from the streisand-effect-censorship dept

Jimmy Kimmel Won’t Air James Talarico Interview On ABC For Fear Of FCC Reprisal

Comedian Jimmy Kimmel‘s planned Thursday interview with Texas Senatorial hopeful James Talarico didn’t air on ABC broadcast TV because network lawyers were worried about Trump FCC censorship and reprisal. Instead, the interview will air on the late-night show’s YouTube channel, Kimmel stated during his latest late night Jimmy Kimmel Live monologue:

“You know, for a lot of years, for the whole 20-plus years of our show, in fact, I’ve been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all, just like Letterman did, Leno did, Arsenio, etc. etc., I’ve interviewed a lot of political candidates. From Hilary Clinton to Ted Cruz to Donald Trump. I interviewed Donald Trump when he was running for president in 2015, and at that time, when he was the one sitting next to me, he seemed to have no problem with the idea of talk show hosts interviewing candidates. In fact, he was very eager to come back for another interview, which he did just before he became the nominee in 2016. But for some reason, and I can’t seem to figure out what that reason is, something has changed.”

“Now that Trump is president, his FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates and our local stations based on simple traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings, it would seem, [that] they don’t like.”

Trump Republicans clearly feel Talarico is a threat to their chance to hold on to the Texas Senate. So earlier this year Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr launched a fake investigation and early review of ABC’s broadcast licenses, claiming that it broke FCC rules by hosting Talarico on The View back in February.

To support his sham inquiry, Carr claimed Talarico’s appearance violated the dated FCC “equal time” rule, which used to mandate that an election season prime time TV appearance by one party’s politicians had to be countered by an appearance by the other party’s politicians. The rule is no longer meaningfully enforced because television obviously has waning impact in the internet era.

But more importantly, The View had struck very clear agreements with the FCC that it has been exempt from this rule since 2002. Carr knows this. But he still falsely claimed The View violated the law, and to sell the violation appears to have worked closely with right wing broadcast affiliates to try and make it look like ABC’s Houston affiliate broke the law (something I suspect will resurface in court).

ABC recently sued the FCC for clearly violating the First Amendment, but while the case plays out their lawyers aren’t taking any chances. In addition to shuffling the Talarico interview off to YouTube (where it’s likely to see a bigger audience due to the sloppy attempt at censorship), The View has simply stopped hosting politicians entirely for fear of adding fuel to the fire.