Trump is skilled at finding and exploiting weaknesses in his opponents, even if his victories often turn out to by Pyrrhic. His Administration’s short and successful campaign to achieve the ouster of a designed Trump enemy, Jimmy Kimmel, is producing a backlash not merely and predictably on what is left of the left and the Democrat aligned, but also those on the right who have memories better than goldfish and recall the loud free speech promises Trump made while campaigning.
And more to the point, as Charlie Kirk’s friend and ally Tucker Carlson stresses below, it’s a virtual certainty that Charlie Kirk would have disapproved of the silencing of a Trump critic. That’s before getting to the fact that Kimmel’s remarks were grossly mischaracterized by FCC chief Brendan Carr in order to whip up a right wing social media mob, most of whom either had such strong priors on Kimmel or otherwise would not be bothered to check that that they would take his claims as gospel.
đ¨đşđ¸đŽđą BREAKING: TUCKER CARLSON CONDEMNS Trump Administration officials using Charlie Kirk's assassination to ELIMINATE FREE SPEECH protections pic.twitter.com/HtUQZi2iWt
— Legitimate Targets (@LegitTargets) September 18, 2025
As we’ll soon unpack, Disney was not just at risk from Trump Administration direct action, but also from action by supposed or actual viewer of Disney network content on ABC, as well as potential or actual visitors to Disney properties. But the direct threat was pretty potent. Carr’s words:
Frankly I think itâs past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney, and say, âWe are going to preemptâwe are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out,ââ Carr said. âItâs time for them to step up and say this garbageâto the extent that thatâs what comes down the pipe in the futureâisnât something that serves the needs of our local communities.
Update: Some readers seem not to appreciate the seriousness of the Carr threat. So below is section of a New York Times article, Trump Has Threatened Broadcast Licenses. Hereâs How They Work, with more detail. After this extract, the balance of the post is the original material:
President Trump threatened on Thursday to revoke broadcasting licenses over late-night hosts who speak negatively about him, escalating an assault against the media. âTheyâre giving me all this bad press, and theyâre getting a license,â Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, after ABC suspended the late-night Jimmy Kimmel Live show. âI would think maybe their license should be taken away.â
Mr. Trumpâs threats have put a spotlight on the Federal Communications Commission, an agency best known for regulating phone prices and reviewing telecom mergers. Hereâs what to know about how broadcast licensing works…
The F.C.C. can revoke a license under a rarely used public interest standard, which can be very broadly defined.
âIn exchange for obtaining a valuable license to operate a broadcast station using the public airwaves, each radio and television licensee is required by law to operate its station in the âpublic interest, convenience and necessity,ââ the agency says on its website. âGenerally, this means it must air programming that is responsive to the needs and problems of its local community of license.âTelecom experts say that definition has traditionally included the broadcasting of public affairs programming and essential local news.
Although the licenses are held by the individual stations, the threat of their loss has major implications for the major networks….
Mr. Carr has argued that he can withhold licenses that arenât being used in the publicâs interest to crack down on speech that doesnât serve local viewers, which includes coverage that is biased against conservatives.
With a license âcomes a unique obligation to operate in the public interest,â Mr. Carr said late Wednesday during an appearance on Fox News. âWe at the F.C.C. are going to enforce the public interest obligation. If thereâs broadcasters out there that donât like it, they can turn their license in to the F.C.C.â
The FCC controls the licenses of the stations in the Disney-owned ABC network. That consists of stations directly owned by Disney and affiliates that syndicate ABC content like the Jimmy Kimmel show. Both of the two major affiliate networks were fast out of the box to demand Kimmel’s scalp. From Business Insider:
The late-night host’s show was pulled from ABC on Wednesday after Kimmel made comments about Charlie Kirk’s death. The comments had drawn the ire of Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr, who said in an interview earlier that day that the FCC might need to place broadcast licenses under review to ensure stations were operating “in the public interest.”
Carr’s comments were bad news for local TV operators who own ABC affiliate stations. These affiliate stations carry ABC programming under contract but aren’t owned by the network itself.
The two biggest local TV operators, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair, who together represent 60% of the ABC broadcast reach, both came out swinging against Kimmel, pressuring ABC to pull the plug on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
The companies said they would remove his show from their stations because they objected to Kimmel’s comments. Sinclair’s vice chairman, Jason Smith, called Kimmel’s words “inappropriate and deeply insensitive,” while Nexstar’s broadcasting division president, Andrew Alford, said they were “offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse.”
Nexstar’s chief communications officer Gary Weitman said the decision to pull “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” was made “unilaterally by the senior executive team at Nexstar, and they had no communication with the FCC or any government agency prior to making that decision,” Variety reported.
The Weitman statement is an insult to intelligence. The one-way communication from Carr to ABC licensees and other stations was crystal clear. Revoking licenses is a death sentence.
Without belaboring details, many observers, including those on the right, did not find what Kimmel said to be offensive, including ABC itself:
đ¨Rolling Stone is now confirming what we all knew happened with Jimmy Kimmelâs show. According to their reporting, executives at ABC and Disney didnât think Kimmel said anything outrageous but they feared retaliation from Trump. This is a blatant attack on free speech. pic.twitter.com/Jozg3ELKun
— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) September 18, 2025
Aside from the license sword of Damocles, Nextstar, which is the biggest TV station network operator and a public company, could be expected to fall in line due to the need to receive an FCC waiver to consummate a pending merger. As LateNighter pointed out:
Much like fellow late-night host Stephen Colbert, the circumstances surrounding Jimmy Kimmelâs removal from the airwaves involve a company in the midst of a merger and under scrutiny from the FCC.
