CNN’s Brian Stelter Calls Out the FCC’s ‘Limited’ Power After CBS Spikes Colbert’s Interview With Talarico: ‘The Threat is the Point’

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CNN’s Brian Stelter argued that the Trump administration didn’t really have the power to punish CBS over the yanked interview between Stephen Colbert and James Talarico.

On Monday night, Colbert opened The Late Show by revealing that he planned on having Talarico, a state representative from Texas, on the broadcast. According to the host, however, CBS’s lawyers stepped in and said that wouldn’t be possible. Colbert blamed the FCC’s new guidance regarding the “equal time” rule for political candidates on news programs, which eliminates longstanding exemptions for late night talk shows like his.

Colbert called it a deliberate attempt by the Trump administration to “silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV.”

According to additional reporting by Stelter, the FCC is actually quite “limited” in its ability to enforce new guidance. Stelter added:

But the FCC’s enforcement powers are limited. The lone Democratic commissioner at the FCC, Anna Gomez, said [FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s] claims were misleading: “The FCC has not adopted any new regulation, interpretation, or Commission-level policy altering the long-standing news exemption or equal time framework.”

What this amounts to, a source told Stelter, is the administration simply threatening companies with no real course of action to punish them. The report continued:

A source at the FCC reiterated that point, saying, “Once again here, the threat is the point.”

“The point is to force shows and networks to second-guess their decisions in light of this ‘new’ guidance,” the source told CNN on condition of anonymity.

As Colbert noted in monologue, Carr had only floated the idea of removing the exemption. That decision had not been made final, but CBS was “unilaterally enforcing it” as if it was.

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