Carr Crash

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

 

One of the stranger idiosyncrasies of the garbage political era in which we live is how firestorms keep erupting around late-night talk shows on broadcast television.

 

Everyone agrees that that type of programming is as good as dead. Its audience share has been cannibalized by cable TV and streaming, leaving the networks with exorbitant salaries to pay and not enough eyeballs to justify continuing to pay them. The highest-rated host in that niche will be out of a job in a few months, in fact—a “financial decision,” according to his employer.

 

With its heyday long past, late-night television should be wet tinder for political arsonists eager to start a blaze. Caring about it in 2026 is like caring about who’s on the cover of Time magazine, a quirk found only in elderly media junkies with a nostalgia fetish.

 

Unfortunately, we made someone like that president. And so here we are, trapped in another national news cycle that somehow revolves around Jimmy Kimmel and/or Stephen Colbert.

 

On Monday, Colbert interviewed Democrat James Talarico, who’s running for U.S. Senate in Texas. Viewers didn’t get to see it, though: The host told his audience that CBS’s lawyers had ordered the segment quashed for fear that airing it would trigger the FCC’s “equal time” rule for political candidates appearing on broadcast networks. If Talarico got 15 minutes, CBS would be obliged to grant 15 minutes to his opponents in the Senate primary, Rep. Jasmine Crockett and Ahmad Hassan.

 

Better to give airtime to no one than to everyone, management apparently concluded. (CBS denies that it killed the segment but admits that “equal time” was a concern.)

 

“Equal time” as a legal doctrine is old and new. It’s been on the books for nearly a century, part of the Communications Act of 1934 that set rules for radio and television networks transmitting over America’s airwaves. It applies only to entertainment programming; news shows are exempt for the sensible reason that sometimes events require reporters to cover certain candidates (especially incumbents) more intensively than their opponents.

 

Twenty years ago, the FCC determined that Jay Leno’s Tonight Show qualified for the “news show” exemption when Leno interviewed California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was running for reelection at the time. That precedent governed late-night television until last month, when FCC Chairman Brendan Carr suddenly declared that “fake news” late-night programs with a “partisan motivation” no longer qualify.

 

That’s what allegedly spooked CBS’s lawyers. Airing Colbert’s Talarico interview might have invited regulatory harassment from a pseudo mafioso prone to warning broadcasters that he’s prepared to do things “the easy way or the hard way.”

 

I’m struggling to think of an episode over the past year that captures the petty pathologies of Trumpist governance more efficiently than this one does.

 

Good government gone bad.

 

To start with, it’s a case of the White House twisting a good-government measure to serve its own unvirtuous ends.

 

That’s always how it is with good-government measures, we conservatives will add, and we conservatives are (mostly) right. The road to big-government hell is paved with utopian intentions. Hand the state a well-meaning regulatory power like “equal time” or its close cousin, the now-defunct Fairness Doctrine, and that power will surely be abused for personal advantage by those who wield it.

 

Trumpism differs from its predecessors on that point to such a remarkable degree, however, that it feels like a difference in kind. The most grotesque example is the pardon power, a good-government measure granted to the president by the Constitution so that he might rectify injustices and dispense mercy. Instead, under Trump, it’s become the linchpin in a racketeering scheme so blatant and perverse that it would qualify his administration as the most corrupt in American history even if that were the only form of corruption it was engaged in.

 

Which it isn’t, of course.

 

“Equal time” was designed as a public service, a way to make sure Americans were fully informed about their options on the ballot in an age when local radio stations were few and television networks could be counted on one hand. That’s no longer a concern in 2026. Carr is extending the rule to late night not because he fears that fans of the genre won’t be able to educate themselves on the candidates without it but because he wants to discourage its left-friendly programming from providing a platform to appealing Democrats like Talarico.

 

If you doubt that (“maybe the FCC wants to force them to interview more Republicans”), I ask you to consider how well a chat between Colbert and, say, Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton is likely to go for the GOP.

 

Carr and Trump want voters less informed about liberals who are on the ballot this year, the opposite of what “equal time” was designed for. They’d much prefer that Texas Democrats go to vote next month knowing a lot about the high-profile but unelectable Crockett than the low-profile but possibly electable Talarico.

 

Hypocrisy.

 

They’re also being egregious hypocrites about it, another political pathology that afflicts all administrations but which has grown by an order of magnitude or two under the current one.

 

It’s comically ridiculous for Carr or any other Republican apparatchik to fret about bias on broadcast television, let alone low-rated late-night television, when the president functionally commands a multimedia propaganda empire that stretches across cable, radio, and too many Internet house organs to count. That empire includes late night too, by the way: Colbert might be the most-watched broadcast host in his time slot but the most-watched host overall is Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld, a dependable Trump apologist.

 

We can debate whether the law should continue to distinguish between broadcast media, which transmits on public airwaves, and everything else given the ubiquity of modern media, but there’s no debating that the White House does not give a rip about “equal time” in principle. If Gutfeld replaced Colbert at CBS and resolved to interview only Republicans until November, I assure you that the FCC would take no action.

 

In fact, I can prove it.

 

Consider the elephant in the room in this episode—talk radio, a medium famously dominated by right-wingers that also happens to transmit over public airwaves. The bootlicking hosts on your local MAGA talk-radio station will welcome numerous Republican candidates onto their shows for friendly campaign chitchat before the midterms (Hannity’s program had Paxton on less than two months ago), which, one would think, should properly trigger “equal time” for their Democratic opponents.

