CBS obeys in advance

And turns a Texas Democrat into a First Amendment martyr.

CBS Editor in Chief Bari Weiss with Mike Johnson. (Leigh Vogel/via Getty)

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On Monday night, the Trump administration made a hefty in-kind donation to a Senate candidate in Texas. But the beneficiary wasn’t incumbent Sen. John Cornyn or even his scandal-plagued challenger, Attorney General Ken Paxton. In fact, it wasn’t a Republican at all.

This slug of earned media went to Democrat James Talarico, who made front-page news after CBS refused to air his appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

On his show, Colbert said he’d been “told in no uncertain terms by our network's lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast."

“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?” Colbert riffed. “He’s like a toddler with too much screen time. He gets cranky and then drops a load in his diapers.” (Watch below.)

CBS insists that it merely “provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule." But that may be a distinction without much of a difference.

However you parse it, CBS fears provoking the White House and its media enforcer, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, a cartoon villain Colbert likened to a “smug bowling pin.”

Colbert did the interview anyway, relegating it to the Late Show’s YouTube channel where it racked up many more views than it would if it had simply run on CBS as planned. (Watch below.)

Cancel culture today, cancel culture tomorrow, cancel culture forever

Trump rode to power by campaigning against the twin scourges of “cancel culture” and “weaponization” of government.

“One of their political weapons is ‘cancel culture’ — driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees,” Trump railed in 2020 at a rally at Mount Rushmore.

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Four years later, he characterized his own criminal and civil prosecutions as an extension of the left’s campaign to “cancel” the voices of Real Americans.

"They've launched one witch hunt after another to try and stop our movement, to thwart the will of the American people," Trump told his supporters. "In the end, they're not coming after me. They're coming after you."

Back in the White House in 2025, Trump abruptly changed his tune.

He purged the federal government of any mention of racial and sexual minorities, even going so far as to dismantle exhibits on slavery at the Smithsonian and George Washington’s official residence in Philadelphia. He ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to indict his enemies for something — he didn’t care what — even spinning up a “Weaponization Working Group” to prosecute people who dared to go after Republicans for crimes. Orwell could never!

And he aggressively wielded the power of the federal government to police private speech he didn’t like, particularly late night comedians.

FCC Chair Carr is essential to this effort. Carr withheld approval of the Parmount/Skydance merger until CBS agreed to make its news coverage more friendly to conservatives, after which the network announced that Colbert’s show would end in May.

When Jimmy Kimmel joked about “the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Carr leaned on ABC to fire him.

"We can do this the easy way or the hard way," he vamped to right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson. "These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead."

FCC's Brendan Carr fails to cancel Kimmel

Carr has taken a particular interest in censoring Talarico. Two weeks ago, the FCC launched an investigation of ABC’s daytime talkshow “The View” over its recent interview with the Texas Democrat. (Watch below.)

Carr’s theory is that giving airtime to one political candidate and not his rivals violates the Federal Communications Act’s Equal Time Rule.

"On my watch, we're going to enforce this regulation," he told Fox News.

That’s not what the law says … at all

Under the Equal Time Rule, “If any licensee shall permit any person who is a legally qualified candidate for any public office to use a broadcasting station, he shall afford equal opportunities to all other such candidates for that office in the use of such broadcasting station.”

A licensee is a TV or radio station using a piece of the public airwaves, which are a finite resource managed by the federal government. CBS and ABC own some local affiliate stations which are licensees. But the television networks themselves are not licensees and are thus outside the ambit of the statute.

Moreover, the statute makes an exception for “bona fide” newscasts and interviews. And for the past two decades, the FCC has treated daytime and late night talkshows as news programs which aren’t subject to the Equal Time Rule.

But on January 21, Carr issued new guidance suggesting that the bona fide news exception no longer applies to talk shows … or at least not to all of them.

“The FCC has not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify for the bona fide news exemption,” he wrote, warning ominously that “a program that is motivated by partisan purposes, for example, would not be entitled to an exemption under longstanding FCC precedent.”

And who will be in charge of making the subjective determination of partisan motivation?

Brendan Carr, of course!

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FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the only Democrat remaining on the board, denounced Carr’s threats.

“Let’s be clear on what this is. This is government intimidation, not a legitimate investigation. Like many other so-called ‘investigations’ before it, the FCC will announce an investigation but never carry one out, reach a conclusion, or take any meaningful action,” she said. “The real purpose is to weaponize the FCC’s regulatory authority to intimidate perceived critics of this administration and chill protected speech. That is not how a free society operates.”

But even a sham investigation can still be a costly headache, and if you’re a network executive with billions on the line and regulators suddenly rediscovering their appetite for oversight, you can read the room. So CBS chose to censor itself, cabining the Talarico interview to its YouTube channel, which is outside of Carr’s purview.

On air, Colbert took advantage of his unique position read Carr for filth. What’s CBS gonna do, fire him?

“Sir, you’re chairman of the FCC. So, FCCU! Because I think you are motivated by partisan purposes yourself, sir.” he joked. “Hey, you smelt it cuz you dealt it. You are Dutch ovening America’s airwaves.”

The CBS “Aye-Aye”

None of this can be separated from the very public implosion of CBS’s news division under its MAGA-friendly billionaire owners, Larry and David Ellison.

Bari Weiss, an opinion journalist with no actual reporting experience, was put in charge of CBS News. Despite cringey pep talks exhorting seasoned reporters to “Do the fucking news!” Weiss’s most notable achievement to date has been spiking a 60 Minutes story for failing to appropriately “contextualize” renditions to the CECOT torture prison.

This is perhaps not entirely unexpected from someone who rose to prominence as an undergrad by campaigning to cancel a pro-Palestinian professor at Columbia, quit-firing herself from the New York Times opinion section when they refused to fire her, and then founding an outlet called “The Free Press” dedicated to bullying college professors and proving that actually Palestinian babies in Gaza were dying of cerebral palsy, not starvation.

The Orbanization of the American press

So far, things aren’t going well. Anchor Tony Dokoupil’s promise to trust “the average American” over “academics or elites” has failed to land with viewers. Last week, CBS News producer Alicia Hastey resigned, decrying an environment where stories are “evaluated not on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations — a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives.” And this week Anderson Cooper ended his 20-year relationship with 60 Minutes, reportedly to spend more time with his children.

Meanwhile Ellison, who recently showed up at the White House, has yet another reason to avoid pissing off Trump as he tries yet again to ram through Paramount’s bid for Warner Brothers. Best not to alienate the despot when you might need his viziers to torpedo Netflix’s already-sealed deal!

Earned media

But if Brendan Carr’s goal was to keep the spotlight off of Talarico via regulatory harassment he failed miserably. The YouTube clip of Talarico’s Colbert appearance cruised past three million views in the first 24 hours.

The low key Talarico is at a media disadvantage compared to his primary opponent, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, whose fiery speeches in House Oversight and Judiciary Committee hearings routinely go viral. But now, thanks to Carr and CBS, he’s gotten a full news cycle of coverage, elevating his national profile and painting him as a free speech martyr.

“I think that Donald Trump is worried that we’re about to flip Texas and Stephen, this is the party that ran against cancel culture and now they’re trying to control what we watch, what we say, what we read,” Rep. Talarico said. “And this is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture. The kind that comes from the top.”

A routine TV hit which would have been quickly forgotten became a national story about government censorship and a Democratic candidate being silenced by Trump’s henchmen. In a tough primary, you couldn’t buy better exposure. Nice work, Brendan Carr.

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