CNN pundit Jonah Goldberg struggled to make sense of the Trump administration's threat against late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
Kimmel revealed upon his return to "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" on Wednesday that he interviewed James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, but ABC, the home of Kimmel's show, pulled the interview and will air it on YouTube instead because of fears about the FCC's threat to late-night hosts over equal airtime for political candidates.
Goldberg, a veteran conservative political analyst, said that the Trump administration's threat didn't make sense and tore into the move during a Thursday roundtable discussion on CNN.
"This is dumb," Goldberg said. "Let them interview James Talarico. It's ridiculous."
The move to pull the interview is the latest fallout from a year-long pressure campaign against ABC by President Donald Trump's FCC, chaired by Trump appointee Brendan Carr. No formal sanction has been issued over the Talarico booking, CNN anchor Jake Tapper noted, but the threat is the accumulated weight of everything the agency has already done.
In January, Carr's FCC scrapped a two-decade-old exemption and told late-night and daytime talk shows they must give equal airtime to rival candidates. In April, it ordered Disney's eight ABC-owned stations to file license renewals years ahead of schedule, a demand Disney called retaliatory in an August lawsuit accusing the commission of an unconstitutional campaign against the network.
Goldberg found it "just profoundly stupid for the FCC" to put pressure on ABC and Jimmy Kimmel.
"It's also corrupt," Goldberg said. "It puts a lie to all the talk about this administration being so pro-free speech, all that stuff. It's also just dumb that the FCC has anything to do with broadcast television anymore."
Goldberg said it's "fine" for the FCC to "regulate standards for emergency bands, radios and 6G and all that kind of stuff...But what the hell?" Goldberg argued that the agency has no business regulating TV at all.
"In a world of 10 trillion streaming platforms and options. What the hell is the FCC getting [by] nickel and diming a handful of networks about what they can and can't put on TV anymore?" he asked. "The FCC was created for the radio era in the 1930s. Just be done with it."