CBS Doesn't Need to Be Told Anymore
A year of capitulation, from paying off the president to killing stories to blocking interviews.
On Monday night, Stephen Colbert told his audience that CBS’s lawyers had called The Late Show staff directly and told them, “in no uncertain terms,” that they could not air a scheduled interview with James Talarico, a Texas state representative running for U.S. Senate. Then they told Colbert he wasn’t allowed to mention on air that the interview had been pulled.
He did both.
Talarico is running in the Democratic primary for the Texas Senate seat currently held by Republican John Cornyn. His main primary opponent is Rep. Jasmine Crockett. The interview was supposed to air the night before early voting began for Texas’s March 3 primaries.
The restrictions went beyond just pulling the interview. According to Colbert, he couldn’t show a photo of Talarico, couldn’t show a drawing of Talarico, couldn’t do anything that would constitute a candidate appearance “by voice or picture.” He did the interview anyway, posted it to The Late Show’s YouTube page after the broadcast, and told viewers to go find it themselves. CBS wouldn’t let him share a URL or a QR code.
The whole segment was Colbert at his best, and the details are worth your time.
Here’s what Colbert said on air
The segment ran at the top of Monday’s show. Colbert opened with some band announcements, told the audience Jennifer Garner would be his guest, and then:
And you know who is not one of my guests tonight? That’s Texas state representative James Talarico. He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast. Then I was told, in some uncertain terms, that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on. And because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.
So you might’ve heard of this thing called the equal time rule, okay? 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. It’s the FCC’s most time-honored rule, right after no nipples at the Super Bowl.
There’s long been an exception for this rule, an exception for news interviews and talk show interviews with politicians. Now, that’s crucial. How else were voters supposed to know, back in ‘92, that Bill Clinton sucked at saxophone?
But on January 21st 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.” Well, sir, you’re chairman of the FCC, so FCC you. Because I think you are motivated by partisan purposes yourself. Sir, you smelt it ‘cause you dealt it. You are Dutch-ovening America’s airwaves.
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? He’s like a toddler with too much screen time. He gets cranky and then drops a load in his diapers.
So it’s no surprise that two of the people most affected by this threat are me and my friend, Jimmy Kimmel. When this letter dropped, we both talked about the letter on air, and then later Carr defended it like this: “If Kimmel or Colbert wanna continue to do their programming 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.”
Great idea, man whose job is to regulate broadcast TV. Suggest everyone just leave broadcast TV. It’s like when Arby’s changed their slogan to, “Arby’s: Would it kill you to eat a salad?”
Anyway, am I being clear? Have I been clear so far? Okay, this one, super important. I decided to take Brendan Carr’s advice. I am going to interview James Talarico tonight, but it’s not gonna be on The Late Show. It’s gonna be on The Late Show’s YouTube page. The network says I can’t give you a URL or a QR code, but I promise you, if you go to our YouTube page, you’ll find it. After the show, right? Little later, okay.
Now, Carr here claims he’s just getting partisanship off the airwaves, but the FCC, as I said, is also in charge of regulating radio broadcasts, and what would you know? Brendan Carr says right-wing talk radio isn’t a target of the FCC’s equal time notice. No, no, I get this part. It makes sense. You can’t get rid of talk radio. What else would your angriest uncle do in traffic? Talk to your saddest aunt?
Now, as I said, at this point, he’s just released a letter that says he’s thinking about doing away with the exception for late night. He hasn’t done away with it yet, but my network is unilaterally enforcing it as if he had. But I want to assure you, ladies and gentlemen, please, I want to assure you: this decision is for purely financial reasons.
And this doesn’t just affect interviews. The rules forbid any candidate appearance, including by voice or picture. That’s right, I am absolutely not allowed to show a photo of Texas state representative James Talarico — ‘cause that’s not him. That’s a stock photo we found when we Googled “not James Talarico.”
Heck, I’m not even — and this is true — I’m not even allowed to show you a drawing of him, okay, which is why I cannot show you what I’m drawing out of fear that James Talarico looks like Snoopy.
Carr is not joking around here, folks. He is serious. He is as serious as the season cliffhanger of Matlock. Matlock, watch it or don’t watch it, I leave in May. She’s great though. Kathy’s great. You should watch, Kathy’s fantastic.
Okay, because a couple of weeks ago, on Carr’s orders, the FCC opened an investigation into ABC’s The View after their James Talarico interview. That is absolutely shocking. James Talarico did The View before my show? Et tu, Whoopi?
