{"id":473640,"date":"2026-02-17T10:17:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T10:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/473640\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T10:17:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T10:17:07","slug":"stephen-colbert-says-cbs-banned-him-from-interviewing-james-talarico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/473640\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Colbert Says CBS Banned Him From Interviewing James Talarico"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAt the top of his monologue tonight, Stephen Colbert<\/a> introduced the Late Show band, announced guest Jennifer Garner and then asked the audience, \u201cYou know who is not one of my guests tonight?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe CBS<\/a> host then answered his own question.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat\u2019s Texas state representative James Talarico<\/a>. He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network\u2019s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThen, 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 does not want us to talk about this\u2026Let\u2019s talk about this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Late Night host went on to explain FCC Chair Brendan Carr\u2019s new guidance on the \u201cequal time\u201d rule, which requires broadcasters who feature qualified political candidates on their airwaves provide time to rivals, if requested.<\/p>\n

\n\tDeadline has reached out to CBS for comment and this post will be updated when it is received.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tTraditionally, news content has been exempted from the equal time rule and, in recent decades, stations have assumed that it has applied as well as to daytime and late-night talk shows, like\u00a0The View\u00a0and\u00a0Jimmy Kimmel<\/a>\u00a0Live, which have featured presidential and other candidates, including figures like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.<\/p>\n

\n\tNew FCC guidance, though, signaled to those talk shows that they no longer should believe that they would fall under the so-called \u201cbonafide news\u201d exemption. Carr said that a determination on whether a show is exempt would come down to a number of factors, including whether there was a \u201cpartisan motivation\u201d in featuring a political candidate as a guest. \u201cIf you\u2019re fake news, you\u2019re not going to qualify for the bona fide news exemption,\u201d said Carr.<\/p>\n

\n\tColbert observed tonight, \u201cIt\u2019s no surprise that two of the people most affected by this threat are me and my friend Jimmy Kimmel.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCarr himself mentioned the duo in his recent comments, a clip of which Colbert played.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIf Kimmel or Colbert want to continue to do their programming,\u201d said Carr, \u201cand they don\u2019t want to have to comply with this requirement, then they can go to a cable channel or a podcast or a streaming service and that\u2019s fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tColbert then said he was following Carr\u2019s advice and posting the entirety of his Talarico interview on YouTube. You can watch it below.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tTed Johnson contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the top of his monologue tonight, Stephen Colbert introduced the Late Show band, announced guest Jennifer Garner…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":473641,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[991,88,69123,10674,10675,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-473640","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-cbs","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-james-talarico","11":"tag-stephen-colbert","12":"tag-the-late-show-with-stephen-colbert","13":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473640\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}