The Interview They Buried: Kimmel, Talarico, and the FCC’s War on the Free Press.
Jimmy Kimmel says the Trump FCC leaned on ABC and its affiliates to keep Texas Senate candidate James Talarico off the broadcast. So the interview is going to YouTube — and the country ought to notice who keeps ending up there.
The pattern is no longer subtle. On Thursday, Jimmy Kimmel told his audience what many inside ABC had feared would happen from the moment his producers began negotiating a sit-down with James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas: the interview would not air on broadcast television. It would be dumped, in full, on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! YouTube channel — safely beyond the reach of the Federal Communications Commission, and safely out of primetime. Kimmel says the network and its affiliates were pressured. Anyone who has been paying attention already knew who was doing the pressuring, and why.
This is the second time in seven months that a late-night host on a major broadcast network has been forced to shove a Talarico interview onto YouTube after their corporate lawyers surrendered to Brendan Carr’s FCC. In February, Stephen Colbert told his viewers on The Late Show that CBS attorneys had ordered him not to air his own Talarico segment — and, more astonishingly, ordered him not to explain why. Colbert did both anyway. The interview drew more than 7 million views on YouTube inside two days and helped propel Talarico past Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Texas Democratic primary. What is happening to Kimmel on Thursday is not new. It is a template. And that is the point.
The template is simple. A Democratic candidate books a booking. A Trump-appointed regulator gestures menacingly at the network’s broadcast licenses. Corporate counsel folds. The candidate is shoved to a platform the government cannot as easily reach — and the American voter, watching television in their living room, is quietly denied a conversation that federal law was written to protect. Then everyone pretends this is about a technicality. It is not about a technicality. It is about who gets to speak on the airwaves the public owns, and who does not.
I. The Interview They Buried
According to Kimmel, ABC and its Nexstar- and Sinclair-owned affiliates were told, in essence, what CBS was told in February: that airing an interview with an active Democratic Senate candidate on a late-night talk show could trigger the FCC’s “equal opportunities” rule — an obscure 1934 provision that Carr, in a January letter to the networks, announced he was reinterpreting to strip late-night and daytime talk shows of the “bona fide news” exemption they had enjoyed for decades. The FCC has since launched an investigation into ABC’s The View for the same reason — a February 2 appearance by Talarico. And Texas ABC affiliates, according to reporting from Fox News Digital, have already quietly filed equal-time notices in anticipation of retaliation.
The pretext is the equal-time rule. The reality is that no such rule has been enforced against a comedy program in living memory, and the Carr FCC has not shown similar interest in the president’s regular appearances on conservative talk radio, Fox News, or friendly podcasts. As Colbert put it in February, quoted by NBC affiliates from Chicago to Miami: “Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV.” The joke was that it was not really a joke.
The evidence that this is a campaign of pressure, not neutral rule enforcement, is now overwhelming and has been assembled in plain view:
Kimmel pulled after Kirk monologue
Hours after FCC Chair Brendan Carr told a right-wing podcaster the agency could “do this the easy way or the hard way,” ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! indefinitely. (WTTW / CNN)
Colbert–Talarico interview to YouTube
CBS lawyers barred the segment from broadcast and initially forbade Colbert from explaining why. The clip drew over 7 million views and $2.5 million in campaign donations in 24 hours. (KERA / NPR)
FCC probes The View
Chair Carr confirmed the agency was “pursuing” ABC’s daytime show as an enforcement matter after Talarico’s ten-minute appearance. (The Wrap)
Early license renewals for all ABC stations
After a Kimmel joke about Melania Trump, the FCC ordered Disney’s eight owned-and-operated ABC stations to file license renewals five years ahead of schedule. (WJLA)
Nexstar and Sinclair fall in line
Two conglomerates that own roughly 70 ABC affiliates preempted Kimmel while seeking Trump administration approval for a multi-billion-dollar merger with Tegna. (eMarketer)
Trump’s $20 billion CBS lawsuit
The president’s suit over 60 Minutes‘ Harris interview runs in parallel with an FCC “news distortion” probe — a two-track pressure campaign legal experts say has no merit. (CNN)
“This is the party that ran against cancel culture, and now they’re trying to control what we watch, what we say, and what we read. This is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture — the kind that comes from the top.”
