter. I shouldn’t have done that. I know Michael Shellenberger. I’ve met him in person a few times and despite what are now my views about him as a journalist, he’s always been kind, friendly, and generous. Back in 2022 I even went to a dinner party at his home when I was staying in the East Bay. From the point of view of politeness and civility — virtues I value, even if I sometimes slip up — I should have reached out to Shellenberger to ask him to explain his posts before I said anything about them publicly. No excuses there.

But I didn’t just complain on Twitter. I also looked into the regulations in question, and doing so quickly made clear that Shellenberger had no idea what he was talking about. He confidently and repeatedly accused NBC of having broken the law at a time when he couldn’t have possibly known that was true. Again, if you want people to take you seriously, you just can’t do this sort of thing. 

Let’s take it from the top. This whole chain of events appears to have been kicked off with a tweet from Brendan Carr, an FCC commissioner, on Saturday night, November 2. An hour and a half after the AP broke the news that Harris would appear on SNL that night, Carr wrote on Twitter:

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.

Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns.

Here’s how this works: There’s a federal law stating that outside of news contexts, broadcasters that allow a candidate to appear on the air need to provide “equal opportunities” to his or her opponents to do the same. That law is light on the specifics but notes that “The [Federal Communications] Commission shall prescribe appropriate rules and regulations to carry out the provisions of this section.”

The FCC made the following rules: If a candidate appears on a broadcast, opposing candidates have seven days to request their equal opportunity to appear. Upon receipt of such a request from a genuine candidate (as legally defined), the network in question doesn’t have to provide time on the exact same show or in the exact same time slot, but it does have to be “comparable time and placement,” as the FCC puts it. The FCC is clear, though, that the other candidate(s) need to take the initiative. It explains in bold that “the station is not required to seek out opposing legally qualified candidates and offer them Equal Opportunities.”

So in short, Carr wasn’t quite right. NBC was not required to offer time to other candidates, but rather was required to respond to their requests for time if they made them. It’s impossible that anyone could have known, in the 24 hours following Harris’s appearance on SNL, whether any rules had been broken. And Carr had no way of knowing whether NBC had already informed the other candidates or planned to — he had no basis, in short, to assert that NBC was seeking to evade the rules, because nothing about the mere appearance of Kamala Harris on SNL proved that. None of that stopped him from tweeting what he tweeted.

Carr, who was appointed by Trump and reappointed by Biden, is a partisan Republican. He wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC, in fact. This spawned an ethics complaint from a handful of House Dems, though Carr was subsequently cleared by the Office of Government Ethics, which determined that he didn’t violate any rules. While I’m no Project 2025 conspiracy theorist and have been annoyed at some of the dishonest liberal responses to the document, its clear goal, at the time it was published, was to establish the conservative movement’s next set of muscular policy goals, most likely through a Trump 2.0 administration. So Brendan Carr might be an FCC commissioner, but he is also a conservative activist, he clearly preferred Donald Trump over Kamala Harris, and he stood to gain if Trump was elected (he is likely to be named the next Chair of the FCC by Trump). 

All of which means that if you’re a careful journalist, you might not want to automatically and immediately take everything he tweets about the election at face value. I’d say the same thing about the progressive members of the body, like Anna Gomez — if she were criticizing Trump on Twitter, I wouldn’t automatically take what she was saying at face value. 

Despite the reasons not to automatically assume Carr’s analysis was 100% accurate or driven by good-faith concern for The Rules, it was good enough for Shellenberger. Carr tweeted his initial complaint Saturday night, and by 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, Shellenberger had posted an audio interview and accompanying article with Carr headlined “Brendan Carr: ‘There’s no question NBC knows’ Saturday Night Live broke the law.” 

Shellenberger’s article starts as follows: 

In mid-September, NBC Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels told the Hollywood Reporter that neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump would be on the show because doing so would be illegal. “You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal time provisions,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “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.”

But last night, Michaels broke his promise and put Harris on air in a cameo with actress Maya Rudolph. “This is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule,” said Federal Communications Commissioner Brenand Carr, “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.”

