AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Late-night host Stephen Colbert said his interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico was pulled from Monday night's broadcast over network fears it would violate regulatory guidance from the Trump administration on giving equal time to political candidates.
The issue came just hours before early voting opened Tuesday in Texas' primary elections, which feature hotly-contested Senate nomination races in both parties.
“He 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,” Colbert said on his program, ”The Late Show with Stephen Colbert."
“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 doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”
Talarico is in a spirited contest for the Democratic nomination as media institutions are navigating around changing broadcast guidance, issued under the Trump administration, governing how they interview political candidates. His main opponent is U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, and both have built national profiles through viral social media clips.
On the Republican side, four-term incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is facing the political fight of his career against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt. Paxton stepped up his campaign with a Monday night rally in Tyler in east Texas.
Talarico posted a nearly minute-long clip of his interview with Colbert on X, calling it “the interview Donald Trump didn't want you to see.” He planned to have a Tuesday evening rally in Austin.
“I think Donald Trump is worried we're about to flip Texas,” Talarico said in a statement. “This is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture, the kind that comes from the top.”
Broadcast networks have been required to give equal time to political candidates, but that rule hasn't traditionally been applied to talk shows. In January, the Federal Communications Commission issued new guidance warning late-night and daytime hosts that they need to give political candidates equal time, with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr questioning the talk show exemption and positing that hosts were “motivated by partisan purposes.”
“The FCC has not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify for the bona fide news exemption,” according to the public notice.
In his comments, Colbert noted that the equal time provision applies to broadcast but not streaming platforms. Subsequently, his nearly 15-minute interview with Talarico was posted to the YouTube page for Colbert's show, with the host noting specifically that the segment was only appearing online and not on broadcast.
Neither CBS nor the FCC immediately responded to messages seeking comment Tuesday.
Carr, appointed by Trump to lead the agency last year, has often criticized network talk shows, suggesting last year that probing ABC’s “The View” — whose hosts have frequently been critical of Trump — over the exemption might be “worthwhile.”
Colbert’s days in his host chair are limited, following CBS’ announcement last year that it was canceling his show this May for financial reasons, shuttering a decades-old TV institution in a changing media landscape.
But the timing of that announcement — three days after Colbert criticized the settlement between Trump and Paramount Global, parent company of CBS, over a “60 Minutes” story — led two U.S. senators to publicly question the motives behind the move, which served to remove from air one of Trump’s most prominent and persistent late-night critics.
Meanwhile, Talarico and Crockett are hoping to avoid a May 26 runoff by capturing at least 50% of the Democratic vote in the March 3 primary. Paxton, too, is trying to avoid a runoff, and until Friday, the only ad his relatively low-key campaign ran had attacked Hunt.
Hunt is trying to appeal to voters seeking an alternative to Cornyn but uneasy about Paxton. The Texas attorney general beat a 2023 impeachment trial on corruption charges and reached a deal to end a long-running securities fraud case but now faces a contentious divorce over allegations of adultery.
Hunt released a new ad Tuesday, with photos of him with Trump, hitting Cornyn over his long political year and declaring, “This is our moment to end the status quo.”
But Paxton's campaign has been airing its own ad featuring video clips of him with Trump since Friday. The president had not endorsed any candidate as of Monday. Paxton on Monday night portrayed Cornyn as a creature of the Washington establishment, adding, "Well, I’m not their person and I’m never going to be their person.”
Early voting began with Paxton looking like the GOP's front-runner, even though Cornyn’s campaign and allied super PACs had spent more than $54 million on television advertising since last year, according to the ad-tracing service AdImpact. Paxton believes he's even better known than Cornyn.
Republican Senate leaders in Washington say Paxton as the GOP nominee would require hundreds of millions of dollars more to defend in a general election than Cornyn would — and that the party shouldn't have to spend in a state Trump carried by over 13 percentage points.
Cornyn hit on those concerns in a Tuesday rally in Austin.
“We’ll pay the price of having an albatross like our corrupt attorney general around their neck,” he said. "It will take a toll on everybody on the ballot.”