— James Talarico · Democratic Nominee for U.S. Senate, Texas · February 2026
II. A Pattern, Not an Incident
What Kimmel is describing is not a discrete event. It is a chronology, and the chronology tells the story better than any single episode does. What began in Trump’s first term as courtroom sniping at CNN and threats to yank NBC’s licenses has, in his second, become an operational strategy run out of the FCC chair’s office by a Trump loyalist who wore a gold Trump-silhouette pin to work.
Between each of these dots is a mergers-and-acquisitions story. Nexstar wants to buy Tegna. Paramount wanted Skydance. Disney wants its ABC affiliate deals renewed. All of it runs through Carr’s desk. As CNN’s reporting put it in September 2025, “it’s not hard to follow the money trail.” Broadcasters are being asked, in effect, to choose between their editorial independence and their business plans — and the government is the one asking.
Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez has been the sole voice on the commission publicly calling this what it is. Former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler told NPR in September 2025 that the agency has “no legitimate role” in what a comedian says about the president. And the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s president Greg Lukianoff named it precisely: jawboning. It is the constitutional-law term of art for a government official leveraging state power to coerce a private actor into suppressing speech that the First Amendment would otherwise protect. The Supreme Court decided in National Rifle Association v. Vullo in 2024 that this is unlawful. The Carr FCC is doing it anyway.
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III. The Chilling Effect on Democracy
The word “chilling” gets tossed around so often in First Amendment discourse that it loses its meaning. The Kimmel and Colbert episodes let us restore it. A chilling effect is what happens when a journalist, a producer, a comedian, or a corporate lawyer stops themselves before speaking — not because the speech is illegal, not because it will lose them the audience, but because they are afraid of the government. That fear is now the operating condition of every major American broadcaster.
Consider the practical arithmetic for a network executive in September 2026. Airing a sitting Democratic Senate candidate on a comedy show carries a nonzero risk of an FCC enforcement action, a delayed merger, an “early renewal” of your station licenses, or a presidential Truth Social post that torches your stock price. Refusing to air that candidate carries the risk of a bad news cycle and a few thousand angry tweets. From a pure business standpoint — a corporate standpoint, not a democratic one — the incentive is unambiguous. This is precisely why the First Amendment exists: to remove those incentives from government’s hands. The Carr FCC has put them back.
What that means for the 2026 midterms is not hypothetical. Talarico is running to be the first Democrat to win statewide in Texas in more than three decades. His race against Attorney General Ken Paxton — a man impeached by his own party’s state House — could determine whether Democrats retake the U.S. Senate. Every broadcast television minute he cannot get, every daytime and late-night audience he cannot reach, is a thumb on the electoral scale. Talarico is not a fringe figure being denied a platform. He is a major-party nominee for federal office, being denied the same broadcast access his opponent’s party has monopolized on friendly networks for years. That is not equal time. That is the opposite.
“I got to say that’s right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a Mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here.'”
— Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) · On FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s threats to ABC · September 2025
And it does not stop at candidates. The chill radiates outward. When Paramount reportedly considered settling Trump’s frivolous 60 Minutes lawsuit — a case even the president’s own former legal allies said was meritless — the newsroom rebelled. The show’s executive producer, Bill Owens, ultimately resigned rather than allow the settlement to be interpreted as an apology. That is the cost, per network, of maintaining editorial independence in 2026: senior journalism careers, publicly. This is what democracies look like when they begin to stop being democracies. Not tanks in the streets. Resignations, and quiet capitulations, and interviews that go to YouTube instead of television.
IV. The Fourth Estate Gives Way to the Fifth
Edmund Burke coined the phrase in the eighteenth century, and the American founders inherited its logic. The Fourth Estate — the free press — was to be the check that other checks depended on. Legislative, executive, and judicial power could be constrained only if citizens knew what those branches were doing. Thomas Jefferson said he would prefer newspapers without a government to a government without newspapers. Every civics classroom in America teaches this. Every one of them should now be teaching, as well, what happens when a president decides to invert it.