Nexstar Media Group is in the middle of a $6.2 billion merger with media company Tegna. Nexstar, which owns or partners with more than 200 television stations, would acquire about 65 more under the deal. The two companies entered into a definitive agreement for the merger last month, but it remains subject to regulatory approval from the FCC, currently chaired by Brendan Carr.
On Wednesday, Nexstar condemned ârecent commentsâ made by Kimmel and announced that JKL would be pre-empted on its stations âfor the foreseeable future.â….
With more than 30 ABC-affiliated owned or partner stations in its portfolio (and 13 more potentially coming via the Tegna merger), Nexstarâs move to pre-empt JKL likely pressured ABC to act at the network level. Networks often act at the behest of their affiliates, who generate significant revenue and connect them with audiences they otherwise couldnât reach due to FCC-imposed ownership caps limiting networks to 39% of national TV households. Minutes after Nexstarâs move, ABC announced it would pull JKL from its schedule âindefinitely.â
The issue of the pending merger is gravy compared to the far more frontal attack via killing defiant stations via cancelling or suspending their licenses. Nevertheless, while the common formula in coverage of the Kimmel row and Nextstar’s susceptibility to pressure due to the pending Tenga merger is that they need FCC “approval”, the extent of rule-bending needed is greater than that. From Poynter in August:
Nexstar announced Tuesday that it intends to buy Tegna for $6.2 billion â a deal that has been rumored for weeks. To pull off what would be the biggest change in TV broadcast ownership history, however, the Federal Communications Commission would have to relax rules limiting how much of the country one company can reach with its over-the-air signal.
The FCC appears open to changing the rules. Chairman Brendan Carr said the agency âis committed to ending all of the rules and regulations that are no longer necessary.â Similar rollbacks have happened before….
If it does go through, the Nexstar-Tegna merger would create a broadcasting giant. The combined company would own 265 stations in 44 states and the District of Columbia, with a footprint in 132 of the countryâs 210 designated market areas, the standard unit Nielsen uses to measure TV audiences. That includes nine of the top 10 markets, 41 of the top 50, 62 of the top 75 and 82 of the top 100.
But the number that matters most is that Nexstarâs reach would grow to 80% of U.S. television households â more than double the FCCâs current 39% cap.
Current FCC regulations state, âThere is no limit on the number of television stations a single entity may own nationwide as long as the station group collectively reaches no more than 39 percent of all U.S. TV households.â
To allow this acquisition, the FCC would need to make a far bigger leap than it has in past decades. In 1996, the ownership cap rose from 25% to 35%. In 2004, the FCC pushed it up to 45%, only for Congress to roll it back to 39%.
Sinclair could be expected to comply irrespective of the FCC showing an awful lot of steel. It’s been Trump-supporting in its local news reporting. From the Guardian in 2024:
Sinclair, one of the largest owners of US television stations, has established itself as an influential player in the conservative movement by using trusted local news channels to spread disinformation and manipulated video of Joe Biden, media analysts say….
âWhen you stress a story the way Sinclair does, say on immigration, and you donât look at the numbers and you donât reflect on what has been going on, that is different than a news story. That is a political talking point,â said Anne Nelson, journalist and author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.
While local newspapers have seen their subscription and advertising numbers decline significantly over the last couple decades, their TV counterparts remain the most common source of local news â outside of personal contacts â and their advertising revenue has remained relatively stable, according to the Pew Research Center
An exclusive Wall Street Journal story, Inside Disneyâs Abrupt Decision to Suspend Jimmy Kimmelâs Show, reports Disney did very briefly consider showing some spine:
Advertisers and affiliates soon called the network expressing concern about Kimmelâs show. Executives at Sinclair and Nexstar, owners of more than 60 local ABC stations, told network leaders after Carrâs remarks that they would âindefinitely preemptâ the show starting that night, moves that would hobble the programâs reach.
Kimmel had planned to address Carrâs comments on his show Wednesday night, according to people familiar with the matter. Before his on-air appearance, Dana Walden, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, spoke to the host about his plan, the people said.
After the conversation between Kimmel and Walden, she and other senior executives thought that the starâs approach could make the situation worse, people familiar with their conversations said. Executives also discussed staff safety, including threatening emails staff on Kimmelâs show had received after Carrâs remarks and the posting of some of their personal information online, the people said….
A person close to the show said that Kimmel was planning to say that his words were being purposefully twisted by some members of the Make America Great Again movement.
The Carr salvo is likely to impose dhard costs on ABC. Again form the Journal:
ABC, which was in the middle of planning a live show featuring Kimmel expected to be filmed in Brooklyn, N.Y., later this month, scrambled to satisfy advertisers who had paid for commercials to run on episodes that were canceled. Advertising buyers said they likely would shift ad dollars committed to Kimmelâs show to other programs, with some considering asking for some money back.
So from a commercial standpoint, Disney’s position was untenable. It was hit not just with the Nextar and Sinclair refusal to run Kimmel, but also advertiser threats to pull commercials and risks to staff, which were potent due to decent odds of success in doxxing efforts. Let us not forget that Trump got CBS to agree to cancel Stephen Colbert when his contract expires in 2026. Colbert tried getting a bit of revenge:
đ¨NEW: "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" just dropped its first response to ABC, FCC chair, and Disney firing Jimmy Kimmel.
