The NPR Politics Podcast - Is the FCC 'equal time' rule leading to media censorship — and self-censorship?

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

The Federal Communications Commission is investigating ABC over its show The View's airing of an interview with a Texas politician. Stephen Colbert moved his interview with the same candidate off broadcast, all because of the FCC’s "equal time" rule. We discuss the rule, possible changes to it, and how it could all affect the way Americans get their information.This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, media correspondent David Folkenflik, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from the BBC with their podcast, The Global Story. With Osama Khalid in D.C. and Tristan Redman in London, the global story brings you daily news from where the world and America meet. Search for The Global Story from BBC podcasts. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanar, senior political editor and correspondent. And NPR's media correspondent is here with us, David Fulkin Flick. Hi, David. Hey, guys. And today on the show, we're going to talk about the FCC, Stephen Colbert, and what an argument about equal time rules for candidates, says about the Trump administration's pretty aggressive stance towards the media.

So, David, let's just start with last week. This is something that a lot of listeners may have seen on their phones or on their computers. But Stephen Colbert comes on his late night TV show and says this about Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talrico. 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. The actual interview aired on the Late Show's YouTube channel. David, can you explain exactly what happened? Sure, and we have some competing versions of exactly what happened.

But as we heard that excerpt, Colbert came out to his audience and said, we can't present to you this interview. We were told by lawyers that it's not possible and that if we did, we'd have to offer his two leading competitors in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat from Texas this year, equal time on the show. And that said CBS came out the next day and said, no, no, we just gave him advice and said, this is what his show would have to do in that context if they were to do that. We tried to advise him. And Colbert, that very night came forward once more and said, absolute baloney. That's not what this network said. The network was very clear

that I couldn't do this, even though I don't really want to get in a spat with my own network on this. And so it all was this argument over who was enforcing an adherence to a particular interpretation of the equal time rule. Let's rewind here. What is the equal time rule exactly? And why is it the first time we're really hearing about it if it relates to talk shows? Well, it's not exactly the first time. But the equal time rule is this. If you are in a political season and you operate not a network, but a station, a local station that holds a license through the federal communications.

Commission. That is, you're using the public airwaves. You're required to give equal time to another candidate. Now, there is exception to this for news divisions or news reports. And there have been exemptions given to late night talk shows and chat shows. They're seen basically as news adjacent. And that is, if something is newsworthy, federal government gets a little more nervous about interfering and saying, well, you can't interview this person or can't interview that. But this is the idea behind it. Well, look, this is part of the Trump. administrations push to try to rein in what they see as information that's too liberal on TV. This is obviously something that President Trump pays very close attention to. He loves TV. He

loves the optics. And it really rankles him and rankles a lot of conservatives that they feel like there are way too many of these networks that are pushing a liberal agenda in their view. And we've seen, you know, in past, you know, administrations in Democratic administrations where conservatives have complained that they feel like they are under assault. That's their view. They see the country is moving in too much of a liberal direction. And they've tried to really reverse that aircraft carrier. And Brendan Carr, who's the chairman of the FCC, was elevated to that position by President Trump. He has kind of been Trump's bulldog on this going after media organizations in ways really haven't seen before. Well, so explain that because in January,

A car, all of this is tied up in car announcing some changes related to the equal time rule. Is that right, David? Yes and no. A car said in January that he was thinking about making changes to that exemption for the late night talk shows. And if we recall last fall, he essentially, you know, did an impression of a mafioso, as Senator Ted Cruz put it, by saying we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way after Jimmy Kimmel made some remarks that offended. the president's supporters in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk. And Disney took them off the air for some days after two major owners of local TV stations that have ABC affiliates, you know, said that they were going to pull that show from their airwaves. And again, this was an instance in which the FCC itself did not take a formal position.

And yet, you know, the will of the administration, the will of this particular FCC chairman, you know, was adhered to for a time. In this instance, you know, there was no change in the policy yet. Carr says he's considering changing it. CBS did not, it seem, get a ruling or an indication from the FCC of the need to do this. They did so themselves. Well, and David noted there the obviously very liberal, you know, senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, he's obviously a Republican from Texas. But Carr's statements and the way that he's approached the media has really made a lot of libertarians really. really uncomfortable. And they lean a little bit more to the conservative side of things. But this is not

exactly what they envisioned as they see censorship in something like this or a chilling effect. You know, because we've seen conservatives before this or libertarian types within the Republican party saying that they felt like free speech was being infringed upon by the left. Well, this certainly is a more explicit way of free speech being infringed upon in many people's views by the right and by the Trump administration. It's so interesting, though, because the sort of censorship did not actually come from the FCC other than the sort of, you know, veiled threats last year and then, you know, in January, this kind of teasing of this rule change.