Under federal law, there is no Lorne Michaels Isn’t Allowed To Change His Mind Act (it was repealed in 2010 as part of the Obamacare compromise), but because Shellenberger has brought this up over and over and over as some sort of smoking gun, it’s worth noting that Michaels didn’t “promise” anything. He appears to have simply said that it was logistically complicated to have a candidate on SNL because of these rules, and therefore at the time (the interview was posted October 1) he wasn’t planning on doing so prior to the 2024 election. And the very next paragraph of the THR article notes “Of course, just because bringing on the real-life political figures is complicated doesn’t mean it’s impossible. In fact, it’s been done before.” The “before” in question is a reference to. . . Donald Trump hosting SNL in 2015. (John McCain also appeared on SNL just days before the 2008 election, but his electoral fate seemed to be sealed by then.)

In the interview with Shellenberger, Carr expresses the opinion that “NBC or SNL has attempted to evade [the equal-time] rule” given the constricted timeline — since the broadcast was Saturday night and the election was Tuesday, Carr argues, NBC would not have time to remedy the situation. 

But Carr himself, despite projecting certainty that there was a problem here, also hedges a little bit, including at the end of the interview:

I think this was structured — by the looks of it, and I’m open to seeing different information — but by the looks of it, to evade compliance with the rules. I simply don’t see how you go from here to the election and invite all of the impacted candidates with comparable time and programming. Again, maybe they can mitigate some of the harm a little bit, but I don’t see how you ultimately avoid a determination here that there’s been a violation of equal time. Again, I guess there’s still time, we’ll see how it plays out, but it seems like it was designed to evade it, and I’m, you know, skeptical that they can find a way to cure it at this point. 

But wait — what about that headline: “Brendan Carr: ‘There’s no question NBC knows’ Saturday Night Live broke the law”? It might not shock you to find out that Shellenberger engaged in a bit of paraphrase massaging here. Carr’s exact quote was “There’s no question that NBC, SNL both know this law and know exactly what they did.” “What they did” is ambiguous, but could simply mean the network knew it would have to offer equal time to the other candidates if they requested it, and that it would have to do so on a very short timeline, which might be difficult. I’d argue that that’s a more likely explanation than Shellenberger’s paraphrasing, in context. This isn’t nitpicking, given that Shellenberger was so outraged by this supposed lawbreaking that he called for NBC to be pulled off the air! 

Now, all along Carr acknowledged that NBC did have an out. It would be attempting to evade the rules, he opined the evening of Saturday the 2nd, unless “the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns.” On Sunday, NBC satisfied its biggest obligation on that front, as NPR’s David Folkenflik reported a day later: The network reached out to the Trump campaign and offered Trump time. The Trump campaign agreed; Trump recorded a video message that subsequently aired that day at the end of a NASCAR race and during Sunday Night Football (the latter of which is trying to become the top prime time show in the nation, by ratings, for the 14th consecutive year, meaning Trump didn’t exactly get a raw deal). Hung Cao also accepted an NBC slot on Monday, the day before the election.

Given the timeline of all this, the single biggest potential problem facing NBC — the Trump campaign making a stink about being denied the equal access to the airwaves to which Trump were entitled — had probably been resolved, behind the scenes, by the time Shellenberger posted his interview with Carr. During an intense, fluid situation, it’s always best to wait a day or two before you publicly accuse a network of willful lawbreaking and call for it to be pulled off the air.

Carr did not respond to my repeated requests for him to clarify whether he agreed with Shellenberger’s description of his view. When I asked the FCC if Carr’s statements about a potential violation of an attempt to evade the rules reflected the Commission’s views, a spokesperson responded that they did not. The spokesperson also explained that while there was no specific written guidance on the question of how the seven-day rule applies so close to an election, it was not the Commission’s view that a candidate simply appearing on a broadcast close to an election is itself a violation, or in any way actionable. That’s because there’s a process, he said, and unless a candidate complains, that process remains untriggered and the FCC has no role to play whatsoever. And as of this afternoon, when I last spoke with this spokesman, he said that the FCC was not aware of any complaint from a candidate. (Jill Stein appears to have issued some sort of press release demanding equal time, but that doesn’t mean she actually filed the necessary paperwork.)

