A Man with a Story to Talarico
- Feb 18
- 2 min read
You may have read that the CBS determined that Stephen Colbert could not air an interview with Texas State Rep. James Talarico – who is running for the U.S. Senate – so the interview was blocked.
The issue has to do with the FCC's Equal Time rule, that if a station had an interview with a political candidate during an election, any opposition candidates were entitled to the same amount of time. For many years, political interviews on late night talk shows were permitted because those programs got an exemption. That very recently changed under a running by Trump’s FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.
Side Note: This is a topic that has long interested me. Years back (with an emphasis on the "years" part) when I was at the beloved Northwestern, I did an Independent Study in the Medill School of Journalism for a new professor there, Sig Mickelson, who was working on a project about the Equal Time rule and the Fairness Doctrine. So, I was assigned to do a paper on the subject. Mickelson, by the way, had been president of CBS News, overlapping with the time when Edward R. Murrow was there. So, I was additionally thrilled about it all. I'd been very interested in Murrow and did briefly ask Mickelson about him. The short version is that he greatly admired Murrow, but working with Murrow, who was often pushing the envelope and challenging the network, made his job difficult at times. But I digress.
Though Colbert didn’t air his intended interview with Talarico, he did talk about it at length, despite CBS telling him not to. He’s blunt about it and also very funny. I suspect his perspective was also colored by, "What are they going to do? Fire me?" By the way, after putting up a photo of James Talarico even though the network had told Colbert that he couldn’t even do that, much later in the segment Colbert finally let the audience know that it was not a picture of Talarico. (Though it’s close…)
Here is that segment.
And here is the interview itself. Colbert and Talarico did it after his regular show, and the studio audience stayed around. It was then posted on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert's YouTube page, which is not covered by the FCC.
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