FCC chair brushes off Kimmel, Colbert outrage over latest policy push

EXCLUSIVE—Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chariman Brendan Carr is brushing off the blowback he's gotten from late-night hosts Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel over the agency's announcement that could impact their liberal programming.

"Well, I didn't get a chance to see Kimmel or Colbert live. I don't have difficulty falling asleep on my own. And so I just, I do that without the aid of their programming," Carr said during an interview with Fox News Digital.

Colbert and Kimmel lashed out after the FCC announced it is providing guidance to ABC, CBS and NBC to adhere to the "statutory equal opportunities requirement," citing the Communications Act of 1934, "including their airing of late-night and daytime talk shows."

"Under section 315, if a broadcast station permits any legally qualified candidate for public office to use its facilities, it shall provide an equal opportunity to all other legally qualified candidates for that office," the FCC wrote in a press release last month.

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Colbert, whose show officially goes off the air in May, framed Carr's newly enforced guidance as an "attempt to silence me, Jimmy and Seth [Meyers]."

"Hey, I'm flattered you think that appearing on my show has the power to affect politics in any way, OK? I've been doing this job for 21 years, and let me tell you something, buddy. If our government had turned out the way I had chosen, you would not have the power to make this announcement," Colbert told Carr.

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Kimmel similarly attacked President Donald Trump's "minions at the FCC" for "planning to make it difficult" for his shows and others to "interview politicians they don't align with."

"We are once again getting threatened by the FCC. I might need your help again," Kimmel told viewers, alluding to the liberal backlash over his brief suspension last year. 

Carr stressed that the law he's enforcing "goes back to the 1950s," and that if Colbert and Kimmel don't like the law, they should urge Congress to change it.

"On my watch, we're going to enforce this regulation," Carr said. "There's lots of ways of distributing programming these days that you don't need to comply with this regulation. If you're a cable channel, it largely doesn't apply. If you're a podcaster, no. If you are a streamer, no."

He continued, "So if Kimmel or Colbert want to continue to do their programming, and they don't want to have to comply with this requirement or other public interest obligations like prohibitions on broadcast hoax or news distortion, then they can go to a cable channel or a podcast or a streaming service and that's fine. But if you want that privilege of that wide distribution on this public resource of broadcast TV spectrum, then that's something that they're going to have to comply with."

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Carr said he hasn't spoken with the three major broadcasters about the renewed guidance but instead has engaged with individual TV stations in hopes to "strengthen" them so they can push back on the programming provided by ABC, CBS and NBC.

"We've seen some decent results on that front," Carr said, likely referring to the brief boycott of Kimmel's program by stations owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar Media Group last fall over his comments about Charlie Kirk's alleged assassin.

For the past several years, late-night talk shows like "Jimmy Kimmel Live!," "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" and "Late Night with Seth Meyers," as well as daytime programs like "The View," have rolled out the red carpet for Team Blue. In 2025, of the nearly 60 active politicians that have made appearances across those four shows, all but one were Democrats, according to data from the Media Research Center.

Carr indicated that GOP candidates don't necessarily have to appear on those exact programs in order for the networks to adhere to the policy, meaning they could either appear on a news program or the network can air their campaign ads as a supplement. 

"If you have one political candidate on, if they're running against another political candidate, you have to give them equal time," Carr said. "Now, there's been an exception to that rule over the years called the bona fide news exception. If your program is bona fide news, then you can have one candidate on and not the other. The problem is that exception has come to swallow the rule principally because there was a handful of FCC decisions from many, many years ago that have been overread by TV broadcasters to assume that every single program, including all late-night TV, all daytime TV, is necessarily now a bona fide news program. And we're simply reminding people that, in fact, that's not the case."

Fox News' Nora Moriarty contributed to this report.