CBS censors Colbert, bowing to pressure from Trump’s FCC

CBS forbade Late Show host Stephen Colbert from interviewing Texas State Representative James Talarico, a Democrat running to unseat Republican Senator John Cornyn. The incident is a chilling example of how the Trump administration and allied media organizations are colluding to suppress critical coverage of the administration.

Addressing the incident on Monday night’s show, Colbert said he was also told by CBS’ lawyers not to discuss the decision to spike the Talarico interview. But Colbert, whose show is being canceled in May, ignored that directive.

At issue was the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) “equal time rule,” which states that if a broadcast radio or television station provides time to a candidate for political office, it must provide equal time to all other candidates. (The rule does not apply to cable, streaming, or other non-broadcast platforms.) There is, however, an exception to the rule for news coverage and interviews. And, for decades, that exception has also applied to interviews of politicians by talk show hosts.

In a January 21 “Public Notice,” the FCC declared that interviews of political candidates on late night and daytime talk shows would no longer have a blanket exemption. Rather, the FCC would make a case-by-case determination of whether a program was conducting interviews for “bona fide” news purposes or for “partisan purposes, such as an intention to advance or harm an individual’s candidacy.” The notice did not provide any guidance as to what makes a show “partisan.”

Without the exception, airing political interviews would be effectively impossible. For example, there are 15 declared candidates running for U.S. Senate in Texas. Without the exemption, if the Late Show interviewed Talarico for 10 minutes, every CBS affiliate in the country would need to provide 10 minutes of primetime airtime to the other 14 candidates — including those with little support and no chance of victory. Recent polls show Talarico in a virtual dead heat with Cornyn in a hypothetical general election matchup.

“Let’s just call this what it is,” Colbert said Monday. “Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV.” At a January 29 press conference, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr (R), a Trump loyalist, said the Commission would not grant an exception to the equal time rule for broadcasts it considers “fake news.”

In a Fox News interview, Carr made clear that the rule was targeting Colbert and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel. Carr said that if Colbert or Kimmel did not want to comply with the new requirements, they could move to cable or a podcast, which are outside the FCC’s jurisdiction.

FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez (D) noted that the FCC “has not adopted any new regulation, interpretation, or Commission-level policy altering the long-standing news exemption or equal time framework.” She called the Public Notice “misleading” and “an escalation in this FCC’s ongoing campaign to censor and control speech.” She urged broadcasters to “not feel pressured to water down, sanitize, or avoid critical coverage out of fear of regulatory retaliation.”

CBS, however, is using the Public Notice as justification to censor the broadcast of an interview with a Democratic political candidate. Notably, the network was recently sold to a new owner in a transaction financed by billionaire Larry Ellison, a major Trump supporter. The CEO of CBS’ new parent organization, Paramount Skydance, is David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s son. In October, David Ellison installed Bari Weiss, a conservative pundit, as the new Editor-in-Chief of CBS News.

In a statement issued Tuesday afternoon, CBS denied that it prohibited Colbert from airing the interview.

Not every broadcast network is falling in line. ABC’s The View interviewed Talarico on February 2. An anonymous FCC source then leaked to Fox News that the Commission had launched an investigation into the interview. “Fake news is not getting a free pass anymore,” the FCC source said.

Carr turns a blind eye to right-wing talk radio

While the equal time rule applies to broadcast radio as well as television, the FCC’s January 21 Public Notice only mentions broadcast television. Talk radio shows typically lean more conservative, and would likely be forced to include more Democratic guests if the equal time rule was also enforced in radio.

Carr was asked in the January 29 press conference if the new guidance applied to “political talk radio.” Carr noted that while the equal time rule “applies to broadcast radio and TV,” the new guidance “was focused on those TV precedents.”

Carr argued that the FCC “wanted to be very clear” about the precedents for broadcast television because “there had been some broadcast television-related decisions by the FCC over the years, and it had appeared that some in [the] industry had misread, overread, or misconstrued those decisions.” Carr argued that the guidance was not necessary for radio, as “there wasn’t a relevant precedent that we saw that was being misconstrued on the radio side.”

Later in the press conference, however, Gomez reiterated that the equal time rule applies to radio as well. “And I also want to note what the administration is not focusing on, that these rules apply to all broadcasters, television and radio,” Gomez said. Gomez argued that the rules “must be applied evenly to the administration’s friends and critics alike.”

How Carr has weaponized the FCC

Since the start of the second Trump administration, Carr has used the FCC as a cudgel to intimidate news organizations and advance the Trump agenda.

On January 22, 2025, Carr reopened an investigation into whether CBS had deceptively edited an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes in October 2024. Carr’s investigation was launched as Paramount, CBS’s owner, faced a defamation lawsuit from Trump over the Harris interview. Paramount was also seeking FCC approval for its merger with Skydance.

In February 2025, the New York Times reported that Paramount executives hoped that settling the lawsuit with Trump would pave the way for the FCC to approve the merger. Ultimately, the lawsuit was settled on July 1 for $16 million, and the FCC approved the merger three weeks later. The approval was granted on the condition that CBS hire an ombudsman to review bias in news coverage and that Paramount and Skydance shut down all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

A few weeks after Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to “combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences,” Carr sent a letter to Comcast, which owns NBC, saying that the FCC was investigating its DEI policies. The letter said, “the FCC will be taking fresh action to ensure that every entity the FCC regulates complies with the civil rights protections enshrined in the Communications Act and the agency’s EEO rules, including by shutting down any programs that promote invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”

Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T have also caved to Carr’s threats and ended DEI programs to secure FCC approval for proposed mergers.

In the last year, Carr has also threatened several other media companies for unfavorable coverage of the Trump administration. For example, early in Trump’s term, the FCC launched an investigation into San Francisco radio station KCBS over its coverage of ICE operations in San Jose. According to the AP, the station’s news directors told employees to ensure that the station’s coverage did not anger the FCC.

Carr’s most high-profile threat came in September when he implied that ABC could face punishment after Kimmel made a comment about the murder of Charlie Kirk. On a podcast with MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, Carr said, “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Within hours, Kimmel was suspended by ABC, although it was reinstated about a week later.