Donald Trump s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV. Stephen Colbert cries censorship, but there s a lot more to the story. DNA testing in the Nancy Guthrie case finally uploaded to the database with no match. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson dies at age 84. And Team USA s women s Olympic hockey team readies to take on top rival Canada in the gold medal match. All that and more coming up in a moment on Your AM Update.
00:02:08.320With comfort that makes the little moments count more.
00:02:10.660CBS's Stephen Colbert, still months from his show coming to an end, making waves Monday night,
00:02:19.600claiming he was blocked by his network from hosting a Democrat primary candidate running for Senate in Texas,
00:02:26.000James Tallarico, suggesting his network cave to pressure from the Trump administration's Federal Communications Commission, or FCC.
00:02:33.920Tallarico, a former school teacher and Presbyterian minister in training, currently running a primary campaign against Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, among others.
00:02:44.660Colbert offering his explanation for why CBS lawyers allegedly blocked Tallarico from appearing on The Late Show on his program Monday night.
00:02:53.580You might have heard of this thing called the equal time rule, okay?
00:02:56.520It's an old FCC rule that applies only to radio and broadcast television, not cable or streaming,
00:03:02.020that says if a show has a candidate on during an election, they have to have all that candidate's opponents on as well.
00:03:08.660There's long been an exception for this rule, an exception for news interviews and talk show interviews with politicians.
00:03:16.540But, on January 21st of this year, a letter was released by FCC chairman and smug bowling pin, Brendan Carr.
00:03:25.760In this letter, Carr said he was thinking about dropping the exception for talk shows because he said some of them were motivated by partisan purposes.
00:04:08.800I think that Donald Trump is worried that we're about to flip Texas.
00:04:16.220This is the party that ran against cancel culture.
00:04:20.520And now they're trying to control what we watch, what we say, what we read.
00:04:26.320And this is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture.
00:04:28.940So Colbert and Tallarico say this whole kerfuffle is because the Trump administration is afraid of Tallarico and trying to silence him.
00:04:37.960But CBS, in a statement yesterday, pushing back on those claims, indicating The Late Show was not prohibited from broadcasting the Tallarico interview.
00:06:02.220I do think that there are additional layers at play here.
00:06:05.900We spoke with constitutional attorney Daniel Sirr, president of the Center for American Rights, whose organization previously filed an FCC complaint against CBS over alleged deceptive editing of then-Vice President Kamala Harris' 60 Minutes interview in the run-up to the 2024 election.
00:06:23.620Sirr explaining the legal foundation governing broadcast networks like CBS.
00:06:27.500Broadcast television signals belong to the American people, right?
00:06:32.120They're not the property of any one company or any one broadcaster or network.
00:06:38.540And the Federal Communications Commission was created to regulate and license who uses those airwaves.
00:06:46.580So it has always been the case that broadcasters are given a license from the government to use a public asset.
00:06:55.540And that license comes with strings attached to protect the public.
00:07:00.820When television programs feature candidates on the public airwaves, they owe equal time to other candidates, right?
00:07:10.060We don't want television stations, which, after all, use the public airwaves to be misused to advance one particular candidate.
00:07:20.700Sirr describing how the equal time rule works and how it's been used in the past.
00:07:25.440So you may remember back October of last year, November of last year, Vice President Harris went on Saturday Night Live.
00:07:33.240And as a consequence of the vice president going on SNL, President Trump got a free two-minute ad at the beginning of a NASCAR race to compensate for his equal time to make up for the SNL appearance.
00:07:49.700And so in this case, CBS could have had, Colbert could have had Jamie Telrico on.
00:07:55.580That would have been fine. It would have been legal. The FCC would have had no problem with it.
00:07:59.780Just the law requires that CBS give equal time to Jasmine Crockett in the form of, say, 15 minutes of free ads.
00:08:08.760Sir, offering a final thought on Colbert's version of the story.
00:08:12.000The irony of all this is that Colbert is attacking Chairman Carr for supposedly being, you know, a Republican hatchet man executing on, you know, President Trump's revenge agenda against his enemies.
00:08:26.020And had the rule been followed in this case, it would have just meant that Democrats would have had more free airtime to attack President Trump.
00:08:33.620Right. And that's because Colbert is missing the point of the rule.
00:08:39.180And the point of the rule is that it protects all candidates from all parties.
00:08:43.460The primary is set for March 3rd. Early voting began yesterday and runs until the 27th.
00:08:48.500A University of Houston poll earlier this month showing Tallarico trailing Ms. Crockett by eight points, 39 to 47 percent.
