Jimmy Kimmel moves Senate interview to YouTube in latest collision with FCC

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.

“Now that he is president, [Trump’s] FCC 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,” Kimmel said.

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.