Kinnard reported from Columbia, South Carolina and, Hanna, from Topeka, Kansas. Associated Press reporter David Bauder contributed to this report from New York, and Associated Press reporter Tom Beaumont, from Tyler, Texas.
Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP
FILE - This photo combination shows Stephen Colbert, left, in Los Angeles, Sept. 12, 2022 and Texas Rep. James Talarico, Aug. 16, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Talia Sprague, Jae C. Hong, file)
CHICAGO (AP) — The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, a protege of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate who led the Civil Rights Movement for decades after the revered leader's assassination, died Tuesday. He was 84.
As a young organizer in Chicago, Jackson was called to meet with King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, shortly before King was killed, and he publicly positioned himself thereafter as King's successor.
Santita Jackson confirmed that her father, who had a rare neurological disorder, died at home in Chicago, surrounded by family.
Jackson led a lifetime of crusades in the United States and abroad, advocating for the poor and underrepresented on issues, including voting rights, job opportunities, education and health care. He scored diplomatic victories with world leaders, and through his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, he channeled cries for Black pride and self-determination into corporate boardrooms, pressuring executives to make America a more open and equitable society.
And when he declared, “I am Somebody,” in a poem he often repeated, he sought to reach people of all colors. “I may be poor, but I am Somebody; I may be young; but I am Somebody; I may be on welfare, but I am Somebody,” Jackson intoned.
It was a message he took literally and personally, having risen from obscurity in the segregated South to become America’s best-known civil rights activist since King.
“Our father was a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in a statement posted online. “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family.”
Fellow civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton said his mentor “was not simply a civil rights leader; he was a movement unto himself.”
“He taught me that protest must have purpose, that faith must have feet, and that justice is not seasonal, it is daily work,” Sharpton wrote in a statement, adding that Jackson taught “trying is as important as triumph. That you do not wait for the dream to come true; you work to make it real.”
Despite profound health challenges in his final years, including the disorder that affected his ability to move and speak, Jackson continued protesting against racial injustice into the era of Black Lives Matter. In 2024, he appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and at a City Council meeting to show support for a resolution backing a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
“Even if we win,” he told marchers in Minneapolis before the officer whose knee kept George Floyd from breathing was convicted of murder, “it’s relief, not victory. They’re still killing our people. Stop the violence, save the children. Keep hope alive.”
Jackson’s voice, infused with the stirring cadences and powerful insistence of the Black church, demanded attention. On the campaign trail and elsewhere, he used rhyming and slogans such as "Hope not dope" and "If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it," to deliver his messages.
Jackson had his share of critics, both within and outside of the Black community. Some considered him a grandstander, too eager to seek the spotlight. Looking back on his life and legacy, Jackson told The Associated Press in 2011 that he felt blessed to be able to continue the service of other leaders before him and to lay a foundation for those to come.
“A part of our life’s work was to tear down walls and build bridges, and in a half century of work, we’ve basically torn down walls,” Jackson said. “Sometimes when you tear down walls, you’re scarred by falling debris, but your mission is to open up holes so others behind you can run through.”
In his final months, as he received 24-hour care, he communicated with family and visitors by holding their hands and squeezing.
“I get very emotional knowing that these speeches belong to the ages now,” his son, Jesse Jackson Jr., told the AP in October.
Jesse Louis Jackson was born Oct. 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, the son of high school student Helen Burns and Noah Louis Robinson, a married man who lived next door. Jackson was later adopted by Charles Henry Jackson, who married his mother.
Jackson was a star quarterback on the football team at Sterling High School in Greenville, and he accepted a football scholarship from the University of Illinois. But after reportedly being told that Black people couldn’t play quarterback, he transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he became the first-string quarterback, an honor student in sociology and economics, and student body president.
Arriving on the historically Black campus in 1960 just months after students there launched sit-ins at a whites-only lunch counter, Jackson immersed himself in the blossoming Civil Rights Movement.
By 1965, he joined the voting rights march King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. King dispatched him to Chicago to launch Operation Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference effort to pressure companies to hire Black workers.
