With Jimmy Kimmel’s YouTube-only interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico now topping 8 million views—and Talarico raising money off the decision to keep it off ABC—FCC chair Brendan Carr is pushing back on the story behind it.
“He’s just running the same hoax he did a few months ago on Colbert for the purpose of getting clicks and donations,” Carr wrote Saturday.
Carr addressed the controversy in a lengthy social media post that began as a response to questions about Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s appearance on ESPN’s College GameDay. Carr said the FCC’s equal-time statute does not apply to the cable program and that Cruz, who is not currently running for office, would not qualify as a candidate under the statute anyway.
He then turned to Talarico, whose 21-minute interview with Kimmel was posted to the Jimmy Kimmel Live! YouTube channel Thursday rather than airing on ABC.
The interview quickly became Kimmel’s most-watched interview on the platform in recent memory, topping 5 million views in its first 24 hours and continuing to climb over the weekend.
Talarico has also incorporated the controversy into his fundraising. In an email sent to supporters, his campaign said it would take “significant resources” to overcome what it called “attacks and censorship,” adding that it hoped to make the episode “backfire again.”
The callback was to Talarico’s February interview with Stephen Colbert, which CBS kept off The Late Show broadcast amid similar equal-time concerns. The interview was instead posted to YouTube, where it drew millions of views, while Talarico’s campaign reported a record fundraising haul after Colbert disclosed what had happened.
Carr argued Saturday that both episodes rest on a misunderstanding of the law.
“The Equal Time statute does not prohibit anyone from interviewing anyone on broadcast TV,” he wrote. “It is about more speech, not less.”
Carr noted that when the statute applies, broadcast stations are required to offer other legally qualified candidates comparable time and placement.
But that leaves out a key part of Kimmel’s complaint: candidates had commonly appeared on late-night television for decades without those interviews triggering equal-time obligations.
The FCC itself established that precedent. In 2006, its Media Bureau ruled that an interview with then-Republican California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno qualified for the statute’s “bona fide news interview” exemption, meaning candidate appearances on the program did not trigger equal-opportunity requirements.
Kimmel pointed to that history Wednesday night, noting that Leno, David Letterman, Arsenio Hall, and other late-night hosts had interviewed candidates for years, including Donald Trump, who appeared on Kimmel’s show twice while he was running for president.
That landscape changed in January, when Carr’s FCC issued new guidance warning broadcasters not to assume that present-day late-night and daytime talk shows qualify for the same exemption.
Programs seeking certainty were encouraged to petition the FCC for their own declaratory ruling. In the meantime, the bureau told broadcast stations to ensure compliance with equal-opportunity requirements that can result in opposing candidates receiving comparable time and placement.
That is the regulatory shift Kimmel was pointing to.
Kimmel has not claimed that federal law literally prohibits him from interviewing Talarico. Rather, he said he kept the interview off ABC out of consideration for affiliates—particularly stations in Texas—that could face equal-time requests from one or all of the other candidates on the ballot, including those unaffiliated with the major parties.
For his part, it’s not the first time Carr has pushed back on the storyline surrounding Talarico’s late-night interviews—though his tone appears to have sharpened.
After Colbert’s Talarico interview, Carr said he was “highly entertained” by the ensuing news cycle, calling it “one of the most fun days I’ve had on the job.” Even then, he accused Talarico of running a “hoax” to generate “clicks” and campaign donations.
Seven months later, with Talarico’s Kimmel interview drawing another massive YouTube audience, Carr sounds considerably less amused.