Trump ain't sleeping tonight. đ¤Ł
This is a must-watch. đĽ
— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) September 19, 2025
So we have an example of how a President can very quickly bring large media to heel. Even though the FCC’s life-or-death power over broadcast stations is more than enough, Disney was also faced the Carr distortion of Kimmel’s remarks as succeeding in whipping up parallel advertiser and Trump-loyalist action. Mind you, this comes after other corporate capitulations where Trump had less leverage, namely his personal attack on new Intel chief Lip-Bu Tan as a Chinese stooge (Tan is in fact Singaporean), which led to the company giving the government a 10% stake.
Democrats are up in arms, but the most they can inflict, at least until the midterms if they manage to claw back a House majority, is a wet noodle lashing:
I call for Brendan Carrâs resignation. Censoring Jimmy Kimmel goes to the core of suppressing free speech in this country. Trumpâthrough his lapdog chair of the FCCâis creating the fear & intimidation that serves an instrument of authoritarian power. pic.twitter.com/NO6d7x8tPE
— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) September 18, 2025
Nevertheless, when Mayo Pete comes off as sound, you know it’s bad:
What's happening with Jimmy Kimmel is about politics and power.
Any corporation that thinks they can win by playing Trump's game will wind up regretting it, sooner or later, because he will never have enough. pic.twitter.com/158YMxJVYe
— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) September 19, 2025
Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks were purely critical. He neither insulted the deceased nor condoned murder. Therefore, firing him was an overreaction.
It looks like you did not read the post, or at least not with sufficient care. FCC chair Carr told the “licensed” broadcasters that Kimmel was not consistent with the needs of local communities. That is a threat to revoke licenses, which is existential. Advertisers were threatening to pull ads. ABC staffers were being threatened and doxxing was starting.
The New York Times unpacks the licensing matter in a new article. The Grey Lady harbors no doubts about the threat to yank licenses. From the top of its article:
https://archive.is/bEsLK
The Trump Administration was in a position to browbeat ABC and Disney into compliance. Look how they did with universities. And the hardcore Trump backers are rallying much more solidly behind the Charlie Kirk martyrdom than they were behind the “take the woke unis down a lot of pegs” project.
Now admittedly, since I have had a cable network as a client and have gotten buzzword compatible, perhaps it was easier for me to grasp what Carr was saying. But the text of the post clearly and repeatedly said that Carr was threatening to revoke licenses and that was an existential threat.
His knee jerk accusation that MAGA killed Kirk is as offensive as the knee jerk suggestion that a leftie or vast left conspiracy did it. Perhaps if Kimmel had been given the chance he would say that MAGA opposition to gun control did it, but I find Kimmel’s smug political pronouncements annoying even though I never watched his show.
As for the broadcast license question, entertainers have always had political views but in the past you wouldn’t hear rightwinger Bob Hope directly attacking a president. In a more bipartisan time Carson made lots of jokes about politicians but he didn’t do it either.
To be sure that was a different time when the three networks were all important to the US media scene whereas now they are increasingly less important given all the competition from other forms of video. But this isn’t the first time an administration has pushed back at the networks and Nixon and Agnew made it a theme.
The story I saw in Deadline says Kimmel isn’t necessarily fired and that Disney hopes to bring him back. They may have wanted some kind of apology which he, being a person of such importance (/s), refused to give.
But if affiliates including the very rightwing Sinclair are against him then he may be done. They aren’t required to take ABC’s shows.
It appears you do not follow much comedy. Comedians here, including ones with big audiences, regularly savage politicians.
Just for color, wasnât it the politically correct police, acolytes to team blue, that began the war on comedy?
Absolutely not. The âwar on comedyâ came from two flanks:
1. College kids boycotting their money being used to platform comedians they didnât like. (Free speech of the students to determine how their organization distributes money)
2. Comedians who lost deals due to scandals, usually of the sexual assault or racist kind.
Please point me to someone who lost their platform simply for being critical of Biden. Iâll wait.
Shane Gillis, cancelled for racist comedy in 2019
Joe Rogan, cancelled for being critical of covid vaccines and using racial slurs
Kevin Hart, for homophobic tweets in ’18
Dave Chapelle, for poking fun at the trans community.
Note I did not specify critical of Biden
I don’t know what your criteria for “cancelled” are, given that all four of them still have wildly successful ongoing careers. The only way this makes any sense is if you think that “being cancelled” means simply receiving any criticism or backlash, in which case, artists have been “getting cancelled” since Ancient Greece.
You have a point which questions the efficacy “cancelling”. All of the above lost income and employability at the time.
In addition to losing scheduled performances, Chappelle went into a temporary retirement. His bounce back was driven in part by his immeasurable talent, in part by the waning influence of the vocal face of the trans community. From the LA Times, Dec 12, 2022, The uncancelable comedy of Dave Chappelle.
In the end, Joe Rogan was too profitable to cancel. Spotify resigned him.
Kvin Hart had to step down from hosting the Oscars.
Shane Gillis got dumped by SNL.
I wager that all four being “A-List” would explain their careers surviving.
