Let's be clear about what's happening here, because the headlines are making it sound like a technicality. This is not a technicality. When FCC Chairman Brendan Carr confirms an "enforcement action" against The View - and signals that late-night programs like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel Live! are also in his crosshairs - he is using the regulatory apparatus of the United States government to pressure broadcast television into avoiding political interviews. That is the story. Everything else is paperwork.
The legal mechanism is the equal time rule, a provision that requires broadcasters to give roughly equivalent airtime to opposing political candidates if one candidate appears on their program. It is a real rule with a real congressional basis. It also has a news exemption - established in 2006 - that explicitly covers talk shows, on the grounds that spontaneous political discussion on entertainment platforms is different from a campaign advertisement. Carr is now arguing, without any new legal authority, that "talk shows are not news" and therefore don't qualify for that exemption.
The chilling effect is already visible and already documented. CBS pulled Colbert's scheduled interview with Texas Democrat James Talarico over FCC concerns - before any formal ruling, before any hearing, before any enforcement action had actually landed. The mere threat of regulatory trouble was enough to make a major network blink. Colbert, to his credit, called this out on air. Jasmine Crockett clarified publicly that the FCC did not formally shut the interview down - which is precisely the point. It didn't have to. The threat did the work.
This is how regulatory censorship functions at its most effective: you never actually have to pull the plug. You just make broadcasters afraid enough that they pull it themselves.
According to Consequence, Carr framed his position in the language of fairness: "Congress passed the equal time provision for a very specific reason. They did not want the media elites in Hollywood and in New York to put their thumbs on the scale." That framing is worth examining carefully. It positions political interviews on talk shows as unfair advantages for one party - and federal enforcement as a corrective. But the equal time rule was never designed to give the federal government veto power over who gets booked on The View.
First Amendment attorneys and broadcast industry organizations have been notably alarmed. The 2006 news exemption is precisely what allows broadcast journalism - including its hybrid entertainment-news forms - to function. Collapsing that distinction doesn't just threaten late-night comedy; it threatens every interview format on broadcast television that dares to discuss politics without equal-time balance for every opposing candidate on the ballot.
This enforcement push does not exist in isolation. It runs alongside reported efforts to reshape media consolidation in ways that would concentrate more of the press under ownership friendlier to the current administration - a story examined separately in today's coverage. Whether or not those consolidation reports prove out, the FCC action is a real and documented thing happening right now. Broadcast television, which still reaches tens of millions of Americans every night, is being reminded who holds the license.
In Hollywood, nobody knows anything - except when the regulator makes the stakes this explicit.