So I cannot show you any form of James Talarico. I can’t interview James Talarico. I can’t show any pictures of James Talarico. I’m not even sure I can say the words “James Talarico.”
Well, what I can show you is what we always show when we have to pull material at the last minute: this tasteful nude of Brendan Carr.
We’ll be right back with Jennifer Garner.
Colbert told you the most important part himself
Pay attention to this line:
He hasn’t done away with it yet, but my network is unilaterally enforcing it as if he had.
Here’s what actually happened with the FCC. On January 21, the agency’s Media Bureau issued a public notice saying that late-night and daytime talk shows can no longer assume they’re covered by the “bona fide news” exemption to the equal time rule. That exemption has been in place since 2006, when the FCC ruled that the interview portion of Jay Leno’s Tonight Show qualified as bona fide news and was therefore exempt from the requirement. Networks have operated under that precedent for two decades. Carr’s January notice said, essentially, don’t count on that anymore.
But here’s what Carr didn’t do. He didn’t formally revoke the exemption. He didn’t issue a new rule. He didn’t make a formal determination that any specific show fails to qualify. What he released was guidance. He said at a press conference that shows motivated by “partisan purposes” wouldn’t be entitled to the exemption, and that the FCC hadn’t seen evidence that any current talk show qualifies for it. Then the FCC opened an investigation into The View after Talarico appeared on that show earlier this month.
An investigation. Not a ruling. Not a fine. Not a revocation. An investigation that FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez (the lone Democrat on the commission) called “government intimidation, not a legitimate investigation.” Gomez said the real purpose is “to weaponize the FCC’s regulatory authority to intimidate perceived critics of this Administration and chill protected speech.”
And it’s working. CBS didn’t wait for a ruling. Their lawyers saw what happened to The View, did the math on what Paramount Skydance’s relationship with the Trump administration looks like these days, and decided on their own: no Talarico.
I wrote about this exact dynamic back in September, when ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel after Carr made threats on a podcast. Jamelle Bouie had a term for what’s happening: the administration is building a “simulacrum of an authoritarian state,” a fake version they’re hoping becomes real. The government doesn’t have to formally censor anyone. It just has to make enough threats that corporations start censoring themselves. ABC wasn’t ordered by a court to pull Kimmel. Congress didn’t pass a law. Carr made some noise, and Kimmel was off the air for nearly a week.
That was six months ago. The system is running more smoothly now. Carr didn’t call CBS. He didn’t order them to pull the Talarico interview. He didn’t have to.
And then there’s talk radio
Colbert pointed this out on air, but it’s worth sitting with for a second.
The equal time rule applies to broadcast television and radio. Carr has acknowledged this. He said so at a press conference in January. The rule doesn’t distinguish between the two.
But when Carr was asked whether conservative talk radio would face the same scrutiny he’s applying to late-night TV, he said he saw no need to apply the same scrutiny to radio stations. His explanation was that TV broadcasters had been “misconstruing” the 2006 Leno precedent and radio hadn’t. So the enforcement was about correcting that specific misunderstanding, not about the rule itself.
That’s a pretty fun distinction if you think about it for more than five seconds. Sean Hannity has Republican candidates on his radio show constantly. Conservative talk radio is, by any honest measure, more overtly partisan than anything Colbert or Kimmel have ever done. If the concern were really about “partisan purposes” in broadcasting, talk radio would be the first place you’d look. Commissioner Gomez said as much: the rules “must be applied evenly to the administration’s friends and critics alike.”
They won’t be, of course. When the FCC chair tells you he’s enforcing a rule against liberal TV hosts but not conservative radio hosts, he’s telling you the rule isn’t the point. The politics are.
I’ve been writing about CBS for a year now
I know. Bear with me, because the Talarico incident doesn’t make sense unless you see where it sits in the timeline, and laid out in sequence, it’s worse than any individual story suggested.
In April 2025, Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, resigned after 37 years at CBS News. He told his staff, visibly emotional, that he’d “become the problem.” The catalyst was a $10 billion lawsuit Trump had filed over a Kamala Harris interview, and Paramount’s desperation to get Trump’s approval for its sale to Skydance.
In July, Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle that lawsuit, which the company’s own lawyers had called “completely without merit.” Democratic senators called it extortion. Stephen Colbert called it “a big fat bribe.” Three days later, CBS announced The Late Show would end in May 2026. Not just Colbert’s run. The entire show, a CBS institution since 1993. The network said it was “purely a financial decision.”
In September, CBS installed Kenneth Weinstein as its first-ever “bias monitor,” fulfilling a promise Skydance had made to Carr’s FCC to secure merger approval. Weinstein is a former conservative think tank head, a Trump reelection donor, and a former Trump ambassador nominee. That same month, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel after Carr threatened the network over a late-night monologue about the Charlie Kirk assassination.
In October, Paramount acquired The Free Press for $150 million and installed its founder, Bari Weiss, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Weiss reports directly to Paramount CEO David Ellison, whose father is one of Trump’s closest allies.
In December, Weiss killed a fully vetted 60 Minutes segment about Venezuelan migrants being tortured in El Salvador’s CECOT prison. The segment had been cleared by CBS’s lawyers and by Standards and Practices. It had been screened multiple times and promoted on social media. Weiss pulled it hours before airtime because the Trump administration had declined to comment, and she said the story wasn’t “ready.”
Three weeks later, in January, CBS published an anonymously sourced story claiming that the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis had suffered “internal bleeding.” The sourcing was two anonymous U.S. officials. CBS’s own staff raised concerns before publication, with one calling the report “a thinly-veiled, anonymous leak by the Trump administration to someone who’d carry it online.” Within hours, JD Vance and Elon Musk were using the CBS story to justify the shooting.
And now, February. CBS lawyers call The Late Show and tell them they can’t interview a Democratic Senate candidate, can’t show his photo, can’t show a drawing of him, and can’t tell the audience that any of this is happening. Based on a rule that hasn’t been changed.
In April, CBS lost a producer who couldn’t do honest journalism there anymore. By July, they were paying off the president and canceling the host who said so. By fall, they’d handed editorial control to a Trump donor and a Free Press founder. By winter, they were killing stories the administration didn’t want aired and publishing stories the administration did. And now they’re enforcing the government’s preferred censorship before the government has even formally imposed it.
CBS isn’t being pressured anymore. They’ve internalized it.
Colbert can do this because he’s already dead
Not literally. But professionally, at CBS, the show is over. It was over the moment they announced the cancellation last July. He’s got three months left. He said it himself on Monday, tucked inside a joke about Matlock: “Watch it or don’t watch it, I leave in May.”
That’s what made Monday night possible. Colbert could defy his network’s lawyers on air, could say the thing they told him not to say, could draw Snoopy and call it James Talarico, because there’s nothing left for CBS to take from him. They already took it. What are they going to do, cancel it again?
And the segment was good. It was genuinely funny and genuinely angry and it laid out the problem clearly enough that millions of people now understand what Brendan Carr is doing and how CBS is helping him do it. The YouTube interview got more attention than a normal Late Show booking ever would have. As an act of defiance, it worked.
But Colbert is the exception. He can do this because he’s a dead man walking at his own network. What about everybody else?
What about the next Late Show host (if there is one) who wants to book a Democratic candidate? What about the producer at CBS or ABC or NBC who pitches an interview with someone the administration doesn’t like and gets told by legal that it’s not worth the risk? What about the late-night writer who has a good joke about the president and decides not to pitch it because, honestly, who needs the hassle? What about the local news director at a CBS affiliate who remembers what happened to KCBS in San Francisco when they reported on an ICE raid?
Those people won’t make the news. Nobody will draw Snoopy in protest. The interviews just won’t get booked. The jokes won’t get written. And that’s the whole point. The chilling effect isn’t measured by the people who push back. It’s measured by the silence.
Colbert’s Monday night segment was a man with nothing left to lose doing something nobody with a future at the network would dare to do. That’s not a free press. That’s a hostage situation where one guy is about to get released and decided to mouth off on his way out the door.
Good for him. I mean that. But he leaves in May. And then it’s just CBS.
You can watch the full Colbert/Talarico interview, the one CBS wouldn’t air, here:
Thank you so much for what you’re doing; as depressing as it is; you’re recording the erosion of the “public sphere” in real time
I hope at some point before the end of his run Colbert tells Bari Weiss and other new CBS decision-making hires what he really thinks about them. In the meantime, his jabs at Brendan Carr and Trump are well taken. Thanks as always for covering these matters and for reminding everyone of CBS' pattern of behavior for context.