I’m just saying that the US broadcast networks have always been subject to regulation and particularly when it comes to the tricky business of political partisanship where they are supposed to be neutral given their use of public spectrum. The Republicans in particular did loosen all those rules on the argument that times have changed and there are now many more outlets for news and opinion. So attack Trump and Republican hypocrisy by all means but the precedents are there.
You need to stop Making Shit Up and start using a search engine. I do not have time to clean up your repeated misinforming of readers.
The Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987, FFS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
Fox is not neutral. CNN is regularly called the Clinton News Network
Just to add, as my brother points out, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine also affected AM radio and gave rise to the era of Rush Limbaugh with great political consequences.
In other words the Fairness Doctrine was a good thing and protector of “the commons.” That’s why the Reaganites and privatizers wanted to get rid of it.
This is shifting grounds and bad faith argumentation. This is what you said:
“…US broadcast networks have always been subject to regulation and particularly when it comes to the tricky business of political partisanship where they are supposed to be neutral given their use of public spectrum.”
That is false. The fact that the Fairness Doctrine was a very good policy, particularly given that licensing is government controlled and thus ideally broadcasters should not be show partisan bias is completely separate and apart from the inaccuracy of your original claim. You are accumulating troll points.
I am old enough to have fond memories of those, “And now for an opposing point of view” commentaries.
I also have fond memories of those “Do you know where your children are?” PSAs….
I am in no way saying the new normal is good. I am saying what Carolinian said about the regs is flat out wrong.
Is another end goal here to get rid of free, antenna TV altogether?
Killing Late Night.
Moving NFL to Streaming.
Thanks for the post!
I never liked Jimmy Kimmel anyway but I hear his show threw great live performances for free in LA with his guests often performing 5 songs!
When the purpose of a media organisation is purely profit, it is easy for the state (or a mob) to apply pressure.
One more reason I stick to blogs such as this one :)
Thanks for the kind words BUT you read the post? The Trump Administration made an existential threat. This goes beyond the notion of “purely profit”.
The Trump Administration could exterminate Nextstar by revoking licenses. Kimmel was merely syndicated content, not something they produced and therefore could control. Why should they die on the hill of a mere syndicated show, particularly when advertisers were also upset? You can bet that nasty letters and e-mails from viewers would follow. And Nextstar execs and station managers and employees could be doxxed and hounded.
Hence the “brownshirting” in the headline.
I didn’t intend to ignore your thesis which I fully agree with. I spend more time than is healthy studying the brownshirting as it unfolds.
More, I meant there is an easy pressure point, and I always expect media organisations to be very ready to sacrifice ‘values’ if profit is threatened. In retrospect it wasn’t really a point worth making in this context :)
At the risk of superfluousness (yikes), from ‘The Economist’: Why MAGA loves Viktor Orban
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Iz7uYJwBpIY
No mention of Orban inviting Bibi to visit Hungary and exiting ICC. In Orban’s mind, he likely regrets for not genociding the Romanians in Transylvania when they had the opportunity.
Colbert and Kimmel were on the front lines promoting the Covid vaccine.
And what does that have to do with free speech? The ACLU would go to court in support of the First Amendment rights of parties most would consider vile, such as Nazi sympathizers and Klu Klux Klan members, because they still have a right to express their beliefs, even if heinous. See Defending Speech We Hate for details.
So parties you don’t like should be canceled? You are all on board with authoritarianism? After all, it was the Biden Administration that made it hard for media outlets and even doctors to buck the narrative. So if the Dems are back in power, you are on board with them censoring views they don’t like?
This is also a textbook example of the cognitive bias called halo effect, of needing to see people as all good or all bad. One manifestation is pretty individuals are seen as smarter than they are.
And even having gotten a vaccine injury with J&J I don’t think that promoting them during wild type was unreasonable. What was unreasonable were all the claims about their safety when that had not been adequately tested, particularly for the novel mRNA platform, and the pressure on employers to have all their staff get vaccinated (such as with airlines). There was a lack of informed consent. I would still get the shot again since I had a medical procedure done in the period when Delta was supplanting wild type. My injury, which resulted in a second procedure (this one outpatient) would still be less bad, IMHO, than the long term consequences of getting Covid (which I believe but cannot be sure I have not gotten).
It took 2-3 weeks of coughing your lungs out to die under wild type. That means they very sick and dying were tying up hospital beds (as well as infecting staff). 24-60 hour waits to get seen by an ER doctor for things like strokes and heart attacks were common. There were also big delays in getting surgeries since doctors were tasked to handling Covid (this happened at the NYC Hospital for Special Surgery, which does only orthopedic procedures; their staff were turned over to Covid during the worst of the first big wave).
So all sorts of non-Covid patients were put at risk too, some severe risk (ER cases).
thank you. These days Matt Taibbi champions the cause of Battacharya et al. I recall from a few years ago a piece from him on how the current ACLU is a shadow of its former self and probably wouldnât go to bat for the Nazis to march in Skokie, which was a high point in the history of protecting the Constitution imho. I guess those would be consistent views if only he was calling out the right as well as the left for their censorship. I am sorry the IRS went to his house while the Dems grilled and insulted him at the Twitter files hearing but I am not going to renew my paid subscription to Racket. Matt Stollerâs post on Kimmel was far more informative than Taibbiâs.
