You may have heard that Jimmy Kimmel taped an interview with Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D-50th District) for Thursday night's show. Then, during Wednesday's monologue, he told his audience they would not actually get to watch it.
According to Kimmel, President Donald Trump's FCC threatened Jimmy Kimmel Live!, ABC, and its affiliate and local stations over the booking. Talarico obviously ran with this narrative, too, sharing the interview on X, calling it “the interview Trump’s FCC doesn’t want you to see.”
Here's the problem: the FCC didn’t threaten anybody.
At issue here was the FCC’s equal-time rule, which is actually in place to protect candidates. The equal-time rule Kimmel is blaming has been on the books for years, and it applies to him exactly the way it applies to every other broadcaster in the country. Kimmel was simply told that if he wanted to book Talarico, he needed to offer to do the same with his opponent in the race, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, on comparable terms.
Not a big deal, right? Well, instead of offering Paxton equal time, Kimmel moved the interview to YouTube, a platform the FCC has no authority over whatsoever, and then played the victim.
This isn't even a new trick.
Stephen Colbert ran the same play during the Democrat primary, sidelining Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) and dumping a Talarico interview online instead of putting it on broadcast television.
Funny how nobody on the left seemed bothered when broadcasters used booking decisions to tilt election coverage in one direction back then. It's only a "threat to democracy" now that Trump's FCC is holding broadcasters to the same standard no matter who's asking for a favor.
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FCC Chairman Brendan Carr decided he'd had enough, and cleared things up himself in a lengthy post on X, responding to a post about why Sen. Ted Cruz was allowed to be interviewed on ESPN's College GameDay.
"The Equal Time statute doesn't apply to GameDay for several reasons," Carr wrote. "For one, when it passed the statute, Congress applied it to broadcast tv stations—not cable programs like GameDay. For another, Congress stated that the statute only applies to legally qualified candidates. The Senator is not one."
Carr wasn't finished. "The Equal Time statute does not prohibit anyone from interviewing anyone on broadcast tv," he wrote. "It is about more speech, not less. Congress wanted to ensure that voters would decide elections, not media gatekeepers picking winners and losers by providing preferential airtime to some candidates and not others."
Then Carr accused Talarico of running "the same hoax he did a few months ago on Colbert for the purpose of getting clicks and donations," and betting that his supporters would be ignorant of the law.
The Supreme Court has already decided that enforcing those obligations does not amount to censorship, and Congress assigned the FCC the responsibility of ensuring that broadcasters honor the agreement that they signed many years ago.
Ok, fine. I’ll weigh in.
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) September 13, 2026
1. The Equal Time statute doesn’t apply to GameDay for several reasons.
For one, when it passed the statute, Congress applied it to broadcast tv stations—not cable programs like GameDay.
For another, Congress stated that the statute only applies to… https://t.co/r3KP7RvQL8 pic.twitter.com/m5IbEl8Ngr
Liberals either don't understand how the equal-time rules work, or they understand perfectly well and are counting on their side never bothering to find out. Either way, the FCC should enforce the law the same way for an interview with a Democrat as it would for one with a Republican; that’s the standard broadcasters agreed to when they accepted free licenses to the public's airwaves.
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