Colbert, CBS spar over FCC and Talarico interview

What happened

CBS Tuesday disputed “Late Night” host Stephen Colbert’s on-air assertion Monday night that network lawyers had “in no uncertain terms” told him not to air an interview with James Talarico, a Democratic Texas state representative running for U.S. Senate, because of threats from Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. CBS said “The Late Show” was “not prohibited” from airing the interview but “was provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule.” Colbert pushed back on that “crap” statement. “They know damn well that every word of my script last night was approved by CBS’s lawyers,” he said.

Who said what

The FCC’s equal-time rule requires radio and broadcast television stations that give airtime to one candidate to “offer comparable time to other candidates competing in the given contest,” The Associated Press said. But it has several exemptions, including for “bona fide” news programming. “Media companies have long taken it as a given that late-night shows qualified for the same exemption,” The New York Times said.

But Carr has “remade” the FCC into a “speech enforcer tackling perceived liberal bias in the media industry,” threatening to “take action against broadcasters that do not follow rarely enforced FCC rules,” The Washington Post said. After Carr issued new “guidance” last month that late-night and daytime talk shows should not count on the “bona fide” exemption, the FCC opened an equal-time investigation of ABC’s “The View” over another Talarico interview.

Carr’s guidance “applies only to television and not radio, which is home to many right-leaning talk shows,” The Wall Street Journal said. The equal-time rule also doesn’t apply to cable TV or streaming, so “The Late Show” posted Colbert’s Talarico interview online. “I think that Donald Trump is worried that we’re about to flip Texas,” Talarico said in the video. Republicans “ran against cancel culture, and now they are trying to control what we watch, what we say, what we read, and this is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture. The kind that comes from the top.”

What next?

Talarico has “used the controversy to garner attention for his Senate candidacy,” CNN said. His Colbert interview was viewed more than 3 million times on YouTube Tuesday, the first day of early voting in his March 3 primary fight against Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas).