ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel has said that an interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico will not air on the network, citing growing intrusion from the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over political candidates’ “equal time” rules.
Talarico is running in Texas against Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in a race that could decide control of the US Senate in November.
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On Wednesday’s broadcast, Kimmel said that he would be interviewing Talarico under “unusual circumstances”, adding that, over the show’s more-than-two-decade run, he had been “interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all”.
But in January, the Republican-led FCC said that daytime and late-night TV talk shows are no longer considered “bona fide” news programmes that are exempt from the equal time rules that require them to give airtime to opposing candidates.
Kimmel noted that for decades talk shows have been free to interview political candidates without being subject to those rules, including interviewing United States President Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign.
“Now that he is president, [Trump’s] FCC 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,” Kimmel said.
The interview with Talarico is instead set to be released on YouTube on Thursday.
The Cook Political Report and University of Virginia’s Center for Politics rate the Texas Senate race as a toss-up. An August poll by the Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center at Texas Southern University showed Talarico nosing narrowly ahead of Paxton, 47 percent to 45 percent, among likely voters.
Republicans have stepped up efforts to shore up the seat. Earlier this week, MAGA Inc, the political group aligned with Trump, committed $10m to advertising against Talarico, in what has been described as the first advertisement buy that Trump’s well-heeled political machine has made for a general election.
The move underscores just how much the party’s usually safest bastion, Texas, has emerged as an Achilles’ heel in Republicans’ effort to retain the Senate.
Talarico, 37, is a former public-school teacher who has built his political identity around a progressive interpretation of Christianity.
Democrats see the eighth-generation Texan as a promising vehicle for breaking their decades-long Senate drought in the state. Texas has not elected a Democrat to the chamber since 1988.
The ABC episode unfolds just as Republicans gather in Dallas for the closing ceremony of a highly unorthodox midterm convention — unprecedented in its timing — in what many observers have called a “Trump-a-palooza” parade, with the president commandeering the spotlight as the party seeks to galvanise its base.
The FCC becomes a pressure point
Over the past year, The View, Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and other programmes have been subjected to heightened FCC supervision over whether their political coverage and candidate appearances comply with federal equal-time rules.
Critics say the agency’s expanding reach into programming decisions risks chilling broadcasters’ editorial independence.
That precarity is compounded by the consolidation of US media ownership. In August, the FCC voted to scrap its 39 percent cap on local television ownership, a move critics warned could concentrate still more control over the country’s broadcast news in fewer corporate hands. That was followed in January by changes to the equal time rules.
The shift has already ensnared Talarico.
The FCC opened an inquiry into his appearance on ABC’s The View in February, while CBS declined to broadcast an interview he had recorded for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Colbert subsequently released the interview online.
In April, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr ordered early licence reviews for eight ABC-owned stations — an extraordinary step given that their licences were not due for renewal until 2028.
Network parent company Disney and ABC assailed the probe, arguing it threatened protected speech and upended longstanding constitutional precedents, separately accusing the FCC of using its regulatory authority to intimidate media organisations critical of Trump.
The intimidation tactics had already made the leap from regulatory threats to targeted reprisal in September of last year for Kimmel, as ABC shelved his show indefinitely, before resuming it six days later.
It came as Kimmel’s remarks about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk drew criticism from FCC’s Carr, who urged local broadcasters not to air the programme.