 

But it won’t. Brendan Carr has already declared that he won’t extend the rule to radio stations despite the fact that the average right-wing infotainment program nowadays is a “news show” in only the loosest, most debased sense of that term. As always, the rules are different for the president’s friends, and the White House is keen to advertise it. 

 

Cronyism.

 

That brings us to the third Trumpist pathology at play in this episode—cronyism.

 

When I said before that CBS’s lawyers blocked the Talarico interview from airing because they “allegedly” feared Carr and the “equal time” rule, I wasn’t just being cautious about trusting Colbert’s account of what happened. In assessing their motives, we should remember who owns the network and what sort of calculations they might be making by avoiding programming that risks angering the president.

 

That owner is Paramount, which, in the span of a few months last year, paid Trump $16 million to settle a dubious defamation claim, canceled longtime MAGA nemesis Colbert, and put anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News. Amid those various bribes, the company’s merger with Skydance Media—helmed by Trump courtier David Ellison—was approved. Ellison is now in charge of Paramount and the company has set its sights on acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, another deal that will require the federal government’s approval.

 

Is it any surprise in that context that higher-ups at CBS got itchy at the idea of giving James Talarico free airtime? He’s a serious threat to flip a Senate seat held by the GOP for more than 40 years if a blue wave gathers this fall, especially if he ends up facing the loathsome Paxton. (A Republican internal poll conducted earlier this month found Talarico winning that match-up by 3 points.) The last thing Trump, and therefore Paramount, needs at this moment is Talarico getting a boost from CBS just as early voting in Texas begins.

 

The newly expanded “equal time” rule may simply have been a convenient pretext for Paramount to spike Colbert’s interview in the interest of staying on the president’s good side as the Warner Bros. saga plays out. It’s hard to blame them: In a rotten mafia-run country where major business acquisitions depend mainly on whether the don likes the parties or not, there’s nothing more important financially than making sure he doesn’t bear you a grudge.

 

Eating the pieces.

 

The most distinctive Trumpist pathology in this episode, though, is how strategically idiotic extending the “equal time” rule to late night has ended up being. As usual, not only have the president and his team struggled to see one move ahead on the chessboard, they’ve ended up eating the pieces.

 

I wrote a column on that topic last week so I won’t belabor this one by reciting examples. Instead, I invite you to identify the logical loophole in Carr’s scheme to stifle broadcast content that might help Democratic candidates in a world in which literally everyone can easily upload content to non-broadcast platforms—including Stephen Colbert and his producers.

 

Will the Talarico interview be successfully suppressed, do you think? Or will it inevitably turn up on one of those platforms, beyond the reach of the FCC?

 

And when it does, amid a feeding frenzy about the interview that was too hot for CBS, how big do you suppose the audience for it might be?

 

These are easy questions with easy answers. Between Carr’s “equal time” stupidity and Colbert’s cleverness in urging his television audience to watch the unaired Talarico interview on his program’s YouTube channel (to the great annoyance of Paramount executives, no doubt), the segment has supernova’d. The YouTube video alone has 6 million views as I write this on Wednesday afternoon, easily more than twice the number of television viewers that the average episode of Colbert’s show draws, with countless more piling up on platforms like Twitter and Bluesky. Talarico has also milked the controversy on social media to great effect financially and otherwise, presenting himself as a martyr of Trumpist censorship rather than of the CBS legal department.

 

It’s one of the more astounding examples of the “Streisand effect” we’ll ever see, a tremendously lucky break for a lesser-known candidate on the eve of an election. The fact that it also exposed the modern fallacy at the heart of the “equal time” rule, that political candidates will suffer meaningfully if their airtime on broadcast television is inequitable, is a happy bonus. Talarico’s primary opponent has appeared at least twice on Colbert’s show in the past, after all, whereas he still technically has yet to appear once—and even so, many more people have seen his interview than hers.

 

The true “eating the pieces” element of this debacle, though, has to do with the precedent that Carr has set. Republicans have little to gain from being sticklers about “equal time” for candidates who appear on late-night broadcast television, a genre that won’t exist for much longer, whereas Democrats do have something to gain by trying to apply the rule to right-wing talk radio once they return to power. In the future, if Sean Hannity wants to play pattycake with Ken Paxton, a leftist FCC might demand that he also fight a battle of wits with Talarico or Crockett in front of his gigantic audience. Is that a good trade for the right?

 

The most one can say for Carr’s decision to expand the “equal time” rule, I think, is that he’s following the laws of the jungle he now prowls around in. The president is turning manic about the midterms as his polling deteriorates, and the more unbalanced he becomes, the more he’ll expect his deputies to prove they’re doing everything possible to stop Democrats from “cheating” their way to a momentous victory. That means filibuster-smashing legislation in Congress, plainly illegal action by the White House, crank-inspired FBI investigations designed to shake voters’ faith in the process, and warnings from Homeland Security about making sure “we have the right people voting.”

 

If you’re Brendan Carr and the president turns to you in a meeting to ask how you’re abusing government power to help Team Red win this fall, what are you supposed to say? Nothing?

 

You should at least be able to say that you made Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel think twice before putting any Democratic candidates on the air. It’s a small thing, sure. But it’s the kind of corrupt gesture that a nostalgic, geriatric TV addict will appreciate.