"After Late Show host Stephen Colbert had scheduled an interview with Democratic Texas state Representative James Talarico, the network's legal division told him to cancel the segment. The rationale for the move was the same pretext that the Federal Communications Commission cited in opening a ludicrous regulatory investigation into Talarico's earlier appearance on ABC's daytime talk show, The View: Featuring a candidate for office during an election cycle without also hosting that candidate's opponents was a violation of the agency's equal-time doctrine."
"But Brendon Carr, the MAGA hack Donald Trump appointed to head the FCC in his second term, is hell-bent on abolishing these genre distinctions and transforming the enforcement of equal-time regulations to benefit right-wing candidates. He is continuing to stoke the media-persecution mania at the core of Trump's grievance politics. This debased reasoning led Carr to pressure ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel for criticizing MAGA theories about Charlie Kirk's assassination."
Stephen Colbert's scheduled interview with Texas Representative James Talarico was canceled after CBS News legal counsel invoked the FCC equal-time doctrine. The FCC had opened an investigation into Talarico's earlier appearance on The View for featuring a candidate without opponents. News reports and talk-show appearances have traditionally been exempt from equal-time rules to allow voters to hear candidates. FCC Chair Brendon Carr is seeking to eliminate genre distinctions and enforce equal-time against entertainment appearances, pressuring networks and targeting critics of MAGA figures. Networks are preemptively self-censoring to avoid regulatory scrutiny, undermining media independence and restricting voters' access to candidate perspectives.
Read at The Nation
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