CBS told “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert not to air a scheduled interview with James Talarico, a U.S. Senate candidate from Texas. 

We don’t expect to find heroes in network television, normally home to the timid, the faddish and the bland. For instances of civic heroism, we usually have to look way, way back, maybe to newscaster Edward R. Murrow challenging the red-baiting demagogue Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954. So the spectacle of a late-night talk show host nowadays openly denouncing a brazen attempt at censorship, telling off — before an audience of millions — not just the government’s most powerful media regulator but his own corporate bosses, all in defense of expressive freedom, is worth a moment of respect.

The story began early last week when, in a blistering six-minute monologue, Stephen Colbert, host of “The Late Show” on Murrow’s own network, CBS, told his viewers that he had scheduled an interview with a U.S. Senate candidate from Texas, James Talarico, who was waiting backstage, but that CBS had now told him he could not do it.

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“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.

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The lawyers took this extraordinary step, it seems, because the network had been warned by Brendan Carr, the fierce Trump administration loyalist who chairs the Federal Communications Commission, that putting........

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