Equal Time and the Public Interest

Susan Estrich
Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:00:00 -0800
Opinion

Stephen Colbert was right to be mad. His bosses at CBS put the kabosh on an interview he wanted to do with a Texas Senate candidate on his late-night talk show. But you can't just blame CBS. The fault lies, as it so often does these days, in the Trump administration, which last month announced new "guidance" from the Federal Communications Commission requiring "equal time" on entertainment-oriented talk shows.

The guidance was clearly aimed at Trump's targets on late-night TV, including of course, Jimmy Kimmel of ABC, who has been targeted as well as Trump's FCC chair, Brendan Carr. It grows out of the longstanding conservative complaints about the late-night liberal conspiracy and the tendency of liberal hosts and guests to dominate. So what do you do? This is not the small government/libertarian crowd. These are big government conservatives. Regulate the hell out of them is what they are doing.

Until now, the broadcast industry — following the FCC's lead — had taken the position that talk shows, like news shows, were exempt from the "public interest" requirement that stations must give rival candidates equal opportunities to buy time and appear on tv. Indeed, the FCC ruled explicitly in 2006 that interviews on "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno were exempt. Then came the new guidance. "This major announcement from the FCC should stop one-sided left-wing entertainment shows masquerading as 'bona fide news,'" Daniel Suhr, the president of the Center for American Rights, said at the time the guidance was issued in January.
Updated: Sat Feb 21, 2026

Stephen Colbert was right to be mad. His bosses at CBS put the kabosh on an interview he wanted to do with a Texas Senate candidate on his late-night talk show. But you can't just blame CBS. The fault lies, as it so often does these days, in the Trump administration, which last month announced new "guidance" from the Federal Communications Commission requiring "equal time" on entertainment-oriented talk shows.

The guidance was clearly aimed at Trump's targets on late-night TV, including of course, Jimmy Kimmel of ABC, who has been targeted as well as Trump's FCC chair, Brendan Carr. It grows out of the longstanding conservative complaints about the late-night liberal conspiracy and the tendency of liberal hosts and guests to dominate. So what do you do? This is not the small government/libertarian crowd. These are big government conservatives. Regulate the hell out of them is what they are doing.

Until now, the broadcast industry — following the FCC's lead — had taken the position that talk shows, like news shows, were exempt from the "public interest" requirement that stations must give rival candidates equal opportunities to buy time and appear on tv. Indeed, the FCC ruled explicitly in 2006 that interviews on "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno were exempt. Then came the new guidance. "This major announcement from the FCC should stop one-sided left-wing entertainment shows masquerading as 'bona fide news,'" Daniel Suhr, the president of the Center for American Rights, said at the time the guidance was issued in January.

Or, as Carr himself put it on X: "For years, legacy TV networks assumed that their late-night & daytime talk shows qualify as 'bona fide news' programs — even when motivated by purely partisan political purposes. Today, the FCC reminded them of their obligation to provide all candidates with equal opportunities."

Or no opportunities at all. Forget the banner of free speech. As the Colbert example clearly demonstrates, the consequences of guaranteeing equal time for all candidates are most likely to be no time for any of them. What you're really telling talk shows — including daytime shows like "The View" — to do is to stay away from politics, which is absolutely the last message that government should be sending.

The FCC has one Democratic member. She issued a statement when the new guidance was issued calling what her fellow Commissioners were doing "an escalation in this FCC's ongoing campaign to censor and control speech. Broadcasters should not feel pressured to water down, sanitize or avoid critical coverage out of fear of regulatory retaliation."

Clearly, that is what happened at CBS. While Colbert said he expected the network to do more to protect him, CBS itself told The New York Times that it had offered him "guidance" (clearly, the word of the day) on how to comply with the new version of the rule, including by offering equal airtime to the two other Democrats in the race.

The larger question — whether the public interest is in fact served by a rule adopted in 1927 to protect against then-powerful radio networks exerting undue influence on politics — is not one CBS alone can easily address. Brendan Carr knows his answer. He's all in for regulation in what he sees as the public interest. Whether the courts and Congress will go along remains to be seen.