Jackson called his time with King “a phenomenal four years of work.”
Jackson was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was slain. Jackson’s account of the assassination was that King died in his arms.
Sharpton said he “always wondered how much trauma that must have been" for Jackson to witness King’s death. “He never would talk about it too much, but it drove him,” Sharpton said Tuesday. "He said, ‘We’ve got to keep Dr. King’s legacy alive.’”
With his flair for the dramatic, Jackson wore a turtleneck he said was soaked with King’s blood for two days, including at a King memorial service held by the Chicago City Council, where he said: “I come here with a heavy heart because on my chest is the stain of blood from Dr. King’s head.”
However, several King aides, including speechwriter Alfred Duckett, questioned whether Jackson could have gotten King’s blood on his clothing. There are no images of Jackson in pictures taken shortly after the assassination.
In 1971, Jackson broke with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to form Operation PUSH, originally named People United to Save Humanity. The organization based on Chicago’s South Side declared a sweeping mission, from diversifying workforces to registering voters in communities of color nationwide. Using lawsuits and threats of boycotts, Jackson pressured top corporations to spend millions and publicly commit to hiring more diverse employees.
The constant campaigns often left his wife, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, the college sweetheart he married in 1963, taking the lead in raising their five children: Santita Jackson, Yusef DuBois Jackson, Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson Jr., and two future members of Congress, U.S. Rep. Jonathan Luther Jackson and Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who resigned in 2012 but is seeking reelection in the 2026 midterms.
The elder Jackson, who was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968 and earned his master's of divinity degree in 2000, also acknowledged fathering a child, Ashley Jackson, with one of his employees at Rainbow/PUSH, Karen L. Stanford. He said he understood what it means to be born out of wedlock and supported her emotionally and financially.
On Tuesday, Harold Hall joined other mourners who stopped by the family home to pay their respects.
Hall, who once lived in the same Chicago neighborhood as Jackson, left a bouquet of flowers outside Jackson’s door and recalled that he helped local street organizations in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Jackson “would come out and shoot ball and try to change the minds of many of our young folk," urging them to stay out of trouble, Hall told reporters. “And in many instances, it happened. It worked.”
Despite once telling a Black audience he would not run for president “because white people are incapable of appreciating me,” Jackson ran twice and did better than any Black politician had before President Barack Obama, winning 13 primaries and caucuses for the Democratic nomination in 1988, four years after his first failed attempt.
His successes left supporters chanting another Jackson slogan, “Keep hope alive.”
“I was able to run for the presidency twice and redefine what was possible; it raised the lid for women and other people of color,” he told the AP. “Part of my job was to sow seeds of the possibilities.”
Obama acknowledged Jackson's efforts, saying he led some of the most significant movements for change in human history.
Michelle Obama "got her first glimpse of political organizing at the Jacksons’ kitchen table when she was a teenager,” Obama wrote on X. “And in his two historic runs for president, he laid the foundation for my own campaign to the highest office in the world.”
Jackson “was relentless in his belief that we are all children of God, deserving of dignity and respect,” the post read.
Jackson also pushed for cultural change, joining calls by NAACP members and other movement leaders in the late 1980s to identify Black people in the United States as African Americans.
“To be called African Americans has cultural integrity — it puts us in our proper historical context,” Jackson said at the time. “Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some base, some historical cultural base."
Jackson’s words sometimes got him in trouble.
In 1984, he apologized for what he thought were private comments to a reporter in which he called New York City “Hymietown,” a derogatory reference to its large Jewish population. And in 2008, he made headlines when he complained that Obama was “talking down to Black people” in comments captured by a microphone he didn’t know was on during a break in a television taping.
Still, when Jackson joined the jubilant crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park to greet Obama that election night, he had tears streaming down his face.
“I wish for a moment that Dr. King or (slain civil rights leader) Medgar Evers ... could’ve just been there for 30 seconds to see the fruits of their labor,” he told the AP years later. “I became overwhelmed. It was the joy and the journey.”
