Jimmy Kimmel won’t air interview with James Talarico after threat from FCC

Late-night show host Jimmy Kimmel will not broadcast an interview with Democratic U.S. Senate Candidate James Talarico to be taped Thursday, after the Federal Communications Commission “threatened” his show and its network, he said on his show Wednesday.

“For the whole 20-plus year[s] of our show, in fact, I’ve been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all,” including Hillary Clinton, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and President Donald Trump when he was a candidate in 2015, Kimmel said.

“But for some reason — and I can’t seem to figure out what that reason is — something has changed,” he continued. “Now that he is president, his FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network ABC, our affiliates, our local stations based on simple traditional editorial decisions: guest bookings it would seem they don’t like.”

Talarico’s interview with Kimmel will be posted on YouTube, Kimmel said. Talarico was en route to Los Angeles from Dallas Thursday to tape the segment.

Talk shows have long been exempted from “equal time” rules when conducting “bona fide news interviews,” allowing them to book political candidates without bringing on their opponents. But in January, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr directed daytime and late-night TV talk show hosts to offer equal airtime to all political candidates running for a given office.

The FCC did not respond to a request for comment.

Republicans are “in danger of losing a Senate seat in Texas of all places where James Talarico is leading a piece of human silly putty named Ken Paxton,” Kimmel said. “I’ll be interviewing Talarico tomorrow night under unusual circumstances … out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas, who would have to deal with this nonsense, my interview tomorrow with James Talarico will not air on television.”

Kimmel opened the interview Thursday, which garnered over 2.2 million views on YouTube in 12 hours, with a claim that his show was “being targeted by the FCC for the crime of interviewing political candidates” and “because they want to make our editorial decisions for us, which of course we cannot accept.”

“This is not the first time you’ve been demoted to YouTube,” Kimmel said to Talarico. “Why are they so scared of you?”

In February, just as early voting kicked off in the primary, late-night show host Stephen Colbert accused CBS of pulling his interview with Talarico from the air over fears of running afoul of the Trump administration. CBS refuted that it had prohibited Colbert’s show from airing the interview. The FCC also opened an investigation into ABC’s “The View” after Talarico sat for an interview earlier this year.

Kimmel was briefly suspended by ABC after the FCC threatened the network when he made a joke on air about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Thursday marked the one year anniversary of Kirk’s killing.

“They’re worried that we’re going to win this race in Texas,” Talarico said to Kimmel Thursday. “But we are the underdogs until the last vote is counted. We’re not just going up against the most corrupt politician in Texas, we’re going up against this entire system.”

Thursday’s interview spanned discussion of Trump’s recent routine of ribbing Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton’s appearance; Paxton’s ballooning wealth; and the Republican convention taking place in Dallas, a confab Talarico dubbed the “Billionaire Ball” and counter-programmed with a grocery drive Wednesday. Talarico offered, too, the populist economic messaging colored by his Christian faith that he has delivered throughout his campaign.

Talarico also invited the president’s support in the race. The Austin Democrat’s campaign has sought to win over independent and right-leaning voters unhappy with the administration and put off by Paxton’s numerous legal and ethical scandals. 

In interviews and a speech at the Republican convention, Trump has denigrated Talarico’s faith, falsely accused him of being vegan and argued he would work to destroy the oil and gas industry in Texas. Trump’s endorsement of Paxton in the Republican primary all but assured his decisive victory over U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, and Trump has praised Paxton as the “greatest attorney general in America” who “deserves to be your next senator.”

“I know the president likes to win — he’s a big winner, and if he wants to be on the winning side in this race, he is welcome to join the movement that we’re building,” Talarico said. “A lot of the president’s supporters have joined us in Texas and we’d love to have the man himself.”

A string of recent public polling has shown Talarico with a narrow lead over Paxton overall, and with significant margins among independent voters. 

Talarico also criticized Paxton for declining to accept invitations from news outlets to several debates ahead of the election, despite Paxton saying in July he would debate Talarico. After Talarico accepted an invitation from CNN last week, Paxton’s campaign said, “no Texan wants to watch James Talarico and two of his fellow far-left activists posing as moderators spew left-wing talking points in a ‘debate.’”

“This is supposed to be the high-testosterone candidate?” Talarico said to Kimmel, a reference to Republican attempts to frame the race around masculinity and Talarico’s supposed lack thereof. “This is the problem: Ken Paxton gets rich on the public’s dime and then he refuses to answer basic questions about that corruption.”

In a fundraising email sent Thursday evening, with the subject line “Kimmel,” Talarico wrote that “it is going to require significant resources to overcome the endless attacks and censorship. But we still have the chance to make this a big day — and to make their attempted censorship backfire again.”

In February, Talarico raised $2.5 million in the 24 hours after the Colbert interview, which was also posted on YouTube and garnered millions of views. He cast the FCC’s moves as part of a pattern of government overreach, and accused corporate media executives at CBS of “selling out the First Amendment to curry favor with corrupt politicians.”