Jimmy Kimmel returned to his late night talk show this week after heading out for his yearly summer vacation back in June, with various celebs such as Anthony Anderson and Rosie O’Donnell filling in as guest hosts. While celebrating the show hitting the 4,000-episode mark, Kimmel made a point of calling out FCC chairman Brendan Carr to say “We’re still here.” One day later, the host announced that his impending interview with Texas political candidate wouldn’t be airing on TV, but rather streaming on YouTube.
If that situation sounds familiar at all, it’s because a very similar situation went down on The Late Show back in February, when Stephen Colbert revealed his interview with James Talarico would be pushed off to YouTube instead of airing on CBS, due to the equal time rule for partisan candidates that the FCC has for years exempted late night talk shows from. (The View is also dealing with relatively similar polarity shifts due to FCC pressures.)
On Wednesday night’s Live! episode, Kimmel shared that his planned interview with Talarico would not be available to watch on ABC, and that viewers would need to make the jump to YouTube to check it out. Here’s how he explained it:
I'll be interviewing James Talarico tomorrow night under unusual circumstances. You know, for a lot of years - for the whole 20+ years of our show, in fact - I've been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all. Just like Letterman did, like Leno did, like Arsenio did, etc. I've interviewed a lot of political candidates, from Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz to Donald Trump himself.
Jimmy Kimmel then went on to point out that he had the current President on not just once during his first campaign, but twice. As he put it:
I interviewed Donald Trump when he was running for President in 2015, and at that time when he was the one sitting next to me, he seemed to have no problem with the idea of talk show hosts interviewing candidates. In fact, he was very eager to come back for another interview, which he did just before he became the nominee in 2016. . . . Now that he's president, his FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network ABC, our affiliates, our local stations, based on simple traditional editorial decisions. Guest bookings it would seem they don't like.
Instead of backing down or canceling the interview, Kimmel took a hint from his former late night frenemy Stephen Colbert and shifted it online. I doubt the Congress hopeful is all that upset about it, either. The hullaballoo that surrounded his Late Show appearance sparked a windfall, with somewhere around $2.5 million donated in the two days following the interview. If anything similar goes down in the aftermath of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, it could potentially only help his chances.
At the time, CBS threw the blame back at Colbert, saying he wasn't being forced to pull the democratic candidate's interview off the air, and that he personally chose to put the interview online instead of adhering to any suggestions for how to adhere to the equal-time rule. It's unclear if Kimmel had the same options laid out, but it's unlikely he'd have opted for anything else anyway.
The aforementioned Ted Cruz appeared on The View this week, which might make it seem like the daytime chat show was giving in to the FCC. However, Cruz has long been a free speech proponent, and has shared his views that the FCC shouldn't be in charge of censoring TV in such a way.
Find out what Jimmy Kimmel and James Talarico will be talking about when their interview goes up on Jimmy Kimmel Live!'s YouTube channel on the evening of Thursday, September 10.