Jackson also had influence abroad, meeting world leaders and scoring diplomatic victories, including the release of Navy Lt. Robert Goodman from Syria in 1984, as well as the 1990 release of more than 700 foreign women and children held after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In 1999, he won the freedom of three Americans imprisoned by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.
In 2021, Jackson joined the parents of Ahmaud Arbery inside the Georgia courtroom where three white men were convicted of killing the young Black jogger. In 2022, he hand-delivered a letter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago, calling for federal charges against former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke in the 2014 killing of Black teenager Laquan McDonald.
Jackson, who stepped down as president of Rainbow/PUSH in July 2023, disclosed in 2017 that he had sought treatment for Parkinson’s, but he continued to make public appearances even as the disease made it more difficult for listeners to understand him. Last year, doctors confirmed a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a life-threatening neurological disorder. He was admitted to a hospital in November for nearly two weeks.
During the coronavirus pandemic, he and his wife survived being hospitalized with COVID-19. Jackson was vaccinated early, urging Black people in particular to get protected, given their higher risks for bad outcomes.
“It’s America’s unfinished business — we’re free, but not equal,” Jackson told the AP. “There’s a reality check that has been brought by the coronavirus, that exposes the weakness and the opportunity.”
Associated Press writers Aisha I. Jefferson in Chicago, Amy Forliti in Minneapolis and Aaron Morrison in New York contributed to this report, as well as former AP writer Karen Hawkins, who left AP in 2012.
This story has been corrected to show that Jackson was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy last year, not this year.
FILE - Former South African President Nelson Mandela, left, walks with the Rev. Jesse Jackson after their meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, Oct. 26, 2005. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe, File)
FILE - Rev. Jesse Jackson, left, talks with singer and civil right rights activist Harry Belafonte after a news conference announcing the installation of a Nelson Mandela plaque in Yankee Stadium's Monument Park in New York, April 16, 2014. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens, File)
FILE - Civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., right, and his aide Rev. Jesse Jackson are seen in Chicago, Aug. 19, 1966. (AP Photo/Larry Stoddard, File)
FILE - Rev. Jesse Jackson answers questions at a rally, April 19, 2021, in Minneapolis, as the murder trial against the former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin in the killing of George Floyd advances to jury deliberations. (AP Photo/Morry Gash, File)
FILE - U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-NY, U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson and NAACP President Derrick Johnson march across the Edmund Pettus bridge during the 60th anniversary of the march to ensure that African Americans could exercise their constitutional right to vote, March 9, 2025, in Selma, Ala. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart, File)
FILE - Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., left, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson are seen at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Awards Breakfast in Chicago on Jan. 15, 2007. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File)
FILE - Democratic presidential primary candidate Jesse Jackson speaks to a group of his supporters at a rally held at a Baptist Church in Dayton, Ohio, April 14, 1984. (AP Photo/Rob Burns, File)
FILE - Rev. Jesse Jackson gestures to a friend in the balcony at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., Sept. 15, 2013. The church held a ceremony honoring the memory of the four young girls who were killed by a bomb placed outside the church 50 years ago by members of the Ku Klux Klan. At right is U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala. (AP Photo/Dave Martin, File)
FILE - President George W. Bush speaks with Rev. Jesse Jackson, right, after signing a bill in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Dec. 1, 2005, authorizing a statue of civil rights leader Rosa Parks be placed in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds, File)
FILE - Jesse Jackson, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, speaks at a University of California rally on May 27, 1970, at The Greek Theater in Berkeley, Calif. (AP Photo/Sal Veder, File)
FILE - Jesse Jackson speaks during a press conference regarding Little League International's decision to strip Chicago's Jackie Roberson West baseball team of it's national championship, in Chicago, Feb. 12, 2015. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green, File)
FILE - Democratic presidential hopeful Jesse Jackson with his wife, Jacqueline, salutes the cheering crowd at Operation Push in Chicago, March 10, 1988. (AP Photo/Fred Jewell, File)
FILE - Rev. Jesse Jackson waves as he steps to the podium during the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 27, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