Taibbi isn’t giving them a pass- https://www.racket.news/p/after-charlie-kirks-murder-elite
After describing the censorship machinery created by Democrats during the Biden administration, he says –
“It will be the mother of all disasters if Republicans take the cheese and try to appropriate this machinery for themselves. The political gains will be temporary, but the tools for a crackdown will become permanent.”
But has he condemned the FCC’s recent action re Kimmel?
I think it would be implied with the quote I highlighted, and there was another recent piece – https://www.racket.news/p/note-on-jimmy-kimmel He writes-
“But acting so quickly after Carrâs âeasy way or the hard wayâ line opens a can of worms. Now the organic demise of legacy media (definitely happening, and at lightning speed too) canât be an unmuddied story. What Carr described would reimagine the FCC as a press regulator in a full-on truth-arbiter role, in the spirit of Britainâs hated OfCom. That feels like a big jump from where the Administration was in February, when J.D. Vance lambasted Europeans in Munich for losing sight of basic tenets of democracy, including the âfreedom⌠to make mistakes.â Either way, wild news; Walter and I will talk it through on the next America This Week.”
That may not be as harsh a criticism as some might like, but it sure doesn’t sound like an endorsement of the FCC’s actions. The new podcast just got posted so I don’t know what he says there yet.
Taibbi did address criticisms years ago that he wasn’t hard enough on Trump by noting that pretty much the entire media establishment piled on Trump every day and since they had it covered, he didn’t feel the need to pile on just because. Personally, I respect him for that stance – if I wanted constant Trump Derangement Syndrome, I’d watch CNN instead of reading NC!
Harshly condemning Trump if he deserves it isn’t TDS. I’d say Yves’ post is pretty harsh. If he’s saying he doesn’t need to condemn it because other outlets have it covered, that’s a cop out. That said, I’ll wait to see what more he says about it. Anyway, since he rarely criticizes Trump, maybe he doesn’t have anything to worry about by a crackdown on free speech. I don’t have much respect for him anymore but his takedown of Russiagate was necessary.
NC over CNN? NC of course! Absolutely no contest. I never watch CNN, except for a clip here and there, on polling or something.
And I just read Stoller’s piece – https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/on-jimmy-kimmel-its-time-to-destroy. His call for a repeal of the 1996 Telecommunications Act and his prescription for how to regulate going forward is excellent. Stoller is great on antitrust but I think that fact that Lina Khan was allowed to try to do something about increasing monopolization as FTC, and the fact that he has always been a pretty big Democrat party cheerleader has clouded his thinking. Did Biden or any Democrat party higher up ever tout Khan accomplishments when they were running for election? The only reason I even knew about her was due to Stoller’s reporting, but Stoller never calls out party leadership for their lack of support. Here he tries giving the Biden administration a pass for their blatant censorship –
“Eventually, Elon Musk opened up Twitter internal records to a team or journalists, and they found nothing explicitly linking decision-making on law enforcement under President Biden to demands over content. It was things like a government official yelling at media official and asking him or her to moderate posts on Covid vaccines, without any underlying threat.”
I don’t think Taibbi would agree with that interpretation at all. I certainly don’t.
I don’t even think the non-self-cognizant Biden even knew what Khan was doing. If he did, he probably would have shut her down. Senator from VISA after all.
I made a factual statement. Has everything to do with free speech. I donât remember David Yeadon, Sucharit Bhakti et al appearing on any network late night âcomedyâ shows. Probably too dry.
How about the old adages Follow The Money coupled with Now You See It, Now You Donât with regard to Colbert and Kimmel? $ not there now.
When you are in a hole, stop digging.
First, your remark had absolutely nothing to do with free speech. There is no evidence whatsoever that the Biden Administration pressured Kimmel or Colbert to pump for the vaccines (not having watched them, I assume by making fun of the shot refusniks). Both carry themselves as loud and proud backers of PMC views all on their own.
Second, your comment was not factual. “On the front lines”? This is hyperbole.
Third, your remark was an ad hominem attack, to depict Kimmel as not worth of having his rights defended because he backed what you view as a bad cause. That is a violation of our written site Policies. I addressed that in part with my halo effect cognitive bias discussion.
While I don’t care what happens to jimmy kimmel, maybe this will start to wake people up to how seriously the establishment is controlling their lives. Talk shows have become just another venue to disseminate propaganda. They are as bad as “the news”.
What I wish was for people to gain the sense that the “commons”; i.e. the airwaves, the electromagnetic spectrum wavelengths, were SUPPOSED to belong to the people. The reason we have a FCC, is because the airwaves were the property of everyone and their posterity.
I always think the biggest problem we as a culture have is the incessant exposure to propaganda. The lies we are fed by “the news”, be it fox, or msnbc , or cnn… the garbage that has been from one end of the media to the other for this entire century has been unadulterated BS.
for all the ills we as earthlings face, the key to dealing with the myriad of issues would be for the vast majority of the population to be educated and informed with the correct information. Instead we have the opposite. Even the scripted shows have shown that they too are a tool for our masters. Remember, Trump is a consequence of media disinformation and a complicit media not living up to it’s role to inform the population about all the lies we are told.
If there is to be a revolution/evolution.. we have to take control of the FCC…. make it actually work for the good of the people… not just to subjugate them to continuous stream of lies.
Republicans and democrats…. a pox on both their houses.
Great article, Yves.
McCarthyism mainly aimed at politicians and the arts-not dissimilar from today’s approach, were regular Joes & Janes in danger of losing their livelihoods in those thrilling days of yesteryear before the internet?
