“I think yesterday was a perfect encapsulation of why the American people have more trust in gas station sushi than they do in the national news media,” Carr feverishly Dennis Miller-ed during an FCC meeting on Wednesday, per The Guardian—suggesting the news media should be ashamed for believing Colbert’s “lies” about the interview. Said accusations stemming, as far as we can tell, from Colbert (and Talarico, who’s gotten a pretty major media bump off of all this) refusing to pay lip service to Carr’s policy of running the government’s TV regulation by a national expression of the “I’m not touching you, I’m not actually touching you!” rule so favored by childhood’s most irritating siblings. After all, Carr never publicly told CBS not to air an interview with the Democratic up-and-comer: He just made very loud noises about how his FCC wouldn’t be adhering to decades of precedent about talk show interviews being treated as exempt from the equal-time rule anymore, and (quite successfully, it appears) waited for the network to comply in advance and regulate itself.
This “I never technically regulated you” approach might offer Carr some measure of legal cover, but it’s offered no such protection from Colbert, who has blasted both the FCC and his network over the “legal guidance” they’ve been so kindly offering him of late. Which, again, has led to the woeful image of Carr trying to throw shade at a guy who cut his national comedy teeth eviscerating hypocrites for a living, tepidly firing back (per Reuters) that Colbert has “what he probably views as a long and distinguished career in the limelight, sees that that limelight is fading, is coming to an end. That’s got to be a difficult time for him… That doesn’t change the facts of what happened here.”
Speaking of facts: After all that, Carr then went on to state that he was pursuing an “enforcement action” against ABC’s The View for having Talarico on two weeks ago, all but confirming that he would have done the same thing to CBS had they aired the interview. Ignoring the fact that equal-time complaints are traditionally supposed to come from the rival candidates in a campaign, and not just bubbled up by the FCC itself, the move ably demonstrates the true point of so much of Carr’s policy in recent years: To produce a chilling effect so that networks don’t even bother running the risk of getting dinged, allowing Carr to claim, with a straight smirk, that he’s not the one censoring anybody at all.
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