The Federal Communications Commission was created, in part, to manage scarcity. When broadcast spectrum was finite and licenses were precious, the agency existed to ensure that the public interest, however nebulously defined, was served by the networks occupying those frequencies. That was the theory. The practice, as any student of regulatory capture will tell you, has always been more complicated.
What we are watching now is not complicated. It is simple, and that simplicity is what makes it remarkable.
Jimmy Kimmel announced Wednesday night that his interview with James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, will not air on broadcast television. The interview will be posted to YouTube. The reason, Kimmel explained, is that the FCC under President Trump has “threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations” over “simple, traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings it would seem they don’t like.”
Let us be precise about the mechanism, because precision matters. The FCC does not need to fine a network to suppress speech. It does not need to revoke a license. It needs only to signal that a license review might become uncomfortable. The threat is the instrument. The regulatory architecture of broadcast licensing, designed for an era of spectrum scarcity that has long since passed, gives the executive branch a permanent lever over any network that transmits over public airwaves. YouTube, operating on private internet infrastructure, requires no FCC license. And so the interview migrates there, to a platform with a fraction of the broadcast audience, and the structural logic of the thing is laid bare.
Kimmel noted, with the weariness of a man who has been doing this for over two decades, that he interviewed Trump himself in 2015. Hillary Clinton. Ted Cruz. No agency called. No lawyers intervened. “Something has changed now that he is president,” Kimmel said, and one does not need a doctorate in political science to identify what.
This is not the first instance. Nearly six months ago, Stephen Colbert said CBS lawyers barred the Late Show from airing a Talarico interview, citing FCC threats. CBS denied it, which is what one would expect from a corporation with broadcast licenses to protect, but the denial is less interesting than the pattern. Two networks. One candidate. The same regulatory pressure converging on the same name.
Talarico is running against Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general whose own relationship with legal accountability has been, to put it in the most generous academic terms, robustly litigated. A former schoolteacher and Presbyterian seminarian serving his fourth term in the Texas House, Talarico has built a campaign around progressive economics framed as Christian obligation. Whether one finds that framing compelling or not, the notion that a Senate candidate cannot appear on a late-night broadcast because a federal agency disapproves of the booking is not a question of taste. It is a question of power.
The literature on democratic backsliding is quite clear on this point. Nancy Bermeo’s work on the incremental erosion of democratic norms, Levitsky and Ziblatt’s analysis of institutional weaponization, Yascha Mounk’s framework for “illiberal democracy”: all describe a contemporary pattern in which the dismantling of free expression arrives not through censorship laws but through the quiet application of regulatory pressure on existing institutions. The FCC’s enabling legislation does not grant it authority over guest bookings. But the agency’s licensing power creates a chilling effect that functions as authority regardless of what the statute says.
Kimmel called this “the best that we can do until November.” He is right about the constraint and perhaps too modest about the diagnosis. When a federal agency can determine which Senate candidates appear on broadcast television and which are exiled to a streaming platform, the question is no longer whether the FCC has