CBS News’ decision to pressure Stephen Colbert against airing his interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico is something more insidious than direct censorship, warned analyst Terry Moran in a long-form post to X on Thursday — rather, it’s the elite corporate world rolling over to do the government’s bidding.
The move came after President Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission began to warn they would take a harder line on enforcing the “equal time rule” against late-night talk show hosts, a move experts have warned is an effort to make it harder for Democrats to get public interviews on broadcast TV.
“Nobody actually ordered CBS to stop anything. No law changed.The FCC didn’t act,” wrote Moran. “There was only bullyboy blustering from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who had puffed himself up to his full egregiousness to suggest that consequences might come. CBS executives were worried. Briefly. Then they caved. They bent the knee to the Trump administration — again. And this time, they caved before anything happened.”
This is what is known as “pre-compliance,” Moran warned — and it’s something that purportedly leads to the erosion of democracy.
“Pre-compliance is when men and women, corporations and institutions, begin sacrificing their own independence, liberty, and dignity voluntarily — before those with power ever force them to. They surrender,” he wrote. “Like CBS, which did not even raise a single legal argument to defend itself.If Brendan Carr had followed through on his vague threats to punish CBS for violating the ‘Equal Time Rule,’ the network would have had an extremely strong case. Carr is just blowing smoke, legally, which makes CBS’s pre-compliance that much worse.”
This comes as CBS has increasingly faced scrutiny for pro-Trump editorial decisions by the leadership appointed after a Trump administration approved merger.
Colbert, for his part, ended up putting the interview online instead of on the broadcast airwaves, which led to an explosion of viewership and public interest in Talarico’s campaign.
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