Talarico HOAX: FCC Chair Brendan Carr Schooling University Dems on 'Equal Time' Is a GLORIOUS Thing

University of Texas Democrats want you to believe Jimmy Kimmel hiding James Talarico on YouTube is the same thing as Ted Cruz showing up on College GameDay.

We made the same face.

Although, if we're being fair, they're not the first ones to believe this rubbish.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr finally walked through why that comparison is a joke.

GameDay is cable. Equal-time rules were written for broadcast stations using public spectrum, not ESPN. Cruz isn’t even a legally qualified candidate in the race they’re pretending this is about.

Talarico, meanwhile, is running the same Colbert bit again: claim the government banned him, farm the outrage, hope nobody reads the statute.

Carr’s point is simple. Broadcasters got a free, exclusive license worth billions and promised to operate in the public interest. Cable shows did not. Treating those as the same thing isn’t a First Amendment crisis. It’s a campaign strategy that only works if voters never learn the difference.

Take a gander, his post says it all:

Ok, fine. I’ll weigh in.

1. The Equal Time statute doesn’t apply to GameDay for several reasons.

For one, when it passed the statute, Congress applied it to broadcast tv stations—not cable programs like GameDay.

For another, Congress stated that the statute only applies to… https://t.co/r3KP7RvQL8 pic.twitter.com/m5IbEl8Ngr
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) September 13, 2026

... legally qualified candidates. The Senator is not one.
2. The Equal Time statute does not prohibit anyone from interviewing anyone on broadcast tv. It is about more speech, not less.
Congress wanted to ensure that voters would decide elections, not media gatekeepers picking winners and losers by providing preferential airtime to some candidates and not others. Indeed, when the statute applies, it simply requires broadcast stations to offer comparable time and placement. And comparable does not necessarily mean an interview by the same person on the same program either.
3. This ties back to Talarico. He’s just running the same hoax he did a few months ago on Colbert for the purpose of getting clicks and donations—he’s banking on people not understanding the statute or operating as partisan lemmings.
4. More broadly, though, at least some people appear to take issue with a cable program choosing to interview one government official and not others. To the extent they’re pushing for greater balance in media, that might be a good thing.
But to bring this back to the law, cable shows are different than broadcast programs.
Broadcasters are unique. The FCC gave them free licenses worth many billions of dollars to use a public resource (spectrum). They are given a government sanctioned monopoly on their broadcast frequencies, too. If anyone else wants to use that same public resource (spectrum) for the purpose of expressing their own views, the government will not let them—it will eject anyone else that tries to use a broadcaster’s licensed spectrum.
This means that Americans are subsidizing the distribution of broadcast programs over a public resource to the tune of many billions of dollars. We don’t do that with cable or anything else.
In exchange for that free and exclusive right to use spectrum, broadcasters made a deal with the American people. They agreed to operate, not in their own narrow interests, but in the public interest. There are various rules and policies that they must follow. This sets them apart from newspapers and cable shows and podcasts.
But some broadcasters want to break their deal with the American people. They want to keep their free access to billions of dollars worth of spectrum, of course. They are less eager these days to abide by their public interest obligations.
Yet the Supreme Court has already ruled that holding broadcasters to their public interest obligations is not censorship or any sort of 1A violation.
And Congress has charged the FCC with ensuring that broadcasters meet those public interest obligations, as required by their licenses. The agency should do so.