Late night host Jimmy Kimmel is whining again. 

Kimmel made an announcement on his ABC show, "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" on Wednesday that he had done an interview with Democrat nominee for Senate in Texas, James Talarico.

But then he started playing the victim, acting as though he had been censored by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He explained why the interview would not be seen on the show, but would be on YouTube. 

Kimmel portrayed the decision to interview Talarico as nothing out of the ordinary, “Tomorrow night, I'll be interviewing James Talarico tomorrow night under unusual circumstances. For a lot of years, for the whole 20-plus of our show, in fact, I've been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all. Just like Letterman did, Leno did, Arsenio, et cetera, et cetera. I have interviewed a lot of political candidates, from Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz to Donald Trump himself.”

He also recalled, “I interviewed Donald Trump when he was running for president in 2015. And at that time, when he was the one sitting next to me, he seemed to have no problem with the idea of talk show hosts interviewing candidates. In fact, he was very eager to come back for another interview, which he did just before he became the nominee in 2016. But for some reason, and I can't seem to figure out what that reason is—something has changed.”

He claimed that now that Trump was president, "his FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network: ABC, our affiliates, our local stations, based on simple traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings, it would seem they don't like." 

He urged the audience to go to the YouTube channel if they "want to learn about a candidate for the Senate" because "in the America we live in right now, this is the best we can do. Until November, of course. Make sure you register to vote, by the way. That's the most important thing you can do.”

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Now this is absolute nonsense. As we saw when Stephen Colbert pulled this same kind of tactic, also with a Talarico interview, what the FCC did was talk about the equal time rule. No one is censoring Kimmel. But where is the equal time for Talarico's opponent? In this instance, that would be the Republican candidate for the Texas Senate, Ken Paxton. 

Kimmel would rather pretend to be a victim, shift the Talarico interview to YouTube, and then whine like a child, trying to whip people to click on the video. 

Then came the next part - the whining about "censorship" complaint from Talarico, with again the media not noting the "equal time" question in this tweet. 

“Government censorship should be a concern to all of us, regardless of our political party,” Talarico told MS NOW, calling the FCC’s threats against certain broadcast programs (including ABC’s “The View”) “the most dangerous form of cancel culture.” 

“People at the top, powerful politicians, powerful media executives, censoring what we watch, what we read, what we say,” Talarico continued. “That, again, should be a concern to everyone who believes in the First Amendment and believes in the freedom of speech. I’m still hopeful that we can have this interview on the air. So we’ll see what happens tonight."

Nobody is preventing him from speaking. Indeed, he's getting a lot of help and attention with this very tactic.

It's so ridiculous that you have that tweet from Variety, and they don't mention the rule in the tweet, although they do mention it in the story. 

Bottom line? If the network doesn't give equal time, it's putting its feet on the scale to help the Democrat candidate. 

But it's this kind of partisan nonsense that turns people off. It perhaps explains why Kimmel's ratings have tanked over the years, and there are rumors about him being cancelled. ABC has denied it, calling it "inaccurate" and "speculative." His current contract is through May, 2027.