But it sounds like CBS took actions related to what Carr has teased. Why would they do that? Some of the critics are saying that they're essentially self-censoring, that they're getting in the way. And why would they, you know, why would they anger one of their biggest stars? Well, let's look at the much bigger context. which is that you've got vast business interests at play. The parent company of CBS is Paramount.

It's chairman David Ellison with the money of his father, the co-founder of Oracle, is making a bid to buy all of Warner Brothers Discovery, the parent company of HBO and Warner Brothers Studios and DC Comics and CNN, among other things. You know, it's right as we are taping this in the mix of it. It's tried to make an increased offer trying to pull that Warner Brothers sale away from Netflix. Well, that would require the approval of antitrust regulators within probably the Justice Department, but other, you know, folks get to advise it, including a chairman Carr at the FCC. At a time when President Trump's administration has made clear that these usually autonomous decisions or supposedly non-political decisions would very much be heavily influenced by the president's ideological beliefs, whims, and political needs.

You know, the Ellison family has really thrown themselves in Trump's court in his circle. And they've taken a lot of stances to try to please the president, to please Chairman Carr to get their acquisition of Paramount through just less than a year ago. Let's not forget, Stephen Colbert's show is set to wrap up in May. Why is that the case? Because the previous owners of Paramount made the decision that they would cancel him to ensure that they could ease through the approach. the approval of the sale to the Ellisons just last summer. Now, they say they did it for financial reasons, but nobody have talked to inside or outside of CBS believes that. And look, it's not just CBS, right? I mean, we've seen the Trump administration go after a lot of these corporations,

or at least make these threats against corporations who own media companies. And it's really the first time I can remember where so many of these organizations have kind of bent and haven't really stood up as strongly for their rights, for their autonomy of their own content. I mean, we've seen ABC settle lawsuits. CBS also settled a different lawsuit. And this is the kind of thing that I think a lot of journalists, a lot of content creators, you know, artists, it's very concerning to them because they feel like that a lot of these companies that they had worked for had their backs for a long time. And now you're seeing this sort of bending the knee in some respects because of their own vested business interests, whether it's these mergers or acquisitions or even just being able to, you know, produce their content without having the threat of the government saying that they'll put them through expensive lawsuits.

All right. We can take a quick break and more on all of this in just a moment. This message comes from Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit Wise.com. T's and C's Apply. This message comes from an PR sponsor, SAP Concur.

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We're now able to have team building and decision-making input from that team that we normally didn't have the time to receive before. So it was almost like a retraining of the brain on job functionality and opportunities that they have here at Atrecure. Visit concur.com to learn more. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Lemelson Foundation, dedicated to improving lives through invention, innovation, and climate action. And we're back. And David, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said last week that the commission is investigating ABC over whether their show The View violated the equal time rule when it aired an interview with James Tauru. And Colbert actually referenced that controversy while interviewing Tauroroko. Now, here's the thing. I don't usually say this to a guest, but if people are watching this right now, it's because they found us online on YouTube. I did an act of the show that's on tonight explaining why. It's not the first. time you've caused some drama.

FCC opening probe into the view after appearance by Tala Rico. Do you mean to cause trouble? I do. I think that Donald Trump is worried that we're about to flip Texas. But, I mean, it feels worth noting that talk radio, which is also governed by the FCC, routinely, I mean, you hear talk radio show hosts interview candidates without the same level of scrutiny. So what am I missing here?

Well, I think at the moment it's fair to say what we're all missing is consistency in Chairman Carr's application of where he's interested in going. What he wants to regulate where he'd like to have a heavy hand, the easy way or the hard way, right? He's shown no interest publicly in wading into refereeing whether or not nationally syndicated shows like Sean Hannity's or local talk radio show hosts, which significantly skew to the right, should equally be scrutinizing. or regulated or forced to give equal time, given the amount of interviews that they give to favored candidates. And that's just a part of the equation that it's almost as though it doesn't exist in the conversation, even as we know that, you know, folks listening to local radio stations may well be influenced by what they hear because it's, of course, often more locally grounded as those races play out. I mean, do we have a sense of how this would change the broader media ecosystem if equal time rules did start being enforced and follow. in the way that we're talking about? Look, let me just say, I think that it's complicating and always a little problematic

when the government is dictating what you can and can't do in speech. It's an accident of history. Broadcast came before cable. Broadcast came before the Internet. Broadcast came before, you know, social media. And because of that and the fact that there were licenses required to broadcast things on what came to be federally regulated airwaves so that all the signals didn't jumble and cancel each other out.

