Outside the Beltway

More Late Night Politics

Plus CBS and the Trump administration keep forgetting about the Streisand Effect.

Steven L. Taylor · Tuesday, February 17, 2026 · 8 comments

The Trump administration and its allies within CBS are again engaging in editorial influence for obviously partisan reasons (not unlike the pulling of a segment from 60 Minutes on CECOT). This event also features FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who managed to temporarily get Jimmy Kimmel pulled from the air over statements that Carr didn’t like surrounding Charlie Kirk’s murder. Deadline has the details: Stephen Colbert Defies CBS, Says Network Banned Him From Interviewing James Talarico On ‘The Late Show’.

The basics are that Texas state representative James Talarico, a candidate in the primary for the Democratic nominee for the US Senate, was a scheduled guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. At the direction of the FCC, CBS’s lawyers blocked the segment.

Colbert told the audience and the country what happened despite being told not to do so (weird that people who are already fired tend to be a bit rebellious).

The Late Night host went on to explain FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s new guidance on the “equal time” rule, which requires broadcasters who feature qualified political candidates on their airwaves provide time to rivals, if requested.

[…]

Traditionally, news content has been exempted from the equal time rule and, in recent decades, stations have assumed that it has applied as well as to daytime and late-night talk shows, like The View and Jimmy Kimmel Live, which have featured presidential and other candidates, including figures like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

New FCC guidance, though, signaled to those talk shows that they no longer should believe that they would fall under the so-called “bonafide news” exemption. Carr said that a determination on whether a show is exempt would come down to a number of factors, including whether there was a “partisan motivation” in featuring a political candidate as a guest. “If you’re fake news, you’re not going to qualify for the bona fide news exemption,” said Carr.

[…]

“If Kimmel or Colbert want to continue to do their programming,” said Carr, “and they don’t want to have to comply with this requirement, then they can go to a cable channel or a podcast or a streaming service and that’s fine.”

And, of course, that simply means that the interview is accessible on YouTube, which is outside the scope of FCC regulation. Like with the 60 Minutes CECOT piece, I have to wonder if these people understand what the Streisand Effect is, as all these kinds of moves do is amplify the significance of the interview. Instead of it being the later segemnt on a Monday night talk show, you know the part of the show where a lot of people have drifted off to sleep, it is now national news.

The FCC isn’t just looking at Colbert.

Per Fox News, the FCC is investigating ABC News’ The View for featuring Talarico as a guest earlier this month, after it issued the new guidance. The show did feature Talarico’s main rival for the Democratic primary, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX). Another Democrat, Ahmad Hassan, also is running for the nomination.

[…]

The sole Democrat on the FCC, Anna Gomez, has blasted Carr for his latest equal time guidance, saying it is an effort to pressure broadcasters an not even a “legitimate investigation.” She said of The View investigation, “The real purpose is to weaponize the FCC’s regulatory authority to intimidate perceived critics of this Administration and chill protected speech. That is not how a free society operates.”

I am not an expert on FCC rules, although I understand the basic contours of the equal time rule as well as the fact that the FCC has the ability to reinterpret rules over time. However, let’s note a little history.

Broadcast talk shows have operated under the assumption that they are exempt from the rules since at least 2006, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno as he was running for reelection. His Democratic challenger, Phil Angelides, sought equal time, but the FCC ruled that the late night show fell under the exemption.

While the networks could challenge the FCC’s latest guidance, given the agency’s past history of not enforcing the equal time rule on talk shows, CBS parent Paramount made concessions to the FCC as part of its merger with Skydance last year. Among other things, it agreed to install an ombudsman “who will receive and evaluate any complaints of bias or other concerns involving CBS.” The person hired, Kenneth Weinstein, has his own ideological point of view, having formerly led the conservative think tank Hudson Institute.

I think it is significant to keep in mind that the rule has been interpreted one way for at least two decades,* so the current reversal, especially when clearly aimed at a specific politician that the sitting president feels threatened by, is quite significant.

This does not appear to be a systematic, serious reevaluation of this rule by Carr. This, instead, appears to be a targeted and arbitrary attempt to make the lives of some critics of the administration, including opposition politicians, unpleasant so as to limit speech. Such a move is, quite simply, an authoritarian abuse of power.

The fact that it is largely ineffectual (the equal time provision only applies to broadcast TV and radio, and so does not apply to any online medium) and somewhat comically focused on outlets like The View, Colbert, and Kimmel just underscores that our TV-obsessed president is at the heart of all this.

Don’t let the absurd nature of it all distract from it being an authoritarian, dictatorial move by this administration.

*And the history of politicians on late-night shows goes back well farther without full equal times being granted to all candidates. Colbert noted, for example, Bill Clinton’s 1992 saxophone playing on The Arsenio Hall Show.