David Folkenflik

that they would cancel him to ensure that they could ease through the approval of the sale to the Ellisons just last summer.

Now, they say they did it for financial reasons, but nobody I've talked to inside or outside of CBS believes that.

Well, I think at the moment it's fair to say what we're all missing is consistency in Chairman Carr's application of where he's interested in going, what he wants to regulate, where he'd like to have a heavy hand, the easy way or the hard way, right?

He's shown no interest publicly in wading into refereeing whether or not nationally syndicated shows like Sean Hannity's or local talk radio show hosts, which significantly skew to the right, should equally be

scrutinized or regulated or forced to give equal time given the amount of interviews that they give to favored candidates.

And that's just a part of the equation that it's almost as though it doesn't exist in the conversation, even as we know that, you know, folks listening to local radio stations may well be influenced by what they hear because it's, of course, often more locally grounded as those races play out.

Look, let me just say, I think that it's complicating and always a little problematic when the government is

dictating what you can and can't do in speech.

It's an accident of history.

Broadcast came before cable.

Broadcast came before the internet.

Broadcast came before, you know, social media.

And because of that and the fact that there were licenses required to broadcast things on what came to be federally regulated airwaves so that all the signals didn't jumble and cancel each other out, that's why these things are regulated.

You know, CNN, if cable had come first and required certain kinds of licensing, CNN might have been regulated and maybe CBS wouldn't be.

So that's a complicating thing.

At the same time, as a general practice, as a broadcaster, I do think that a notion of fairness is not a terrible thing.

But there is such a welter of information available to us.

The Tallarico interview was put on Colbert and the Late Show's YouTube page.

He claimed that the lawyers for CBS told him he couldn't even read the URL of the YouTube page out loud.

And at the same time, it racked up, I think, tens of millions of viewers, far greater than the few million that might have seen it on The Colbert Show itself.