It’s worth remembering that a lot of people in very wealthy Hollywood supported McCarthy. Check out the Cole Porter number in Silk Stockings: “I’ve Got the Red Blues.”
DeMille was a big rightwinger. Reagan of course and John Wayne were as well.
So the notion that the media are liberals is shaky at best.
Yes. I know of one. There were others, described here.
The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis: McCarthyism, Communism, and the Myth of Academic Freedom.
McCarthyism was also aimed at the Unions. There was a big strike wave in 1948 and big business wanted to destroy the left unions. Max Boot in his biography of Ronald Reagan goes into some detail about his work against some of the Hollywood craft unions. So yes McCarthyism did effect regular Joes & Janes. This story is largely forgotten. One exception the black beat poet, Bob Kaufman. In the 40s he was an organizer with National Maritime Union. He was black listed and started a second career as poet.
Gays and lesbians in government starting with the state department were also persecuted under the cover of fighting communism. What made this effort effective was the expectation of homosexual employees who were called in for interviews that it would be about communists spies, which was often welcomed by patriotic government employees, and they would be ambushed by questions about, and evidence of, their orientation. As with those accused of being communists, they were expected to betray others or else.
This makes me wonder just how serious Senator Joseph McCarthy and his aid Roy Cohn, who was extremely gay and known to be so especially as he had government agents drop off his newest, nightly boy toy while working for McCarthy, were about fighting the communist menace.
History really is stranger than fiction.
Broadcast exists at the behest of the government; yanking those licenses will end broadcast in its current form. Next, why not go after Internet for good measure. I can’t recall any administration making this kind of threat, maybe a bit of throat clearing and we get the Hayes Office or The Family Viewing Hour. This escalation is scary and I’m increasingly worried for us, but that worry began with the killing of Phil Donahue’s career, and later Roseanne. No Dems cried over their loss of free speech, indeed Dems throughout the 2000s promoted their own howling mob of cancel cultists. And here we are.
Thanks for mentioning Donahue, because that was an important turn. You might want to read up on the Twitter files, because the Biden administration intimidated internet companies until they censored posts deemed “misinformation” by “liberal” scolds. They shadow banned accounts, deleted thousands of others completely due to alleged “Russian influence”, and they also famously banned Trump from Twitter. As you noted, by and large Democrats cheered all this on. Or course banning Trump was what prompted Musk to buy Twitter and pushed those two together, which likely wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
What I heard from a lot of liberals then was that the government didn’t force anybody to do those things, that the government just made suggestions which those companies were free to ignore. These were private companies who could do what they wanted! Pretty naive defense if you ask me, because of course there was an implied threat there too. Now the tables are turned, and the “liberals” have forgotten all about their own behavior and don’t like what’s happening one bit. Too bad they didn’t stand on principle earlier; then maybe we wouldn’t be in the middle of this s*it show.
Also, I posted this one late yesterday and it’s worth repeating I think – Charlie Kirk’s producer seems to be one of the clearer heads in all this and after Paramount sort of removed a recent South park episode parodying Charlie Kirk, he asked for it to be put back up on free speech grounds, saying Kirk would not have approved of it being censored. Bravo.
Side note: I haven’t watched Kimmel or Colbert in years due to their massive cases of TDS but the clip Yves posted from Colbert above was really funny! And after his poorly thought out attempt to place political blame on Kirk’s shooter, the joke he told about Trump’s phony grief immediately after cracked me up. Maybe these two should try getting fired more often – it really improved their humor.
“Too bad they didnât stand on principle earlier; then maybe we wouldnât be in the middle of this s*it show.” Do Trump and the Republicans care about principle? We might be right where we are. If freedom of speech is a principle that Trump cares about, he should be protecting it.
Trump might never have gotten elected this time if the Democrats had not so blatantly censored and distorted over the previous four years.
There was explicit censorship not that long ago. I met Dan Rowan of Rowan and Martin on his houseboat in the Seine. He recounted what they had to do to code things in their scripts to get them past the censors. Recall that in the 1960s, bedrooms of married couples were shown as having twin beds.
I’ve been watching the first year of Laugh-In from 1968, and its amazing what they could say back in the day, a lot of it hidden in speech, but some of it in the wide open no doubt about it.
So much of the content wouldn’t fly today, such as Dick Martin’s lecherousness around any attractive woman, and various vaguely racist skits would bring on lawsuits!
I found it a breath of fresh air~
Back in the day 90 percent of comedy seemed to be ethnic humor. Even the beloved I Love Lucy was making fun of Ricky’s accent. There was racism to be sure and often very ugly racism but the “melting pot” idea was taken seriously.
Just to repeat Mel Brooks’ definition of comedy: “you fall in an open manhole hilarious–I get a paper cut a tragedy!” Comedy is cruel and a cathartic outlet for aggression.
When the Challenger crashed people were quickly making tasteless jokes about it. Now, as Taibbi has said, “woke” is the very antithesis of comedy. So it’s a bit much when Colbert makes tasteless jokes about Trump and Putin and then tenderly sucks up to the near vegetative Biden. Comedy is supposed to satirize and puncture hypocrisy, not be part of it.
America needs a thicker skin, all the way around.
Please stop already. Nothing Kimmel said was offensive. It showed Trump’s real lack of empathy for Kirk as he drooled over his gold-plated ball room, now in construction. Comics often make tasteless jokes about anything and everything, often crashing because it turns out flat.