None of the complexities of this mattered to Shellenberger. Instead, after it was clear that there was effectively zero chance that anyone had committed any violation, he trotted a victory lap: “It’s a big victory that NBC acted. It shows that the public pressure we all brought to bear worked. X is game-changing. It’s also further proof that NBC knew it was guilty.”

So NBC’s offer to Trump, which helped ensure it stayed within the bounds of the law and actually went beyond what was required of it — statutorily, NBC didn’t have to do anything unless and until the other campaigns complained — is “further proof that NBC knew it was guilty.” In this view, NBC didn’t care about the law as of 11:30 p.m. Saturday night, but then Michael Shellenberger complained on Twitter, and NBC said “Oh, crap — Shellenberger noticed” and changed course by early Sunday. 

Okay. Another explanation — one which I would argue is more realistic, albeit less flattering to Shellenberger — is that NBC is part of a gigantic corporation staffed by trillions (okay, not literally) of lawyers who are well-versed in broadcast law, and that has very easy access to the presidential campaigns, and that therefore the network had some sort of plan in place. 

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Shellenberger reached out to me via Signal after he saw my tweets, upset that I had publicly criticized him. Again, a valid response on his part given our acquaintanceship. If I could do it again, I would have started this process a bit more privately.

We went back and forth for a bit. I found that Shellenberger wouldn’t answer basic questions about his reporting, including about how he could have possibly determined NBC had broken the law by Sunday given what the law actually states. Instead, there was a lot of what came across as deflection, including demands from him that I answer a bunch of irrelevant questions that struck me as only tangentially related to my claims. Rather than respond to my actual questions, Shellenberger sent me an almost 500-word statement and asked me to publish it in full, which I’m going to (politely!) decline to do. 

I’m declining in part because the inaccuracies start with the very first two sentences: “NBC executive Lorne Michaels said in September he would not have Trump or Harris on Saturday Night Live because doing so would violate the law. NBC thus knew it was breaking the law, and interfering with the election, when it had Harris on SNL.” Michaels never said it was illegal to have a candidate on! He said it was logistically complicated because of the equal-time requirement. Someone as smart as Shellenberger should be capable of better reading comprehension than this. (Shellenberger is, of course, welcome to post his statement, which you’ll see doesn’t meaningfully address any of my critiques, and he’s also welcome to post our entire text chat, if he wants.)

For the record, after this all started I reached out to NBC, the Trump campaign, the FCC, and Carr himself. Carr has ducked my repeated requests for him to clarify whether, as Shellenberger suggests, he meant to imply that NBC knowingly broke the law — I asked that question directly to him in one of the emails the FCC responded to but haven’t heard back. (After a quick initial response from NBC, I didn’t hear back from the network, nor did I hear back from the Trump campaign, all of which is understandable given that I reached out to both right before a national election.)

As for Shellenberger, after some more texting this past Sunday, I called him and we had an off-the-record voice chat I viewed as deeply counterproductive. All I’ll say is that I made no progress in my attempts to get him to actually defend the claims he loudly and confidently made online. I emailed him a list of specific questions, asking him to respond by noon Eastern today if he wanted me to include his responses in this piece, and haven’t heard back.¹

So that’s where we’re at. I’m disappointed by all this, especially because Shellenberger has the ear of so many powerful people — even more so than before now that Trump has won — and is taken so seriously by them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with dancing between activism and journalism, as Shellenberger has done for a long time, but you can’t let tribalism degrade your journalistic standards. 

I can’t say for sure why Shellenberger descended into conspiracy theorizing, nor how he came to sometimes sound exactly like Donald Trump, right down to the misunderstanding of how broadcast licensing works, all while proclaiming to hold free speech sacred. But I have a theory: He simply hates liberals more than he likes liberal principles. 

After Trump won, Shellenberger co-authored an article on Public headlined “Why Trump’s Victory Is, For Millions Of Us, Cathartic.” The subheadline read, “After a decade of being hunted, stigmatized, and ostracized by the Woke, many of us can finally breathe a sigh of relief.”

