On a second occasion in the same year, James Talarico, the Texas Democratic hopeful for the U.S. Senate, found that a planned appearance on a late-night program was pulled from the air before the show could broadcast it.
In both incidents, the host and the network appeared to yield to pressure from President Donald Trump and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). As with the earlier episode, the episode stands as a clear illustration of why the equal time rule should be scrapped.
“I’ll be interviewing James Talarico tomorrow night under unusual circumstances,” Jimmy Kimmel announced on his ABC late-night show on Wednesday. Yet the audience at home would not see the segment because executives worried that airing it could put ABC’s affiliates at risk of violating the equal opportunities requirement, widely known as the equal time rule.
The equal time rule requires that when a “legally qualified candidate for any public office” appears on a broadcast network in the weeks leading up to an election, the network must “provide equal opportunities to all other such candidates for that office.”
The regulation does permit exemptions for genuine news coverage, such as interviews or news programs, and the FCC has extended bona fide exemptions to talk shows like Kimmel’s since 1984. But in January of this year, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr issued guidance indicating that a broadcast could not be exempt if it was “motivated by partisan purposes.”
Kimmel noted on Wednesday that he had conducted interviews with numerous candidates over the show’s twenty-year run, including Donald Trump. “When he sat beside me back then, he didn’t appear to have a problem with the idea of talk-show hosts interviewing candidates,” Kimmel observed.
Indeed, Trump sat with Kimmel on the program twice during his first bid for the presidency, first in December 2015 and again in May 2016, just two months before the Republican Party formally nominated him.
But “now that he’s president, his FCC has pressured me, our program, our network, ABC, our affiliates, and local stations, seemingly over editorial choices and guest bookings,” Kimmel continued. “To spare all our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas who would have to deal with this nonsense, my interview tomorrow with James Talarico will not air on television; it will appear on YouTube instead.”
“The FCC wants to make it impossible for me to interview candidates by requiring that I speak with every candidate on the ballot who asks for equal time,” Kimmel noted the following night. Not only would he need to include Talarico’s Republican challenger, the embattled Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—”which, by the way, I would love to do, call me,” Kimmel joked—but “our affiliates in Texas would have to give equal time to as many candidates as there are on the ballot.” BallotPedia lists seven total candidates in Talarico’s race.
Kimmel’s interview with Talarico appeared on the program’s YouTube channel Thursday night. On a typical broadcast night, Kimmel’s TV program draws about 1.5 million viewers, while the YouTube clip accrued more than 3.6 million views within its first 16 hours.
If you’re feeling a sense of déjà vu, it’s because this isn’t the first time such a situation has occurred: Talarico had appeared on Stephen Colbert’s CBS late-night show in February, only for the interview to be moved to YouTube and other streaming platforms after the network feared FCC repercussions.
The Trump administration disputes Kimmel’s account. “Jimmy Kimmel is acting—he often does—to manufacture a false narrative about this administration’s policies,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told The Wall Street Journal. “Chairman Carr has not threatened him regarding interviewing James Talarico, or any other candidate.”
That specificity matters, since Carr has issued threats to Kimmel on numerous occasions. Last year, Carr gained infamy by pulling Kimmel off the air for a week after the host made a sharp joke about slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “We can handle this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr told podcaster Benny Johnson, warning broadcasters to “adjust your behavior and take action, frankly, on Kimmel” or face FCC retaliation.
Carr has also pressed ABC on this same matter. Earlier this year, after Talarico appeared on ABC’s daytime talk show The View, Carr threatened to revoke the show’s equal time exemption, and the FCC even instructed the ABC affiliate in Houston to file “a petition for declaratory ruling” on whether the interview violated the equal time rule.
Then, of course, the FCC called in ABC’s affiliate licenses for review years ahead of schedule, a move that a free-speech organization labeled “illegal jawboning.” Taken together, these examples suggest Carr treats the FCC’s authority as primarily safeguarding Trump’s sensitivities. Trump himself has repeatedly criticized Kimmel over the years and has even called for him to be fired.
The entire affair underscores why the equal time rule is so outdated and overdue for abolition.
The rule originated in the radio era and was extended to television at a time when only a few networks existed. With so few outlets broadcasting on what were effectively limited airwaves, the government required each network to serve the public interest.
Today, of course, there are countless ways to access information, including numerous cable channels, social media platforms, streaming services, and video sites like YouTube. Unlike the broadcast networks, none of those outlets fall under the FCC’s equal time rule.
As of this writing, Kimmel’s YouTube channel boasts more than 22 million subscribers and 15.6 billion total views across 8,000 videos—an average of roughly 2 million views per video. And that’s before counting the millions who watch short clips from the show on platforms like Instagram or TikTok.
The notion that broadcasters must preserve a perfectly balanced roster of guests—or at least match the number of guests to what the administration deems balanced—is not only antiquated, it runs counter to the core principles of free speech in America.
No television program should be compelled to feature a particular guest, nor barred from having someone on. The equal time rule, in its current form, ought to be removed.