What is quietly emerging in its place is the Fifth Estate: the platforms, the podcasts, the YouTube channels, the independent Substacks that the FCC does not — yet — regulate. Colbert’s Talarico interview did not die when CBS suppressed it. It jumped platforms and grew louder. Kimmel’s will do the same. Talarico’s total interview reach across YouTube and social media has already surpassed 85 million views. That is a heartening story. It is also a terrifying one. It is heartening because it demonstrates that the American public is not passively accepting the suppression. It is terrifying because it means that the country’s oldest and most trusted institutions — the broadcast networks that once shaped a national conversation — have become effectively unusable for the party out of power, and everyone knows it.
That is not press freedom. Press freedom is not the ability of the president’s critics to find a workaround. Press freedom is the impossibility of a president needing to be worked around in the first place. Kimmel will get his interview out. Colbert got his out. The question is what happens to the candidates and the comedians and the journalists who cannot afford to trip a merger review, absorb a lawsuit, or fund their own independent distribution. What happens, in short, to smaller voices — local reporters, community stations, upstart challengers to entrenched incumbents — when the federal machinery has been quietly weaponized against inconvenient speech.
The answer is that they get quieter. And a democracy of quieter voices is not a democracy for very long.
When Does a President’s Priorities Become the Country’s Emergency?
Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment permits the removal of a president unable to “discharge the powers and duties of his office.” It has never been invoked. Its historic application has been imagined for stroke, dementia, or physical incapacity. But the amendment’s plain text does not limit “unable” to medical incapacitation. It contemplates a president whose conduct is so untethered from the constitutional duties of the office that continuing to occupy it becomes itself the problem.
In April 2026, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), joined by 65 House Democrats including Rep. Luz Rivas (D-California), introduced legislation to create the Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office — the body Section 4 explicitly permits Congress to establish “by law.” In May 2026, a bipartisan open letter from medical and legal professionals urged Congress to move faster. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) has entered a supporting letter into the Congressional Record.
The argument the Kimmel–Talarico episode makes for Section 4 is not that the president is medically incapacitated. It is that he is substantively unwilling and unable to fulfill the oath he took. That oath — to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution — is not compatible with directing the machinery of a federal agency to suppress the political speech of a candidate for the opposing party. A president who spends the executive branch’s regulatory power to silence critics has, by any honest reading, ceased to discharge the duties of the office as the Constitution defines them. He is discharging some other duty — to himself, to his image, to his coalition’s electoral advantage. That is not the job.
The practical barriers are real. Vice President J.D. Vance will not initiate proceedings against the man who elevated him. The Cabinet, chosen for loyalty, will not act. The current Republican Congress will not pass Raskin’s bill. Even the December Senate Commerce Committee oversight hearing on Carr’s conduct, called by Sen. Cruz, is unlikely to produce enforcement. None of that changes what the Constitution says, or what the current moment requires the country to admit out loud.
The barriers do not negate the case. They describe it. A functioning constitutional order does not require a supermajority to name what everyone can plainly see: a president who uses the federal government to suppress the press is not fit to be president. Saying so is not a policy preference. It is a civic minimum. And a country that cannot say it — for reasons of political inconvenience, procedural difficulty, or fear — has already begun to lose the thing it is refusing to defend.
V. What This Tells Us About Leadership
A president who spent hours of his first term calling for the FCC to punish NBC has, in his second, delivered on it — not against a president’s usual targets but against a comedian, a daytime chat show, a Senate candidate. His White House is not, in September 2026, focused on inflation. It is not focused on the border. It is not focused on any of the substantive priorities on which he campaigned. It is focused on the content of Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue, the guest list at The View, and whether James Talarico gets a fair shake in a Texas Senate race. This is what he cares about. This is what the executive branch’s regulatory bandwidth is being spent on. Voters should look at that priority list and ask themselves whether it looks like leadership.
