FCC Chairman Brendan Carr told reporters on Wednesday that the agency is pursuing “an enforcement action” against The View and would continue stepping up pressure on late-night shows such as The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Carr’s novel interpretation of the equal time rule has become a source of stress and censorship for talk shows that touch on politics. Talk shows had been exempt since 2006, when the FCC allowed Jay Leno to interview political figures. But earlier this week, Colbert revealed that CBS scuttled his interview with Texas Democrat James Talarico over concerns that it would trigger FCC penalties.
Per Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter, Carr stressed his belief that talk shows are not news and should not qualify for a news exemption. “The general rule is equal time applies,” he said. “There’s narrow exceptions you have to fit in.”
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Carr, who was also a key author of Project 2025, added, “Congress passed the equal time provision for a very specific reason. They did not want the media leads in Hollywood and in New York to put their thumbs on the scale and pick their winners and losers in primaries and general elections. That’s the point.”
To understand the rule — and how silly all of this is — it’s helpful to think of Saturday Night Live. Imagine that in 2028 during the Republican primaries, SNL booked Marco Rubio to host. If Rubio did well, his appearance could theoretically help him beat JD Vance for the Republican nomination, giving SNL an outsized influence in politics. The equal time rule says that in this scenario, Vance would be able to file a petition with the FCC. If it held up, the Vice President would have the right to purchase equal time on the network at the same rate (and then they could have argued about what would constitute an equal rate). This is essentially what happened in 2024, when SNL first booked Kamala Harris and then, after a petition, Donald Trump.
“We encourage people to file petitions,” Carr said. “The ones we have seen have yet to establish that they qualify for the bona fide news exception.”
But the equal time rule did not require CBS to pull Colbert’s Talarico interview. His opponent in the Democratic Senate primary, Jasmine Crockett, could have filed a petition to appear on the program, and the FCC could have forced Colbert to comply. Though it’s unclear how such a petition would have been handled, considering she was already a guest on The Late Show in both 2024 and 2025.
The enforcement action relating to The View also concerns an interview with Talarico. If you were inclined to speculation, you might wonder if the Trump administration believes Talarico has an actual shot at winning a Senate seat in Texas, and is attempting to limit his exposure and boost his opponent’s prospects. Though if that’s the strategy it seems to have backfired — search interest in Talarico just reached an all-time high.
Carr also spoke about the backlash engendered by CBS’s decision. “Look, anybody that’s not suffering from a terminal case of Trump derangement syndrome could see right away yesterday the exact story arc and how it was going to play out,” he said. “You had a Democrat candidate who understood the way the news media works, and he took advantage of all of your sort of prior conceptions to run a hoax, apparently, for the purpose of raising money and getting clicks, and the news media played right into it.”
As for Colbert, he thinks arguments like this are, well, dog shit.
