Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, on Saturday accused Texas Senate candidate James Talarico of orchestrating a “hoax” after Jimmy Kimmel punted his 20-minute interview with the Democrat from his broadcast to YouTube in an attempt to avoid the FCC’s fury.
“He’s just running the same hoax he did a few months ago on Colbert for the purpose of getting clicks and donations,” wrote Carr of Talarico in a lengthy post to his X account.
“He’s banking on people not understanding the statute or operating as partisan lemmings.”
Months after Stephen Colbert accused CBS of caving to the FCC’s threats when his Talarico interview didn’t make his show’s broadcast, Kimmel similarly revealed last week that the decision to keep his interview with Talarico off the air was due to the Trump-friendly agency’s threats against ABC.
Both rounds of FCC threats, per the hosts, relate to the agency’s enforcement of its equal time rule, which calls on broadcasters to give opposing candidates equal time on their programming.
Daytime and late-night talk shows were long exempt from enforcement of the rule until Carr took the helm. His agency, in January, warned that daytime and late-night TV shows were no longer considered exempt from the rule. Critics viewed this as another attempt to stifle the free speech Trump is bothered by.
Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr speaks at Conservative Political Action Conference in Grapevine, Texas in March.
Shelby Tauber/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The FCC’s apparent crackdown on Talarico’s late-night appearances hasn’t made viewership go vamoose.
His interview on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” has accumulated over 9 million views since Kimmel uploaded a video to his YouTube channel, as of Monday morning.
That makes it the host’s second-most viewed video of 2026, The Wrap noted.
Colbert’s “online-exclusive” interview with Talarico from February is his most viewed YouTube video of the year, as well.
Talarico has used what he has called the FCC’s “attempted censorship” of him for fundraising’s sake, reportedly raising $2.5 million in the wake of the Colbert interview and referencing the Kimmel appearance in an email on Thursday.
The straight-to-Youtube interviews featuring Talarico came into focus over the weekend as the FCC faced questions around equal time rule enforcement as it related to Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) boo-laden appearance on ESPN’s “College GameDay.”
Carr noted in his X post that the rule doesn’t apply to cable programs like “College GameDay,” which spoke to Cruz for nearly 10 minutes about a bipartisan college sports bill he co-authored, before adding that the senator is not running for reelection this cycle.