Stephen Colbert is crying censorship over the fate of an interview meant to air on his CBS late night program earlier this week, but there is a lot more to the story than he and his guest let on.
Colbert’s Claims
As reported on Wednesday AM Update, Colbert made waves Monday night when he claimed he was blocked by CBS from hosting James Talarico, a Texas State representative running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat in the Lone Star State. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert host suggested the network caved to pressure from the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Talarico, a former school teacher and Presbyterian minister in training, is currently running in the Democrat primary against Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and others. Colbert, who is months away from being unemployed due to CBS announcing last July that his show would end after its current season, offered this explanation for why CBS lawyers allegedly blocked the Talarico interview:
COLBERT: You might have heard of this thing called the ‘equal time rule’… It’s an old FCC rule that applies only to radio and broadcast television, not cable or streaming, that says, if a show has a candidate on during an election, they have to have all that candidate’s opponents on as well… There’s long been an exception for this rule, an exception for news interviews and talk show interviews with politicians… But on January 21 of this year, a letter was released by FCC chairman and smug bowling pin Brendan Carr. In this letter, Carr said he was thinking about dropping the exception for talk shows, because he said some of them were motivated by partisan purposes… Let’s just call this what it is. Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV, okay?
Colbert then directed viewers to The Late Show’s YouTube page, where the 15-minute interview was available in its entirety. Here, a moment of the riveting content traditional broadcast viewers missed:
COLBERT: If people are watching this right now, it’s because they found us online on YouTube. I did an act of the show that’s on tonight, explaining why… Did you mean to cause trouble?
TALARICO: I think that Donald Trump is worried that we’re about to flip Texas. This is the party that ran against cancel culture, and now they’re trying to control what we watch, what we say, what we read. And this is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture.
Colbert and Talarico claimed this whole kerfuffle is because the Trump administration is afraid of the Senate hopeful and trying to silence opposition. But in a statement Tuesday, CBS pushed back on those claims, indicating The Late Show was not prohibited from broadcasting the Talarico interview:
“The show was provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule for two other candidates, including Rep. Jasmine Crockett, and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled. The Late Show decided to present the interview through its YouTube channel with on-air promotion on the broadcast rather than potentially providing the equal-time options.”
So, no ban or government censorship – just a private business decision made because The Late Show didn’t want to give Rep. Crockett equal time.
Crockett Chimes In
To that point, Crockett addressed the debacle yesterday afternoon, seemingly admitting it wasn’t the Trump administration’s fault. “We did receive information suggesting that the federal government did not shut down this segment, number one. That is my understanding,” she told reporters. “There may have been advice to just have me on, and then they could clear the issue. It was my understanding that someone somewhere decided we just didn’t want to do that.”
“I don’t have any love for the current FCC… I do think that there are additional layers at play here,” she acknowledged.
Understanding Equal Time
AM Update spoke to constitutional attorney Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights – the organization that previously filed an FCC complaint against CBS over alleged deceptive editing of then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ 60 Minutes interview in the run up to the 2024 election – about the Colbert controversy.
Suhr explained the legal foundation governing broadcast networks like CBS:
“Broadcast television signals belong to the American people, right? They’re not the property of any one company or any one broadcaster or network… And the Federal Communications Commission was created to regulate and license who uses those airwaves… so it has always been the case that broadcasters are given a license from the government to use a public asset, and that license comes with strings attached to protect the public… When television programs feature candidates on the public airwaves, they owe equal time to other candidates. We don’t want television stations which, after all, use the public airwaves to be misused to advance one particular candidate.”
He also described how the equal time rule works, and some of the high-profile ways it has been used in the past:
“So you may remember back in [the fall of 2024], Vice President Harris went on Saturday Night Live, and as a consequence of the vice president going on SNL, President Trump got a free two-minute ad at the beginning of a NASCAR race to compensate for his equal time, to make up for the SNL appearance… So, in this case… Colbert could have had James Talarico on. That would have been fine. It would have been legal. The FCC would have had no problem with it, just the law requires that CBS give equal time to Jasmine Crockett in the form of, say, 15 minutes of free ads.”
As it relates to the Colbert case, Suhr said the protestations from the left are rather ironic. “The irony of all this is that Colbert is attacking Chairman Carr for supposedly being, you know, a Republican hatchet man, executing on, you know, President Trump’s revenge agenda against his enemies,” he noted. “And had the rule been followed in this case, it would have just meant that Democrats would have had more free airtime to attack President Trump.”
“That is because Colbert is missing the point of the rule,” Suhr added. “The point of the rule is that it protects all candidates from all parties.”
The Senate Race
The Democrat primary is set for March, and early voting began Tuesday. A University of Houston poll earlier this month showed Talarico trailing Crockett by 8 points, at 39 to 47 percent. The RealClearPolitics average, meanwhile, has the race tied at 41.
Whomever wins the Dem primary contest will face off against a Republican opponent for the seat currently held by incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in the November general election. The fourth-term senator is running for the GOP nomination and would like to keep his seat.
You can get all the day’s headlines by tuning into the AM Update with Megyn Kelly on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch AM Update on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111).