WASHINGTON, D.C. — Call it “equal time” or “equal opportunity” for FCC-regulated broadcast media. For the Carr Commission and the Trump Administration in the Commander-in-Chief’s second term, ensuring there’s no politically flavored tilt in the content appearing on broadcast media programming that’s more entertainment than newscast in presentation has become a top priority.
But is Television getting more scrutiny than Radio? That’s a question posed to Chairman Brendan Carr by a reporter during a post-February Open Meeting Press Conference convened by Carr on Wednesday morning, during which he had sharp words for a Texas U.S. Senate candidate.
The question-and-answer session began with a Politico reporter asking Carr how he thinks his “equal time” guidance “has been going so far over the last few weeks” — specifically inquiring if there could be “fewer voices on air” because of that. The reporter addressed the incident this week involving The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and CBS’s decision to prohibit Colbert from interviewing Texas State Representative James Talarico, who is seeking a seat in the U.S. Senate as a Democrat counterpart to Ted Cruz.
Carr replied that when he took a step back and looked at the entire arc of that news story on Tuesday, “I was highly entertained. I think it was probably one of the most fun days on the job, watching sort of the hilarity of how this story played out.”
He elaborated, “Anybody that’s not something from a terminal case of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ could see right away yesterday the exact story out and how it was going to play out.” In fact, Carr pointed fingers at Talarico for orchestrating the entire affair to his benefit, a man “who understood the way the news media works and he took advantage of all of the viewers’ prior conceptions to run a hoax — apparently for the purpose of raising money and getting clicks, and the news media played right into it.”
Carr added, “I think yesterday was a perfect encapsulation of why people have more trust in Gas Station Sushi than they do in the national news media.”
Jasmine Crockett, who is also seeking the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Texas, noted on Tuesday that there was no censorship by the federal government in the Talarico matter. This was echoed by Carr, who shared that CBS shared with Colbert that “there are lots of ways” he could have had Talarico appear, but he declined to consider them. This included having Crockett and any other candidates appear on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Jeremy Barr, a media reporter with liberal non-profit news organization The Guardian, then asked if the FCC has opened “a probe” into ABC’s The View regarding a potential violation of the “Equal Time” rule. The answer from Carr? “Yes, the FCC has an enforcement action underway on that.”
On the Colbert matter, if he acts like David Muir, does the “Equal Time” rule still apply? It was a curious question, as Muir hosts a 30-minute newscast, while Colbert “is no David Muir,” Carr opined, in illustrating how he is a talk show host born out of a character featured on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.
HANNITY VS. COLBERT: A DIFFERENCE UPHELD
For D.C.-based reporter Ted Johnson at Deadline, Chairman Carr was asked why, in his view, the head of the Commission did not have the same concern about broadcast talk radio as he does about broadcast TV talk shows.
As an example, Johnson pointed to longtime Premiere Networks-syndicated conservative talk host Sean Hannity, and how he featured Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a December 2025 broadcast.
Johnson also asks how the FCC is assessing whether a candidate’s appearance on a Talk show is motivated by partisan purposes.
Carr replied that the “Equal Time” rule applies to all broadcasters, and the advisory the FCC recently released happened to apply to the TV context. “It appeared that programmers were overreading or misreading some of the case law on the ‘Equal Time’ rule as it applies to broadcast TV,” Carr said. “We haven’t seen the same issues on the Radio side, but the ‘Equal Time’ rule is going to apply to broadcast across the board, and we will take a look at anything that arises.”
Thus, if you’re a “partisan political actor,” you will need to provide equal air time to different candidates. Is that a talk show host? “It could be that, yeah,” Carr replied.
For a Punchbowl News reporter, does this mean that every candidate up for election in the November mid-terms is subject to the “Equal Time” rule? Carr would only state that the FCC would apply case law in all instances, adding that in the case of Talarico’s aborted appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the interview could have run with the understanding that any CBS affiliate or owned station in Texas would be prevented from airing the segment.