00:08:57.000Although the Real Clear Politics average has the race tied at 41.
00:09:00.600Whomever wins the Democrat primary will then face off against their Republican opponent for the seat currently held by Republican John Cornyn,
00:09:08.720who is running for the GOP nomination and would like to keep his seat.
00:09:14.400A long anticipated forensic step now complete in the case of missing 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie.
00:09:20.820DNA recovered from a glove discovered a few miles from her home uploaded into the FBI's CODIS database yielding no hits.
00:09:29.820Fox News' Jonathan Hunt speaking to Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos yesterday afternoon.
00:09:35.200We had heard this morning that, of course, the DNA on the glove that was found two miles away was submitted for CODIS.
00:09:44.460And I just heard that CODIS had no hits.
00:09:47.600No hits on the DNA found in the glove?
00:11:44.380Yesterday afternoon, co-owner of Armor Bearer Arms in Tucson, Philip Martin, telling a Fox News
00:11:50.600reporter FBI agents visited his store with three pages containing names and photos of about 18 to 24
00:11:57.300people asking whether they had purchased firearms in the last year.
00:12:01.280The FBI agent didn't tell me why he was here other than just he wanted to know if somebody or any of
00:12:06.660these people that he had on the papers had purchased a gun from us. So I was able to look at the photos that he
00:12:13.140was showing me, and I told the FBI agent, I was like, I'm no investigator, but my intuition is telling me based
00:12:20.860on how these people's facial hair looks like, it looks like the guy that was on camera at that house doing the
00:12:29.740kidnapping. And he honestly kind of just smirked and took a deep breath, and he was like, yeah, that's why I'm here. He was like, we're going to be going to different gun shops checking to see if any of these names that I'm showing you here, any of these people have purchased a gun in the last year. And then so I just went on to check on our system to see if any of those people that were on the sheet,
00:12:50.860had been in here to buy a gun, but unfortunately, none of them had.
00:12:54.900Meanwhile, Sheriff Nanos once again reversing course on the issue of whether the Guthrie siblings or their spouses have been cleared in this case.
00:13:03.500On Sunday, the sheriff telling the Daily Mail, quote, nobody had been cleared. On Monday, the sheriff writing in a press release, the family, quote, has been cleared as possible suspects. NBC News reporting the change was not based on any new evidence. Then yesterday, the sheriff's office walking things back yet again, writing in its daily update, quote, at this time, the Guthrie family, including siblings and spouses, has not been identified as suspects.
00:13:31.800So, not cleared, but not, quote, identified as suspects, at least at this time. What a mess.
00:13:41.080Coming up, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson dead at 84. President Trump reacting as the longtime activist and two-time presidential candidate leaves behind a historic legacy.
00:13:52.620And the fiercest rivalry in women's hockey returns. Team USA and Team Canada set to clash for Olympic gold in Milan.
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00:15:05.600Civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson has died at the age of 84.
00:15:14.300He passed peacefully yesterday morning, surrounded by family at his home in Chicago, after years of declining health.
00:15:20.940Jackson suffered from a severe neurodegenerative condition called progressive supranuclear palsy, though the official cause of death has not yet been released.
00:15:29.780In a statement, the family calling Jackson, quote, a servant leader, not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world.
00:15:39.060President Trump honoring Jackson in a lengthy Truth Social post, reading in part, quote,
00:15:43.240I knew him well, long before becoming president.
00:15:46.680He was a good man, with lots of personality, grit, and street smarts.
00:15:50.940He was very gregarious, someone who truly loved people.
00:15:54.680Despite the fact that I am falsely and consistently called a racist by the scoundrels and lunatics on the radical left, Democrats all,
00:16:02.500it was always my pleasure to help Jesse along the way.
00:16:05.200I provided office space for him and his Rainbow Coalition for years in the Trump building at 40 Wall Street.
00:16:10.740The Reverend Jackson and your humble correspondent crossed paths many times during the Fox News days and, if you will permit me, he was always affable, warm, and genuine.
00:16:22.340Jackson, a protege of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., later becoming a prominent leader in Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
00:16:31.100founded to fight segregation through nonviolent protests.
00:16:34.880Over the decades, Jackson founding the Rainbow Push Coalition, advocating for social justice,
00:16:39.600running for president twice in 1984 and 88, and becoming one of the leading voices of the modern civil rights movement.
00:16:47.120Here, a moment from Jackson's 1988 Democratic National Convention speech.