Jimmy Kimmel keeps finding new ways to avoid putting his own guests on his own network.
This time a Texas Senate candidate sat right across from him, and millions of people watched anyway.
Then the nation’s top telecom cop stepped in and called the whole stunt exactly what it looked like.
Carr Says Talarico Is Running The Same Play Twice
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr accused Texas Democrat US Senate candidate James Talarico of orchestrating a “hoax” after ABC pulled Talarico’s sit-down with Jimmy Kimmel off broadcast television and posted it straight to YouTube instead.
Carr made the accusation in a lengthy post on X, and he did not mince words about what he thinks Talarico is actually up to.
“He’s just running the same hoax he did a few months ago on Colbert for the purpose of getting clicks and donations,” Carr wrote.
He didn’t stop there.
“He’s banking on people not understanding the statute or operating as partisan lemmings,” Carr added.
Carr was referring to the FCC’s equal-time rule, a statute requiring broadcast television programs to give equal airtime to opposing political candidates unless the program qualifies as a “bona fide” news show. Late-night and daytime talk shows have historically operated under an exemption from that rule, but Carr has argued that many of these same broadcast programs tilt heavily toward Democrat candidates while treating Republicans as an afterthought.
Carr’s post actually began as a response to a completely separate question about Texas Senator Ted Cruz appearing on ESPN’s College GameDay. Carr explained that the equal-time statute doesn’t apply to cable programming in the first place, and that Cruz wouldn’t qualify as a “candidate” under the statute anyway since he isn’t currently running for anything. Only after clearing that up did Carr pivot to Talarico.
Kimmel’s interview with Talarico, which ran roughly 20 minutes, had climbed past 8 million views on YouTube within days of ABC deciding to keep it off the air. That total dwarfs the audience Kimmel’s actual broadcast show typically pulls in on a given night.
Carr also laid out the underlying reason broadcasters answer to different rules than cable or streaming outlets in the first place. Broadcasters operate on public airwaves the federal government hands them for free, worth many billions of dollars, and in exchange the government guarantees they won’t have to compete with other stations jamming their frequency. That arrangement, Carr’s argument goes, comes with obligations that YouTube and cable channels never signed up for.
The Money Trail Behind The Censorship Claims
Talarico has been here before.
Back in February, Stephen Colbert posted his own interview with Talarico to YouTube rather than airing it on CBS, and Colbert told his audience at the time that network executives had warned him about featuring the candidate on the broadcast. That interview went on to generate 9.6 million views on YouTube, again far outpacing what Colbert’s regular audience looks like.
Talarico turned that episode into a fundraising opportunity, reportedly hauling in $2.5 million off the back of what he called the FCC’s “attempted censorship.” He has since described the Kimmel situation in similar terms, characterizing it as government censorship and a form of “cancel culture.”
Kimmel, for his part, framed the whole thing as an attack on free speech when he addressed it on air.
“We are being targeted by the FCC for the crime of interviewing political candidates,” Kimmel said at the top of the segment.
“Even though, for years, we and every other late-night talk show have welcomed numerous candidates including Donald Trump when he was running,” Kimmel continued. “He was on this show two times. But now I guess he doesn’t like me anymore or the First Amendment.”
The White House, however, pushed back hard on the idea that Carr or the FCC ever threatened Kimmel or ABC at all. White House spokesman Davis Ingle put it bluntly.
“Any media outlet blindly amplifying Kimmel’s egocentric delusion should insist on proof,” Ingle said. “Of which they will find none.”
According to reporting on the dispute, it was ABC’s own network executives, not the FCC, who made the call to keep the interview off local affiliates, reportedly out of concern about having to offer equal airtime to Talarico’s opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, if he requested it.
What This Fight Over The Equal-Time Rule Really Means
Talarico wants voters to believe the federal government is silencing him.
The math tells a different story. Two interviews, two separate networks, and a combined audience north of 17 million YouTube views is not the profile of a candidate being censored into obscurity. It’s the profile of a Democrat candidate turning a manufactured grievance into a cash machine, and doing it twice with the same script.
This is the same media playbook that’s been running for years now. A legacy network makes an editorial or business decision, a Democrat politician reframes that decision as an authoritarian crackdown, and a sympathetic press corps repeats the framing without asking basic questions about who actually made the call and why. Carr’s response cuts through that noise by pointing straight at the statute and the math behind the views.
Kimmel’s comparison to Donald Trump’s prior appearances on his show doesn’t hold up the way he wants it to, either. Trump appeared as a candidate under different circumstances and a different regulatory posture toward broadcasters, and invoking his own past bookings doesn’t change what the equal-time statute actually requires once a network airs an interview with one candidate in a contested race.
Talarico is running for the seat currently occupied by the fight between him and Paxton, and every dollar raised off a censorship narrative that the White House says has zero evidence behind it is a dollar raised on a false premise. Carr made that point about as plainly as a sitting federal official can.
Expect this fight to keep going. Talarico has found a fundraising formula that works, and there’s little reason for him to abandon it heading into the rest of the campaign. But every time Carr steps in to point out the underlying statute and the actual math on network decision-making, the “censorship” story gets a little harder for the legacy press to sell with a straight face.
Sources: Breitbart, TVInsider, Yahoo News, Variety, Deadline, LateNighter, HuffPost, RedState,