The FCC’s original mandate was to serve the public interest in the airwaves that belong, by law, to the American people. The people’s interest is not being served when a federal regulator’s phone number is on speed dial at every network’s general counsel’s office. It is not being served when a president posts on Truth Social to demand a comedian’s firing. It is not being served when a Senate candidate cannot appear on late-night television without triggering a federal investigation. What is being served is one man’s ego, and the electoral prospects of one political party. That is not the public interest. That is an autocratic reflex, dressed in regulatory language.
The 2026 midterms will be a referendum on whether the country wants to keep going in this direction. But the more urgent question is whether the country still has the institutions to conduct a fair referendum. Free elections require a free press. A free press requires that broadcasters not fear the government. Broadcasters, at this hour, fear the government. That is the crisis. Everything else follows from it.
Editorial Conclusion
The FCC does not exist to police late-night television, and a president does not exist to punish the press. What Jimmy Kimmel is describing on September 10, 2026, is not a communications-law dispute. It is the ordinary, incremental machinery of authoritarianism, running on schedule, in daylight.
The interview will go to YouTube. Talarico will keep campaigning. Kimmel will keep his job, or he will not. That is not the measure. The measure is whether the country will still recognize itself in a decade — whether the First Amendment will still be a promise or only a paragraph.
A press that fears the government cannot check the government. A government that intimidates the press cannot be trusted to hold elections. If those two sentences describe where America now lives, the constitutional emergency is already here. It is time to say so — in Congress, in courtrooms, and at the ballot box in November.
Sources & References
- CNN via KTVZ — “FCC Chair Threatens ABC and Disney Over Jimmy Kimmel’s Remarks About Charlie Kirk” (Sept. 17, 2025)
- The Hollywood Reporter — “FCC’s Kimmel Threat: ‘The Easy Way or the Hard Way’” (Sept. 2025)
- NPR / KAXE — “Tom Wheeler on the FCC’s Role in What Stations Broadcast” (Sept. 17, 2025)
- NBC Los Angeles — “Colbert Says CBS Didn’t Air Talarico Interview Out of Fear of FCC” (Feb. 2026)
- PBS NewsHour — “FCC Is Investigating ABC’s ‘The View’ Over Equal-Time Rule” (Feb. 2026)
- The Wrap — “FCC Investigation of ‘The View’ Over Talarico Appearance” (Feb. 2026)
- KERA News — “Talarico Raises $2.5M After Colbert Interview Controversy” (Feb. 18, 2026)
- Fox News — “Texas ABC Affiliates File Equal-Time Notices Over Talarico” (Feb. 2026)
- PBS NewsHour — “Texas Senate Primary Ramps Up After Pulled Colbert Interview” (Feb. 2026)
- WJLA — “FCC Orders Review of Disney-Owned Broadcast Licenses” (April 2026)
- KAXE / NPR — “FCC Orders Early License Renewal for ABC Stations” (April 28, 2026)
- eMarketer — “FCC License Threat Over Kimmel and the Nexstar/Sinclair Merger Angle” (April 2026)
- CNN — “Trump Wants FCC to Punish CBS Over ’60 Minutes’” (April 2025)
- NPR — “Why CBS Stands at the Epicenter of Trump’s Assault on the Media” (Feb. 2025)
- Rep. Luz Rivas (D-CA) — “Rivas Co-Sponsors Raskin’s 25th Amendment Commission Bill” (April 17, 2026)
- Ralph Nader — “Open Letter to Congress on Trump and the 25th Amendment” (May 11, 2026)
- Nation.Africa / Reuters — “Carr to Testify on Kimmel Censorship; Cruz Called Threats ‘Dangerous as Hell’” (Sept. 2025)
- Tubular Labs — “Talarico Interview Draws 85M Views Across YouTube & Social” (April 2026)
- PBS NewsHour — “Sinclair Brings Kimmel’s Show Back to ABC Affiliates” (Sept. 26, 2025)
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