The spark was simple enough. Late Show host Stephen Colbert revealed that CBS would not broadcast an interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico, a Democratic candidate in a closely contested U.S. Senate primary. Network lawyers reportedly worried that airing the segment could trigger the FCC’s “equal time” requirement, which would require the station to offer comparable airtime to Talarico’s primary opponents. Rather than navigate that minefield, CBS declined to run it on broadcast television and released the interview online instead.

What might once have been a minor regulatory footnote quickly became a political spectacle. And that spectacle says more about the FCC’s uneasy place in the modern media ecosystem than about any single candidate or talk show.

The reaction followed a familiar script. Democrats framed the decision as proof of creeping censorship under a Republican-led FCC. Anna Gomez, the commission’s lone Democrat, accused the network of “corporate capitulation” in the face of a broader campaign to chill speech. The implication was clear: An agency charged with regulating communications was now indirectly shaping political discourse.

Republicans countered just as forcefully. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr argued that equal time rules exist to prevent broadcasters from tilting elections toward favored candidates. The statute, he noted, was designed to prevent “media elites” from serving as partisan gatekeepers. To Carr and his allies, the Colbert controversy was a manufactured crisis and a convenient narrative for a campaign eager to turn regulatory caution into political capital.

Each side saw what it expected to see. Either the FCC had revived the spirit of heavy-handed speech control, or liberal media figures were staging a melodrama to gin up outrage. But focusing only on that exchange obscures something more revealing: how a rule designed for a 1930s media landscape collides awkwardly with one for 2026.

The equal time provision did not emerge from nowhere. It traces back to the Radio Act of 1927, which was later incorporated into the Communications Act of 1934 and signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. It seems odd to be fighting legislative battles from nearly a century ago, but at the time, it might have been necessary. The logic behind it was what courts later called the “scarcity rationale.” The broadcast spectrum was limited. Only so many frequencies could exist. Because the airwaves were public property licensed to private stations, the government imposed conditions to ensure no single political voice monopolized them.

Over the decades, Congress has repeatedly revisited communications law and amended rate structures, ownership rules, and licensing procedures. What remains unresolved is whether the scarcity rationale remains relevant in an age of cable, satellite, and easy broadband internet access (for most people). Lawmakers have left the equal-time framework largely intact, even as the technological assumptions beneath it have eroded. The result is a statute built for a world of rotary dials, operating in a world defined by fiber optics and streaming platforms.

That original scarcity logic also justified a broader regulatory architecture, including the now-defunct Fairness Doctrine. The doctrine required broadcasters to present contrasting viewpoints on controversial public issues. When the FCC repealed it in 1987 under President Ronald Reagan, critics warned that political discourse would polarize. Supporters argued the opposite: Government supervision of speech had outlived its constitutional and practical justification.

However, in the early ’90s, with the rise of conservative talk radio, most notably Rush Limbaugh, Democrats had a change of heart and introduced legislation to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. For many Republicans, the Fairness Doctrine became shorthand for regulatory overreach. And ever since then, GOP lawmakers have insisted that the FCC has no business policing viewpoint balance. The present dispute sits squarely in that lineage.

But equal time itself is narrower than many assume. It does not require identical coverage of every candidate. It does not mandate editorial neutrality. It simply requires that legally qualified candidates for the same office be given comparable opportunity if one is granted access to a broadcast station’s facilities. People make the incorrect assumption that it applies to the particular show, as if someone would have to appear with Colbert, but that is not the case. Bona fide news interviews are generally exempt. Entertainment programming historically was as well. It was never an issue when hosts like Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, and David Letterman largely avoided partisan advocacy. That has changed. Hosts like Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel use their platforms for overt political advocacy, even as they mix comedy, commentary, and celebrity. That gray area, rather than any sweeping new statute, is what animated the Colbert controversy.

The episode also illustrates a different principle, and one that is less legal than technological. Efforts to suppress or avoid content now tend to amplify it.

CBS may have sought to avoid triggering equal-time obligations on its broadcast signal, but the interview did not vanish. It simply migrated to a place where the FCC has no authority and was posted to Colbert’s Late Show YouTube channel. Within days, it reached more than 8 million views, more than triple Colbert’s nightly network audience. Talarico’s campaign reported a surge in online engagement and fundraising in the immediate aftermath.