Look, liberal institutions have been roiled by a lot of meltdowns in recent years. Anyone who subscribes to this newsletter knows that I don’t shy from critiquing these tendencies. I haven’t yet figured out exactly where I land when it comes to the question of how all that nonsense contributed to Trump’s victory, but I do think that on net, it helped him at least a bit.

And I’ve had my own run-ins, so on one level, I sympathize with Shellenberger; some of the same people who falsely claim he’s a fascist have falsely claimed I’m a fascist. If you disagree with anything they think about anything, you’re a fascist. It’s very unpleasant, even if, in my opinion, the worst of it was over a couple years ago, despite certain pockets within academia, media, and NGOs where the lunatics still hold some sway over the asylums in question.

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But if you make personal pique at wokeness your entire public identity, it’s going to take you dark places, both morally and intellectually. This isn’t the first time I’ve pointed this out — I’ve written pieces for The Spectator and The Boston Globe Magazine about the rabbit hole some people fall into as a result of their obsession with wokescolds.

Shellenberger has always been a contrarian, sometimes in the good sense of that word, like, Hey, maybe we shouldn’t shut down the nuclear power plants, given that they’re actually cleaner than what will replace them? We need such figures, and they are often on the receiving end of unfair slings and arrows. But when you get to the point where you’re writing that you feel like you’re being hunted, when in the same breath you both extol the virtues of free speech and support major government attacks on it, when you trade in embarrassingly nonsensical conspiracy theories. . . I dunno, man. Something has gone badly wrong. 

What really gets me about this is the doubling and tripling down. For example, in our initial Signal chat, I pointed out how little sense the Tim Kaine conspiracy theorizing made. Shellenberger could have easily said, “Look, it was a heated election moment and I got a bit overexcited.” We’ve all been there, myself included. But he won’t do that: He is so locked into his worldview that he can only find confirming evidence. 

Whatever Shellenberger is doing, it isn’t quality journalism. And if he can’t get basic things right like “what the law says” or “what Lorne Michaels said in an interview,” what possible reason is there to trust him on bigger, more complicated stories involving whistleblowers, anonymous sources, and so on? I don’t trust his journalism, is what it comes down to.

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Questions? Comments? Theories about the deep pro–Tim-Kaine conspiracy that infects every floor of 30 Rock? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal.

Image: UNITED STATES - MARCH 9: Michael Shellenberger, co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute and the California Peace Coalition, recites the Pledge of Allegiance during the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing titled The Twitter Files, in Rayburn Building on Thursday, March 9, 2023. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

1. For the record, here’s that whole email:

If you could get me any answers you'd like to provide by noon Eastern tomorrow, I can put them in the piece. I'm not going to run a long statement from you as you suggested before -- I'm really just interested in your answers to these specific questions. 

1. My understanding of the law here is that broadcasters are not required to inform candidates that they are entitled to equal time. Rather, candidates are required to request it, and then the networks are required to provide it. I know that Brendan Carr expressed skepticism that NBC would be able to follow the law, but it appears to have done so. How were you able to determine by Sunday, November 3rd that NBC had knowingly broken the law? 

2. You claimed that NBC offering other candidates equal time "shows that the public pressure we all brought to bear worked." Do you have any evidence that that's the sequence of events, or is there a chance NBC was simply aware of the law and followed it? (David Folkenflik reported that NBC told him that they reached out to the Trump campaign on Sunday.)

3. You said NBC should have its 'license' revoked. NBC doesn't have a license (see here,). Rather, each individual NBC affiliate has a license to broadcast. I want to make sure I'm relaying your argument correctly: were you saying that every one of the ~220 NBC affiliates around the country should have effectively gotten the death penalty for having aired SNL as they do every week? To me this would raise fairness concerns given the unlikelihood these affiliates had any influence on or knowledge of the decisions made by higher-ups at NBC to have Harris on SNL.

4. Where are you seeing in the regulatory language that the penalty for violating the equal time rule should lead to licenses getting pulled? Can you cite any prior examples of this happening?

5. If there's anything else you'd like me to consider adding, please let me know.

Thanks,
Jesse