The fight inside CBS over Stephen Colbert’s interview of James Talarico tells you everything you need to know about where corporate media stands under the Trump administration’s assault on American liberties.
Nobody actually ordered CBS to stop anything.
No law changed.
The FCC didn’t act.
There was only bullyboy blustering from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who had puffed himself up to his full egregiousness to suggest that consequences might come.
CBS executives were worried. Briefly. Then they caved. They bent the knee to the Trump administration—again. And this time, they caved before anything happened.
This cringing behavior has a name: pre-compliance.
It means obedience to authority in advance, anticipating what the bullyboy (or the “smug bowling pin,” as Colbert dubbed Carr) wants. Then doing it—even if you know it is wrong.
Pre-compliance is when men and women, corporations and institutions, begin sacrificing their own independence, liberty, and dignity voluntarily—before those with power ever force them to.
They surrender. Like CBS, which did not even raise a single legal argument to defend itself.
If Brendan Carr had followed through on his vague threats to punish CBS for violating the “Equal Time Rule,” the network would have had an extremely strong case. Carr is just blowing smoke, legally, which makes CBS’s pre-compliance that much worse.
The Equal Time Rule requires broadcasters—not cable or streaming, but old-fashioned, over-the-air broadcasters—to treat political candidates equally. If Candidate A appears on a program, Candidate B must get an appearance, too.
But, for decades, the FCC has exempted “bona fide interview programs,” including late-night TV shows. These programs are considered protected editorial spaces, meaning any attempt to punish a network over a guest booking would face serious legal and constitutional trouble.
And there’s this damning fact: Talk radio is covered by the exact same law that broadcast TV is. Same statutes and precedents. Same airwaves. But Brendan Carr has explicitly indicated that talk radio would not be scrutinized in the same way as late-night television.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Brendan.
“If this is a neutral interpretation of the statute,” a judge would immediately ask the FCC’s lawyers (if CBS actually had the spine to go to court), “why are you enforcing it against television programs but not radio programs governed by the same law?”
But CBS didn’t want that fight.
Democracies rarely lose their freedoms all at once. They lose them in small adjustments made by reasonable people trying to avoid unnecessary trouble. A joke gets softened here. An interview reconsidered there. A question left unasked. No single decision feels momentous. But taken together, they redraw the boundaries of what can be said.
What we are seeing is that the American corporate media is not going to be suddenly silenced by Donald Trump and his regulatory goons.
What we are seeing is that, one careful decision at a time, it is learning to silence itself.
—Terry