That's why these things are regulated. You know, CNN, if cable had come first and required certain kinds of licensing, CNN might have been regulated, and maybe CBS wouldn't be. So that's a complicating thing. At the same time, as a general practice as a broadcaster, I do think that a notion of fairness

is not a terrible thing. But there is such a welter of information available to us. The Tala Rico interview was put on Colbert and the Late Show's YouTube page. He claimed that the lawyers for CBS told him he couldn't even read the URL of the YouTube page out loud. And at the same time, it racked up, I think, tens of millions of viewers far greater than the few million that might have seen it on the Colbert Show itself. What I really think is at play is the willingness

of senior government officials to intercede in public discourse and say what they are willing or want to hear on the air and what they don't in concert with the president's interests. And that that applies to a far vaster array of actions by the government and by media owners in response that's deeply troubling more than the question of any given talk show. I do think that if this were to be enforced and accepted rather than challenged by these network owners and these local station owners that you would see a tamponing down on certain kinds of conversations that are critical to the president, which, of course, in many ways, is the desired outcome here.

Yeah, and it's not really about fairness. It seems to be about Trump and what he wants and what conservatives are looking at here. There certainly is this inconsistency that David's talking about. And it's the chilling effect that we are seeing where you don't know what Donald Trump is going to do and what Brendan Carr is his bulldog how far he's willing to go. So I think a lot of people who are running these organizations are very nervous. And, you know, people would be right to be confused because we have such a panoply of, you know, an a la carte sort of media consumption. it. Not everybody's just listening to broadcast news anymore, right? I mean, this is a totally different media landscape than our parents or grandparents' landscape. And a lot of people are just watching on YouTube, just ask my kids, right? And Tala Rico really benefited, actually, from this controversy, was able to not only rack up views for Colbert's clip on YouTube, but raised

millions of dollars in a really competitive primary. I was thinking about that. I mean, I don't know that I would have seen this interview if this hadn't happened. Literally, I saw it the day ever had happened, I think only because of this controversy. Yeah, and we're in an attention economy, and he certainly was able to get the attention on that. It was really interesting. I was reading up on the history of the equal time rule, and I saw some quote from Dwight Eisenhower from like 60 years ago where he basically said, we don't really want to be that involved, because we really do trust the broadcasters to be able to kind of use their judgment. And, I don't know, the tone in which he was talking about the media environment seemed so different from what we're

in now in terms of. just this relentless assault from Trump on the trustworthiness of the media. Well, and there was, I mean, more flexibility, obviously, with some of these rules that had been put in place where they did trust the shows to make those decisions and they didn't want to appear to have government overreach. But Trump has shown that he's willing to go as far as the law is willing to let him go and maybe even further unless the courts are willing to step in and stop him. I mean, is there any way that this backfires in a time when it's not like, I mean, we talk all the time about how trust in. media, David, is at new all-time lows, I feel like every year. I don't know that, you know, the average person is feeling super enraged necessarily at the injustices being voiced upon Stephen Colbert or on CBS. I guess I wonder how do you feel like the American public sees all this?

The question of the administration is backfiring on them or having limits requires major media owners to push back and not simply accept the administration's logic or demands. And we've seen that, you know, as Domenico has laid out properly, the corporate owners of CBS and ABC and others have really sought to accommodate the president as a private citizen in his lawsuits, but also his administration and federal policy in all kinds of ways to get their larger corporate interests through, through regulators, through the administration's gatekeepers, right? And you've seen even in figures so great as Jeff Bezos, right? one of the world's handful of richest people, the founder and largest shareholder in Amazon, he has contorted the Washington Post in many ways to accommodate the president and the administration as well. And if you're seeing somebody like Bezos willing to do that to make sure the flow of money keeps coming for government contracts to make sure that the government doesn't go after

some of his business practices, you know, it requires a leap of faith to assume that all media owners of much smaller degree are going to be willing to take a more aggressive stance. Look, if there's a word that's landed Trump in political hot water in this first year and made him unpopular with independence and persuadable voters, it's overreach. There's a risk here in looking like the very thing that his critics are accusing him of being, you know, the idea of autocracy and backsliding and cracking down on what journalists and artists are able to do. And I think that we're seeing this sort of tension that has risen up. And that's where the backfiring can kind of come in for Trump and Republicans if they're viewed as pushing too hard to suppress speech.

All right. We can leave it there for today. Thank you so much for being with us today, David. You bet. The political world does change pretty fast, but this podcast is here with analysis to help you make sense of it. Hit that follow button in your favorite podcast app to make sure you do not miss an episode. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper with people you really want to hear from, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodriguez, Liz Cheney, or the godfather of artificial intelligence, Jeffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well-informed colleagues at The New Yorker. So join us every week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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