FCC chair Brendan Carr says media were ‘lied to’ over Stephen Colbert controversy

The chair of the US’s top media regulator claimed on Wednesday that journalists had been tricked into covering claims by late-night host Stephen Colbert that he had been blocked by his network from interviewing a Texas Senate candidate.

Brendan Carr, the avowedly pro-Trump chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), made his comments after Colbert accused the Trump administration and CBS of censorship.

CBS has countered Colbert’s claims in a statement, saying it had not blocked him from interviewing James Talarico, a Texas Democrat, but had merely provided legal guidance that such an interview might trigger equal time regulations that would require him to also platform Talarico’s campaign rivals.

“I think yesterday was a perfect encapsulation of why the American people have more trust in gas station sushi than they do in the national news media,” Carr said, speaking at an FCC meeting in his first public comments on the controversy. “I think you guys should feel a bit ashamed for having been lied to and then run with those lies.”

In guidance issued in January, the FCC said that daytime and late-night talk shows would not automatically be eligible for exemptions to the equal time rule, which was enacted as part of the Communications Act of 1934. Based on Colbert’s comments, CBS had faced criticism for “corporate capitulation”, as the lone Democrat on the FCC, Anna M Gomez, put it, for enforcing the rule even before the network had received a complaint.

But Carr told reporters that the FCC is simply enforcing the rules on the books. “If you have a legally qualified candidate on, you have to give comparable air time to all other legally qualified candidates, and we’re going to apply that law,” he said. “There was no censorship here at all.”

Networks can request exceptions for what are called bona fide news interviews – but Carr said that CBS and ABC parent company, Disney, have not done so. Late-night and daytime shows had previously operated under the assumption that host-conducted interviews with politicians would qualify for the exception, based on past precedent.

A day after his initial broadside against his bosses, Colbert on Tuesday night harshly criticized a statement released by the network that contested his version of events. In the end, Colbert aired the interview – but only on YouTube, where it has piled up nearly 5.5m views, far greater than the average traditional television viewership for the Late Show. The controversy has also been a boon for Talarico’s campaign, which has said it raised $2.5m in the 24 hours since Colbert’s initial comments.

On Wednesday, Carr also confirmed to the Guardian that the FCC has opened an enforcement action into ABC’s the View over an appearance Talarico made on the program earlier in the month. He declined to provide further comment on the nature of the investigation.

“Every single broadcaster in this country has an obligation to be responsible for the programming that they choose to air, and they’re responsible whether it complies with FCC rules or not, and if it doesn’t, those individual broadcasters are also going to have a potential liability,” Carr said.

But, in her own remarks, Gomez took a different approach. “This equal time rule issue is just one of a long pattern of this administration using the FCC to go after content it doesn’t like,” she said in response to a question from the Guardian. “What you are seeing is using and weaponizing our enforcement process in order to pressure broadcasters to self censor.”

Colbert, whose show ends in May, said it was “really surprising” that CBS had not consulted him on the statement it released Tuesday afternoon, which he said seemed to be written by a panel of lawyers. At the end of his segment, Colbert picked up a printed copy of the statement as if it was pet waste.

“Here’s where I do want to tell the lawyers how to do their jobs: They know damn well that every word of my script last night was approved by CBS lawyers who, for the record, approve every script that goes on the air,” Colbert told viewers. “They told us the language they wanted me to use to describe that equal time exception. So, I don’t know what this is about.”

While it’s unusual for a network host to criticize their employer, Colbert said he did not wish to start a war with CBS – though he did take a shot at the network.

“For the record, I’m not even mad,” he said. “I really don’t want an adversarial relationship with the network. I’ve never had one. I’m just so surprised that this giant global corporation would not stand up to these bullies.”

Gigi Sohn, who served as counselor to then-FCC chair Tom Wheeler during Barack Obama’s administration, said she’s less concerned about the equal time rule than about what she fears is unequal enforcement of it to crack down on liberal media opposition to Trump.

“My feeling is that if Stephen Colbert is going to give James Talarico 20 min to basically give a campaign speech, then CBS should provide equal opportunity,” she told the Guardian in an interview. “In theory, I don’t oppose what he’s doing. What I worry about is that it’s going to be unevenly unenforced.”

Sohn also said that the onus is on rival candidates, not the FCC, to request and pursue the equal time opportunity.

“It’s not for the FCC to go around sniffing around what The View did three months ago,” Sohn said. “[Carr] has a tendency to start his own investigations when nobody is complaining. If Carr sets his enforcement bureau out to find liberal bias shows and starts to go after them, that’s not how the equal opportunities rule is supposed to work.”

Carr ended his comments to reporters with an attack on Colbert, who has relentlessly mocked him on his show. Carr said that Colbert sees that, with the cancellation of his show, his time in the limelight is “coming to an end”.

“That’s got to be a difficult time for him. I get it,” he said. “But that doesn’t change the facts of what happened here.”