People writing about WW2 airplane noseart make the point about how the Soviets and Nazis were very prudish about them. I wonder about that sometimes nowadays.
Between Laugh In and the Smothers Brothers, it was a golden age! Some of the stories that Tommy Smothers tells regarding … things … are fascinating.
The Smothers Brothers used to poke a lot of fun at LBJ- who clearly had a much better sense of humour than Trump – here is part of a letter he wrote to the brothers addressing their teasing:
https://www.threads.com/@david.heath.writer/post/DMa3TFpR-tw/lbj-wrote-a-letter-to-the-smothers-brothers-after-they-mocked-him-it-showed-matu?hl=en
Us humans are imitative creatures. It is no accident that one political gang imitates another and usually turns the flame just a bit higher. Tis a fact, Donnie’s gossamer integument is easily punctured. Does his amour propre leak out? What’s that old saying? If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. A truism. Then there is that immortal line of Jack Nicholson’s. “You can’t stand the truth.” Does this apply directly to Jimmy Kimmel’s words? It does not, but his words were an excuse not an issue as any thinking person knows. I would like to believe that there are corporations and other institutions that will stand up for principle. Looks unlikely. They never remember that the first payoff is followed by a larger one and than another still larger.
The sad fact of the matter is team Trump can and will do whatever they want. Similar to the cases of canceling grants (war on science), withholding fed funds (universities and âblueâ states), deportations, dispatching troops to city streets, firing federal employees, and bulldozing regulatory institutions, ABC is forced to consider the realities of the feral finster maxim âWhat are you going to do about it?â and find their options laughably impotent.
Antidotal but the MAGA people in my life/sphere (mainly family) have expressed concern about this move and how âthey are not the party of limiting speechâ
Also, where is the free speech maximalist Elon Musk in all of this?!
Musk has never been for free speech.
Yeah, especially with the courts willing to give this administration maximum leeway when it comes to exercising executive power, best case scenario for ABC was that they get their licenses back after multi-year litigation and/or change in administration.
It will be interesting to see how this develops in 2026, being the election year. Now that the test cases sailed through with a whimper, I’ll be curious to see how Trump will try to leverage this for election benefit next year.
Mayo Pete đ
And Richard Blumenthal of “I served in Vietnam” fame when he never left the USA.
The Democrats have a “gravitas gap/chasm”
I have no doubt of the threat to the license affecting “network” offerings. But not sure how it fits into the overall economics of broadcast television.
I have never been a cable subscriber nor any subscription streaming service, so mostly get content over the air “as God intended it”. (I did have Amazon Prime for a while as it provided some advantages in shipping to Hawaii, but didn’t use the video streaming service.)
Most broadcast licenses provide 3-4 different streams via ATSC 1.0 aka “digital” broadcast. I don’t know the economics of the secondary streams, which mostly are provided by outside programmers with brands like “AntennaTV”, “Grit”, “Tru Crime”, etc. I’m thinking Fox was one of the leaders with their “CW” format which provides original content.
In “prime time” network affiliates get about 2 hrs of programming, heavy on reality/game show unscripted content.
Locally much of the remainder is filled with local news/weather/sports.
Various factions have been promoting ATSC 3.0 aka “NextGen” which tries to duplicate more of a streaming experience with OTT and interactive aspects. There seems little consumer interest in NextGen and FCC hasn’t played much of a role unlike ATSC 1.0 which got constant promotion and subsidized converter boxes. What NextGen does provide is encryption and the ability to prevent recording/timeshifting resulting in what would be called here enshitification.
Of course federal government simply asserted it owned all the RF frequency spectrum, much like it asserted ownership of airspace.
Aside from NextGen the main action which I think is about complete is the “repacking” of broadcast spectrum, removing broadcast services from a chunk of the UHF spectrum so it could be resold.
As far as late night, have had no interest since Leno. Letterman et al seem to have offered a bland generic center Dem world view.
The federal government has to control broadcast spectrum just as they have to control air traffic. Otherwise you’d have planes crashing from both absences. This is true in every country and some only have govt owned television. In the UK the BBC is supposedly prohibited from showing partisanship toward the current govt but this has been challenged as here.
The clips of Vance berating Europe about free speech concerns was making the rounds on my twitter feed yesterday, for what itâs worth.
I also saw a clip of AOC appearing with Jen Psaki on her MSNBC show this week. The New York congresswoman was arguing that Tucker Carlson should not be allowed on network television because of the views he expresses. I think that is worth noting because she, along with our California governor have been noted as early frontrunners for the Dem presidential nomination.
I am a free speech absolutist. I think often of Thomas Jefferson saying that only the people can censor the government and that to do so they must be informed, so he would prefer the press with no government to government with no press. Speech is the right that makes other rights possible. People who profess reverence for the Constitution need to step up, regardless of party.
Ironically, AOC was calling for censorship of Tucker Carlson at almost the very moment that Carlson was using his online platform to condemn the Trump administration for using the Kirk shooting as a pretext for fascist repression of free speech. I view myself as left of center, and in my view, Carlson’s statement was far more in line with my views than AOC’s.
I do think that censorship is necessary for a ruling class to run an orderly state. Otherwise, opportunists will inevitably use their freedom to hoodwink the people with scams (the Youtube ads I’m getting are absolutely insane and exploitative and should be banned) and/or destabilize the current regime.
