Stephen Colbert says CBS blocked interview with Democratic candidate James Talarico | CBC News

Late-night host Stephen Colbert said his interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico was pulled from Monday night’s broadcast over network fears it would violate regulatory guidance from the Trump administration on giving equal time to political candidates.

The issue came just hours before early voting opened Tuesday in the Texas primary elections, which feature hotly contested Senate nomination races in both parties.

“He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert said on his program, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

“Then I was told, in some uncertain terms, that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on. And because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”

CBS disputed Colbert’s account, denying that his show was told it couldn’t interview Talarico. Instead, CBS said Tuesday, “The show was provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule.”

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Talarico is in a spirited contest for the Democratic nomination as media institutions are navigating around changing broadcast guidance, issued under the Trump administration, governing how they interview political candidates. His main opponent is U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, and both have built national profiles through viral social media clips.

On the Republican side, four-term incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is facing the political fight of his career against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt. Paxton stepped up his campaign with a Monday night rally in Tyler in east Texas.

FCC has warned talk show hosts

Talarico posted a nearly minute-long clip of his interview with Colbert on X, calling it “the interview Donald Trump didn’t want you to see.” He planned to have a Tuesday evening rally in Austin.

“I think Donald Trump is worried we’re about to flip Texas,” Talarico said in a statement. “This is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture, the kind that comes from the top.”

Broadcast networks have been required to give equal time to political candidates, but that rule hasn’t traditionally been applied to talk shows. In January, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued new guidance warning late-night and daytime hosts that they need to give political candidates equal time, with FCC chair Brendan Carr questioning the talk show exemption and positing that hosts were “motivated by partisan purposes.”

“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,” the public notice says.

In his comments, Colbert noted that the equal time provision applies to broadcast but not streaming platforms. Subsequently, his nearly 15-minute interview with Talarico was posted to the YouTube page for Colbert’s show, with the host noting specifically that the segment was only appearing online and not on broadcast.

Texas voting starts with Colbert on his way out

The FCC did not immediately respond Tuesday to a message seeking comment.

But Carr, appointed by Trump to lead the agency last year, has often criticized network talk shows, suggesting last year that probing ABC’s The View — whose hosts have frequently been critical of Trump — over the exemption might be “worthwhile.”

Colbert’s days in his host chair are limited, following CBS’ announcement last year that it was canceling his show this May for financial reasons, shuttering a decades-old TV institution in a changing media landscape.

But the timing of that announcement — three days after Colbert criticized the settlement between Trump and Paramount Global, parent company of CBS, over a 60 Minutes story — led two U.S. senators to publicly question the motives behind the move, which served to remove from air one of Trump’s most prominent and persistent late-night critics.

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Meanwhile, Talarico and Crockett are hoping to avoid a May 26 runoff by capturing at least 50 per cent of the Democratic vote in the March 3 primary. Paxton, too, is trying to avoid a runoff, and until Friday, the only ad his relatively lowkey campaign ran had attacked Hunt.

Hunt is trying to appeal to voters seeking an alternative to Cornyn but uneasy about Paxton. The Texas attorney general beat a 2023 impeachment trial on corruption charges and reached a deal to end a long-running securities fraud case but now faces a contentious divorce over allegations of adultery.

Hunt released a new ad Tuesday, with photos of him with Trump, hitting Cornyn over his long political year and declaring, “This is our moment to end the status quo.”

But Paxton’s campaign has been airing its own ad featuring video clips of him with Trump since Friday. The president had not endorsed any candidate as of Monday. Paxton on Monday night portrayed Cornyn as a creature of the Washington establishment, adding, “Well, I’m not their person and I’m never going to be their person.”

GOP fears about Paxton

Early voting began with Paxton looking like the GOP’s front-runner, even though Cornyn’s campaign and allied super PACs had spent more than $54 million US on television advertising since last year, according to the ad-tracing service AdImpact. Paxton believes he’s even better known than Cornyn.

Republican Senate leaders in Washington say Paxton as the GOP nominee would require hundreds of millions of dollars more to defend in a general election than Cornyn would — and that the party shouldn’t have to spend in a state Trump carried by over 13 percentage points.

Cornyn hit on those concerns in a Tuesday rally in Austin.

“We’ll pay the price of having an albatross like our corrupt attorney general around their neck,” he said. “It will take a toll on everybody on the ballot.”