Censorship Comes for Stephen Colbert

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show ends in May, and he’s in almost open warfare with his soon-to-be ex-bosses at CBS. Last night, he had planned to broadcast an interview with James Talarico, a member of the Texas state House who is running in a heated Democratic primary for United States Senate. But it was not to be.

At the start of his show, Colbert told viewers that CBS had barred him from airing the interview, citing threats from Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission. (You may remember Carr as the guy who sounded like a cartoon mobster while trying to get Jimmy Kimmel fired—“We can do this the easy way or the hard way”—drawing a rebuke from Senator Ted Cruz.)

Colbert savaged CBS. He said that the network had told him not to talk about it, which he defied in dramatic fashion. “I want to assure you, ladies and gentlemen—please—I want to assure you, this decision is for purely financial reasons,” he joked, a sly reference to the rationale that CBS gave for ending his show. Colbert posted the interview on his show’s YouTube channel. CBS said in a statement that The Late Show “was not prohibited by CBS from broadcasting the interview with Rep. James Talarico. The show was provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule for two other candidates, including Rep. Jasmine Crockett, and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled.”

I wrote in July that CBS’s leadership had lost the benefit of the doubt, and the network’s actions since its parent company’s merger with Skydance and the appointment of Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News have reinforced that. CBS deserves plenty of criticism for cowardice. But that doesn’t mean it’s incorrect to fear FCC action.

Last month, the FCC issued a notice about the equal-time rule, a century-old regulation that says that a broadcast station that provides time to one candidate must provide an equal forum to a rival. The rule has an exemption for “bona fide news”—basically, producers can decide what to cover in their programming, because anything else would constitute government interference in the free press. In 2006, the FCC determined that interviews on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno fit under the exemption even if they are not strictly news programming, a precedent that shows have relied on since.

But the new notice states that “the FCC has not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify for the bona fide news exemption.” (Carr has not extended this reasoning to talk radio, which conservatives dominate.) This is not just bluster. Earlier this month, Fox News reported that the FCC was investigating ABC’s daytime talk show The View, which has become an important stop for politicians seeking to reach the show’s heavily female audience, for violating the equal-time rule. The reported object of Carr’s ire? An interview with one James Talarico.

The Talarico dustups are among several incidents in the past few days that show the Trump administration’s enthusiasm for censoring speech by both the press and ordinary citizens. One year ago, I wrote that Donald Trump and his allies were free-speech phonies who, having campaigned against censorship, were eager to impose it. The threat to First Amendment rights has gotten worse since then.

Earlier this month, The Washington Post’s John Woodrow Cox reported on a retiree who used a publicly available email address to encourage an attorney at the Department of Homeland Security to have mercy on an asylum seeker. In response, DHS sent federal agents to the man’s door and demanded access to his Google accounts, using a tool called an administrative subpoena that doesn’t require a judge or grand jury to approve. On Friday, The New York Times reported that Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta in recent months have received “hundreds” of administrative subpoenas from DHS seeking access to information about the accounts of people who have criticized the government. (DHS told both papers that it was acting within its authority but didn’t give any detailed response.)

The goals of both DHS and the FCC in these cases are to intimidate critics and stifle dissent. This is staggering hypocrisy. During the presidential campaign, Trump accused the Biden administration of undermining free speech by asking—though not demanding—that social-media companies remove misinformation about COVID. On day one of his administration, Trump issued an executive order that charged, “Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.” This is a good description of what Trump’s administration is doing now.

Some repression efforts fail. Last week, the federal district-court judge Richard Leon, a President George W. Bush appointee, temporarily blocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from punishing Senator Mark Kelly, a Navy veteran, for a video in which he and other members of Congress remind current service members that they can and should refuse illegal orders. “This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees,” Leon wrote.

The ruling is a welcome defense of Americans’ freedoms, but it can’t reverse all of the damage. Kelly is unusually well positioned to fight back and take the administration to court. Not every would-be critic is. And censorship, once established by a president, has ways of spreading its tendrils to other institutions. At one state university in Texas, for example, a philosophy professor was forced to remove passages of Plato from his syllabus because of new policies passed by governor-appointed regents, and an art exhibition critical of ICE was abruptly canceled at another Texas university.

These attacks are clearly partisan: They all target speech by critics of the president, his party, or his policies. But they should be scary even if you feel that Colbert doesn’t deserve a news exemption, The View is too liberal, or Kelly was out of line. Crackdowns on speech by prominent figures pave a way for the government to regulate speech more broadly, which should be concerning for people of any political leaning because the party and people in power can change.

During a Senate hearing last week, Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, accused Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, of being responsible for the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good because he supported protests. Johnson began, “Did you ever encourage people to go out there and exercise the First—”

“I freely admit being in favor of the First Amendment,” Ellison shot back. This position is apparently not as common among elected officials as you might hope.

Related:

• The free-speech phonies
• Is Colbert's ouster really just a “financial decision”?

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Marco Rubio’s impressive speech
• The Republicans made peace with science.
• For Europe, it’s not back to business as usual.

Today’s News

1. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, a civil-rights leader and two-time Democratic presidential candidate who, in 1984, became the first Black man to mount a nationwide campaign for the White House, died today at 84.
2. Iran’s foreign minister said American and Iranian officials made “good progress” during indirect talks in Geneva, and that they had agreed to exchange draft proposals for a potential deal. According to Iranian officials, Iran has indicated that it would be open to limiting its nuclear program in return for sanctions relief.
3. Democrats sent a counteroffer to Republicans and the White House yesterday to fund the Department of Homeland Security as the partial government shutdown entered its third day. President Trump said he will negotiate with Democrats, but Republicans oppose many of the demands to restrict ICE operations.

Dispatches

• The Wonder Reader: Rafaela Jinich explores stories that challenge the idea that love is about finding the “right kind” of person.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

American Kids Used to Eat Everything

By Olga Khazan

The most striking passages in Picky, a forthcoming book by the historian Helen Zoe Veit, describe the way famous 19th-century American figures ate as children. I found myself gripped with envy as I read—not because the foods were particularly appetizing, but because I would kill for my kid to eat like that.

To wit: As a girl, Edith Wharton adored oyster sauce, turtle, stewed celery, cooked tomatoes, and lima beans in cream. Mark Twain fondly remembered eating succotash, string beans, squirrels, and rabbits on his uncle’s farm. And during her childhood, Veit writes, Elizabeth Cady Stanton “happily ate vegetables, hickory nuts, and cold jellied brain.”

If these don’t sound like typical “kid foods,” that’s because they aren’t, and weren’t. “Kid food,” as a category, is a recent invention.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• AI agents are taking America by storm.
• An Olympic trend that defies tradition
• Europe has received the message.
• The Founders would have opposed “nationalizing” elections.
• Sarah Longwell on the disappointment of young Trump voters
• Norway faces up to Trump’s demands for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Culture Break

Read. In Toni Morrison’s novels, she located the missing stories of Black America, Judith Shulevitz writes.

Reminisce. David Sims explores how Robert Duvall could carry a film thunderously, yet also stand out in the subtlest of roles.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.