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Jimmy Kimmel says pressure from Trump's FCC pushed him to move his taped interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico off ABC's broadcast and onto YouTube instead.
- White House spokesperson Davis Ingle and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr both deny any threat was made, framing Kimmel's account as invented.
- The clash closely mirrors a February standoff in which CBS kept a Colbert-Talarico interview off broadcast television under the same regulation.
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It's unfolding alongside a separate, unresolved court fight: Disney is suing the FCC over an unprecedented early review of ABC's broadcast licenses.
A Taped Conversation Diverted to YouTube
Jimmy Kimmel told his studio audience on Wednesday that a sit-down he'd taped with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico would skip ABC's broadcast entirely and stream only on the show's YouTube channel. Kimmel said regulators had gone after his booking decisions directly, telling viewers, "His FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network" over what he described as routine editorial calls. He pointed out that he's booked candidates from both parties for years, including Trump himself, without incident until now.
Out of concern for how the FCC could treat ABC's Texas affiliates, Kimmel said, the full conversation would post to YouTube instead — a channel with more than 22 million subscribers, dwarfing the show's broadcast audience of roughly 2 million nightly viewers, according to recent Nielsen figures tracked by industry outlet LateNighter.
The Rule Reshaping Late-Night Bookings
The dispute traces back to Section 315 of the Communications Act, a decades-old requirement that broadcasters give rival candidates comparable airtime once one appears on air. Talk shows have long operated under an exemption for bona fide news programming — but FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's agency issued guidance in January arguing that programs driven by "partisan purposes" may no longer qualify, according to the Al Jazeera reporting on the timeline. Under that reading, a Talarico appearance could obligate a network to offer matching time to his Republican rival, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — a legal risk that regulators have also tied to a separate inquiry into a Talarico appearance on ABC's "The View."
An Almost Identical Fight in February
This wasn't the first Talarico booking to vanish from network television. In February, Stephen Colbert told his own audience that CBS lawyers had barred him from airing a Talarico interview and had also instructed him not to mention the cancellation on air — restrictions confirmed by both Colbert's account and reporting from the Hollywood Reporter. Colbert aired the interview on YouTube anyway, and Talarico's campaign reported raising $2.5 million in donations within 24 hours of the controversy going viral. CBS maintained its lawyers had only flagged legal risk, not issued an order. Carr later brushed off the entire episode, telling reporters it amounted to "a hoax, apparently for the purpose of raising money and getting clicks" rather than genuine regulatory pressure.
The White House Calls It Invented
Administration officials moved fast to knock down Kimmel's version of events. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told reporters Carr had never threatened Kimmel over the Talarico booking or any other guest, adding that "any media outlet blindly amplifying Kimmel's egocentric delusion should insist on proof". Neither the FCC nor Talarico's campaign had responded to requests for comment by the time NBC News published its report. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the agency's lone Democrat, pushed back publicly, telling CNN the commission was overstepping into territory it shouldn't touch and calling it "a violation of the First Amendment".
Talarico addressed the dispute directly in a Thursday-morning interview on MS NOW, saying flatly that he considers himself censored and describing it as the most dangerous form of cancel culture he can imagine — government pressure on what Americans are allowed to watch and hear.
A Wider Legal Battle Over ABC's Licenses
The Kimmel-Talarico flap is landing in the middle of a much bigger, ongoing fight. In April, one day after Trump publicly demanded ABC fire Kimmel over a joke about Melania Trump, Carr ordered an early review of the broadcast licenses for Disney's eight company-owned ABC stations — the first time in more than 50 years the FCC had taken that step, according to reporting on the filing by Exchange4Media. Disney sued the FCC over the move in August, calling it retaliatory and a threat to protected speech. The FCC asked a federal judge to dismiss that lawsuit on September 4, arguing the dispute belongs before an appeals court; a hearing is now scheduled for October 6, 2026.
What's at Stake for Texas Voters
Talarico, a state representative, is challenging Paxton for a Senate seat Democrats haven't won statewide in Texas in nearly four decades. Whether the FCC's equal-time posture survives legal scrutiny — or simply fades once the midterms pass — remains unresolved. For now, anyone who wants to watch Kimmel's full conversation with Talarico has exactly one place to find it: YouTube.
