Stephen Colbert Hands CBS Bosses Their Asses AGAIN, With An Assist From James Talarico
That's entertainment!
President Donald John Trump’s approval rating just hit 36 percent! In fact, most of the polling companies have him right about there. Just historic lows, reportedly the lowest of any president at this point in their presidency. It’s been going nowhere but down, in spite of having administration loyalists in charge of X, Facebook, Fox News, Sinclair, TikTok and CBS/Paramount. All that power, all those billionaires and their billions, still losing.
Case latest, CBS lawyers refused to run a Stephen Colbert interview with Texas Democratic Senate hopeful James Talarico, out of fear that Trump’s Cancel Czar at the FCC Brendan Carr, still mad about trying and failing to find a titty or Spanish curse word in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime show, might sue or fine them, or whatever. Plus Carr has been making noise about coming up with a new rule that would make late night talk shows in big trouble mister if they interview political figures who say mean things about Donald Trump, or whatever. Point is, going after talk shows is Trump’s new thing, be it Jimmy Kimmel or The View, because he apparently is glued to a TV screen for most of his waking hours.
But Colbert is retiring in May, and fuckless.
Allow Wonkette pal Jeff Tiedrich to summarize:
last night, Colbert was set to broadcast an interview with James Talarico, the Texas State Rep currently running for Senate. that’s when CBS’s lawyers swooped in and were all ‘nuh-uh, you can’t.’
they claimed airing it would violate the FCC’s ‘equal time’ rule that says if you interview one candidate for office, you have to interview all the candidates for that office.
fine, whatever. but then CBS cranked the fuckery dial way past eleven, and told Colbert that not only was he barred from airing the interview, he was barred from even talking about not being allowed to air it.
Like that was going to work. (It did not work.)
As Colbert explained!
“[James Talarico] was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast. then, I was told, in some uncertain terms, that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on. and because my network clearly does not want us to talk about this… let’s talk about this.”
The equal-time rule was not broken, it’s a talk show, and how many of those on Fox News did candidate Trump call into where no one asked Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton to weigh in? LOL, nothing matters anymore.
Anyway Colbert put the interview on his YouTube page, where it’s racked up over two million views so far, as of this writing, which is getting close to the Late Show’s average nightly network viewership. And that’s not counting TikTok and Facebook Reels and Insta and your Nana’s email forwards. (Go check for current numbers whenever you read this!)
Oh look, is it CBS News, full of absolute shit and backpedaling already?
Colbert and Talarico win. Trump and the billionaire bootlickers lose.
Watch Talarico, also a Presbyterian seminarian, dispense some facts:
Trump is so scared they’re going to flip that Senate seat in Texas, even after he won the state by 14 points, so he is trying to cancel culture his way out of failure. Republicans are shaking in their spurs worried, as well they should be. They just lost a solid-red state Senate seat in a 32-point swing outside of Fort Worth. Fort Worth! After outspending the Democratic candidate ten to one! People are sick of the culture war bullshit. It’s not the trans people to blame for the soaring prices of rent, dolls and pencils.
And yeesh, what a spectacular meltdown at CBS News since Trump-humper and himbo nepo baby David Ellison, the “son king of Hollywood,” bought the joint and installed Bari Weiss as chief enforcer of the anti-woke tone police. It looks like Ellison’s bid to hostile-takeover Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company, is back on the table, too.
What good are airwaves without stars and eyeballs, though? Now Anderson Cooper, only 58, is leaving 60 Minutes in May after two decades. It’s officially to spend more time with his husband and children, though he is also staying on at CNN, presumably at least until Ellison succeeds in buying that, too. Also we can read between the lines of an announcement, and so can everyone else:
Meanwhile, CBS Evening News is blowin’ in the wind under warm jar of mayonnaise Tony Dokoupil.
Eleven Evening News staffers have quit, including producer Alicia Hastey, who blasted the new bosses in a letter to her colleagues for killing stories out of concern they might be construed as political:
“[T]here has been a sweeping new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcast norms to embrace what has been described as ‘heterodox’ journalism. The truth is that commitment to those people [a widow profiting from windpower, voters in rural Georgia disagreeing politically yet getting along anyway] and the stories they have to tell is increasingly becoming impossible. Stories may instead be evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations — a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”
CBS News also got broasted in December, if you’ll remember, for not airing a 60 Minutes story on El Salvador’s CECOT prison, though eventually it did air a “tweaked” (edited) version in January after the episode aired in Canada and was streamed online anyway. And of course, even before the merger with Ellison’s Paramount, CBS was the first to step right up to pay a ridiculous bribe to Trump’s presidential library, $16 million, for allegedly making Kamala Harris look too smart.
Oh yes, then there’s Dr. Peter Attia, the medical correspondent/longevity grifter/quack Bari Weiss recently hired and refuses to fire because cancel culture. The irony! Though the Epstein Files finds him mentioned 1,838 times, discussing meetups, sending flowers, exchanging photos, trying to sell Epstein his longevity regimen, hyucking about pussy being low-carb, envying Epstein’s lifestyle, and thirstily emailing Epstein’s assistant, “I go into JE withdrawal when I don’t see him.”
Just exactly what parts of American culture do conservatives hope to preserve besides the guns? They really ought to be much more specific.
And what do you know, Bari Weiss’s wife Nellie Bowles, a journalist who had described the Epstein files as a problem for just “elite liberals,” is ALSO in there as having met with Epstein. And sure, lots of journalists did, but curious how she never disclosed that until it came out. It doesn’t mean they did anything wrong, of course. But it’s also another reminder how it’s a big, nasty old secret cabal, and none of us is in it.
It’s better out here with Colbert and Talarico. And Bad Bunny. Etc.
[Jeff Tiedrich / New York Magazine archive link / Variety]
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Oh, there's an "Equal Time rule," still?
BRB. Fox News owes the Dems about ten straight years of tongue bathing.
Stephen Colbert is one of the best among us. My forever TV boyfriend.