The rule intended to ensure balance created an advantage. A segment that would have aired once on CBS became a viral artifact, replayed, shared, clipped, and monetized across platforms that the FCC does not regulate.

That is largely structural. Equal-time obligations apply to broadcast licensees using public spectrum. They do not apply to Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, podcasts, or cable networks. A political candidate appearing on a streaming platform faces no comparable statutory requirement. The result is that the only outlets chilled by equal-time concerns are the very ones already losing audience share.

Consider recent scrutiny of daytime talk shows such as The View, which has also drawn complaints about candidate appearances. The regulatory shadow falls unevenly. The broadcast signal remains governed by mid-20th century assumptions, while the digital ecosystem operates under an entirely different set of rules. That is not neutrality. It is fragmentation.

Fragmentation, in turn, invites strategic behavior. Campaigns understand that controversy itself is currency. A threatened cancellation becomes a fundraising email, a viral campaign clip to share on social media, and a mere regulatory warning becomes “proof” of political persecution. Far from dampening political involvement, it feeds the incentive structure of online campaigning, using institutions as platforms where outrage travels faster than compliance memos.

The larger problem is not that equal time exists or does not. It is that the political fight over it absorbs oxygen that might otherwise be spent on matters squarely within the FCC’s core mission.

During the Biden administration, FTC Chair Lina Khan pursued an aggressive antitrust agenda that her supporters called long-overdue enforcement and her critics called politically motivated targeting, based on the lawsuits she brought against particular companies. One can agree or disagree. However, it follows a familiar pattern: A regulatory agency with legitimate authority becomes defined by its most contentious interventions, and institutional credibility erodes in the process.

The commission oversees spectrum auctions, broadband deployment subsidies, rural connectivity programs, and emergency communications infrastructure. It administers billions of dollars through the Universal Service Fund. It sets rules that determine how quickly new wireless technologies roll out and how resilient networks are during hurricanes, wildfires, and cyberattacks.

It is also wrestling with complex questions about 5G and emerging 6G spectrum allocation, satellite broadband competition, and the implementation of federal broadband grant programs intended to bring high-speed internet to underserved communities. These are the technical, often unglamorous debates and policy decisions that justify the agency’s existence and the debates its appointees can have.

Instead, Washington stages high-volume skirmishes over symbolic and petty conflicts. The Colbert-Talarico controversy became a convenient morality play. Democrats cast the FCC as an instrument of intimidation. Republicans cast themselves as referees protecting electoral fairness. Media outlets amplified the clash. Social media converted it into shareable outrage.

But outside political media circles, how many Americans were meaningfully affected? The interview aired online. It involved a candidate, not in a national presidential election but in a Senate race. The candidate raised money. The commissioners traded statements. However, nothing about the nation’s communications infrastructure changed.

That is the sense in which this was political theater performed in a half-empty house. The spectacle consumed attention while leaving underlying structural questions untouched. Does it make sense for broadcast television alone to bear equal-time burdens in an era when most political content flows through unregulated digital channels? 

Perhaps it is finally time for Congress to revisit the scarcity rationale. 

The FCC was created in an era when radio towers defined the limits of mass communication. Today, a candidate can reach millions with a smartphone and an algorithm. The Colbert episode did not prove that the agency is tyrannical or obsolete. It did, however, expose the mismatch between a regulatory framework built for airwave scarcity and a media environment defined by abundance and easy availability.

If Congress believes equal time remains necessary, it should say so clearly and explain why broadcast speech alone warrants distinct treatment. If lawmakers believe the rule is an anachronism, they should modernize it rather than rely on shifting interpretations and episodic enforcement based on whatever party is in office. However, the current middle ground is unsustainable. It is one in which clearly outdated assumptions collide with contemporary technology, and each collision becomes a partisan battlefield.

WE ARE ALL NIXONIANS NOW 

Like other agencies that have slowly become agents in partisan political battles, the FCC continues to function as a prop rather than as a technocratic regulator focused on infrastructure, competition, and connectivity. Agencies endure not merely because of statute but because of public confidence that they are solving actual problems. The longer communication and technical policy are reduced to culture-war skirmishes over comedy segments, the harder it becomes to sustain that confidence.

The show will go on. It always does. The question is whether the audience and the rest of the country would be better served if more energy devoted to political fights were spent on the less glamorous, but far more consequential, task of updating communications law for the world that actually exists.

Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) is a writer living in West Virginia.