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. 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. 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.
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.
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