Stephen Colbert Goes Against CBS, Interviews Democrat James Talarico for YouTube Over FCC Fears

Stephen Colbert was set to host Texas state Rep. James Talarico, who is running for U.S. Senate, on The Late Show on Monday night (February 16), however, he was blocked from doing so.

He explained what happened to his audience.

“You know who is not one of my guests tonight: That’s Texas State Representative James Talarico. 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,” he said to his audience about the Democratic candidate for the Senate.

He then let CBS know how he felt about that: “Then I was told in some uncertain terms that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on, and because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”

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Stephen then told his audience about the FCC equal time provision.

“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 published.

“In his letter, [FCC chair Brendan Carr] said he was thinking about dropping the exception for talk shows because he said some of them were motivated by partisan purposes. Well, sir, you’re chairman of the FCC, so FCC U because I think you are motivated by partisan purposes yourself, sir. Smelt it because you dealt it. You are Dutch ovening America’s airwaves. Let’s just call this what it is. Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV,” Colbert added.

Colbert ended up interviewing Talarico anyway, publishing it to his YouTube.

When asked about being blocked from airtime, Talarico said, “I think that Donald Trump is worried that we’re about to flip Texas.”

“This is the party that ran against cancel culture, and now they’re trying to control what we watch, what we say, what we read, and this is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture, the kind that comes from the top,” he continued. “They went after The View because I went on there. They went after Jimmy Kimmel for telling a joke they didn’t like. They went after you for telling the truth about Paramount’s bribe to Donald Trump.”