My whole life, America was a censored place where debate was carefully managed, though the powers that be for the most part censored with a hidden hand. Moneyed interests eroded the censorship system and began to degrade the people (gambling and pharma advertising), contributing to their loss of faith in the American regime. This in turn allowed opportunists and demagogs to further weaken sentiment.
By the time Biden got into office, it was clear the censorship system needed overhaul to rein in the social media influencers. However, the old regime was too weak to carry it out, the influencers too strong. Now that the demagogs are in power, for their own good they must try to institute their version of the Biden censorship.
If they’re successful, it will stabilize the regime around a new narrative/moral pretext. Once it gets going, the new censorship system will expand like any fresh institution and become a legitimizing tool, hopefully in time it can do some good by turning against forms of speech that degrade the people (like scams and gambling advertisements). But it’ll mostly do a lot of harm in the disciplining phase as many, many people are defenestrated and as the remainder fall into line.
As I’ve argued in the past, I believe no class can govern without censorship. Part and parcel with American decline is the failure of its old censorship system with constrained debate, ensuring the masses adhered to a general nationalistic script that kept them in the main loyal and stupid. Deviants were skillfully sidelined and demonized. Government priorities were accompanied by overwhelming propaganda campaigns, some beneficial (anti-smoking) and the rest abhorrent (prison, prison, prison).
Taibbi – Kirn
America This Week, Sept 19, 2025: Kimmel, Kirk, and The Speech Crisis Strikes Back
After years of First Amendment threats in the digital realm, Trumpâs FCC aims at the public airwaves. Also, wrapping up The Hound of the Baskervilles
30 min.
https://www.racket.news/p/america-this-week-sept-19-2025-kimmel
Then they came for the late night show comedians-but it was past my bedtime and I did not speak out.
Lulled to sleep by the gentle hum of the test pattern…
I just love the sound of irony in the morning.
Jeff Childress of Coffee and Covid made the following points today.
The Kimmel conflict generated a New York Times headline yesterday under the astonishing title:
“Democrats Pitch Bill to Protect Speech Targeted by Trump.” The article further stated:
“A summary of the bill entitled the No Political Enemies Act or NOPE outlined a series of legal protections for people targeted for political speech. It said the bill will create a specific legal defense for those targeted for political reasons and allow them to recover attorney fees if they were subject to government harassment for expressing their views. And it would make it easier to sue federal officials for abusing their power to silence critics.”
Childress argues that for twenty years Democrats kept a tight iron grip on media and Hollywood (being the party of micro aggressions, deplatforming, virtue signaling, social media censorship, hate speech and cancel culture) out of a credible threat of retaliation against them–you will be punished if you don’t play with us.
Now, conservatives are willing to play the same game. And ironically, now some Dems seem to be proposing some ideas, like the right to recover attorney fees, as a real solution to censorship.
Will wonders never cease.
“Narcissism is related to direct aggression following negative evaluation or rejection and this link may be explained via the theory of threatened egotism. . . . These ďŹndings suggest that narcissistic individuals are likely to act aggressively towards innocent others under conditions where there is uncertainty with regard to potential damage to their self-perceptions of superiority.” “The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States has elicited numerous opinions from mental health professionals, both in the media and in specialized magazines. Many of these observers assert that Trump clearly exhibits a Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).”
Good times ahead, for those sycophants who will profit from the changes, if power and influence becomes more concentrated and a population becomes more habituated to an authoritarian political style. Control of the media is a standard operating procedure that extends well beyond just OrbĂĄn: “According to press watchdog Reporters Without Borders, OrbĂĄn has used media buyouts by government-connected âoligarchsâ to build âa true media empire subject to his partyâs orders.â”
https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2024/how-hungarys-orban-uses-control-of-the-media-to-escape-scrutiny-and-keep-the-public-in-the-dark
Some individuals will most probably be thrilled out of their minds if such developments are fully implemented in the US ecosystem.
Lordy…. TV? Gave it up years ago. I was paying $1500/yr to watch commercials.
I think I clocked the national news content per program at about 13 1/2 minutes
per news hour. The rest was all commercials. The thing is, I’m very vulnerable to
commercials. I see a couple and immediately am overcome with the urge to BUY
something, anything. Of course there is exposure to ads on the internet as well.
The internet offers some indispensable services for modern life, such as weather
radar, Utube, craigslist, email, etc. Plus some ‘thinking’ sites such as this one.
Given the precipitous decline in Kimmel’s audience in recent years i can’t help but wonder if the largely faux upset over his remarkably stupid comment simply provided a convenient excuse for a decision that was coming soon anyway. and, on another related topic, i find it amusing that the same people who cheered the de-platforming of conservatives from Twitter and other outlets and such curiosities as he weaponization of the IRS against right leaning organizations have suddenly become first amendment absolutists.
little wheel spin and spin while the big wheel is turning round and round.
Can you cite an example of someone who cheered de-platforming of conservatives and now claims to be a free speech absolutist? I canât think of any. When I think free speech absolutist (or maximalist) the public figures that come to mind immediately are Taibbi and Greenwald. Neither supported censorship of conservatives, both condemned it in fact.
The surprise to me in sticking up for constitutional speech rights for âthe left?â Ted Cruz. Of all people.
Contrast that with Jim Cramer who commented today that free speech wasnât very strong because it was just an amendment.