Wednesday I published a column responding to the Trump administration’s opportunistic crackdown on dissent following Charlie Kirk’s horrific assassination: “What’s needed now is courage,” I wrote. “Corporations, nonprofits, colleges and other institutions must understand — if it isn’t evident already — that capitulation will not save you. This is a lawless bandit of an administration that disdains the First Amendment as much as any other constitutional limit on the federal government’s power, no matter how much it brands itself a champion of free speech.”
Almost on cue, ABC demonstrated my point and suspended late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for comments he made in a monologue that seemed to characterize Kirk’s assassin as “one of them” — referring to the MAGA movement — though there was no evidence of that at the time, and the charging documents released Tuesday, a day after Kimmel made these comments, suggest the suspect was deeply ideologically opposed to Kirk. That suspension followed an explicit threat to the companies that broadcast Kimmel’s show from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr.
America, say these words aloud: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Does this sound like a request?
Let’s be very clear about what happened: A government official, who openly disdains “mainstream media” and has already used his bully pulpit to influence companies’ news coverage — such as when the FCC approved the Paramount-Skydance merger only after CBS News agreed to install a “bias monitor,” who turned out to be a Trump-supporting, conservative think tank veteran with no journalistic experience — leaned on a corporation to silence a comedian for saying things the government official doesn’t like.
It’s called “jawboning,” and it doesn’t matter if a private company is the entity that ultimately took Kimmel off the air. That entity did so under duress from the government. This is censorship.
Earlier Wednesday, Carr gave an interview to MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson, a well-known serial plagiarist and propagator of false conspiracy theories, also known as lies. Carr characterized Kimmel’s comments from two days earlier as lies and said the late-night host was “frankly talentless and [is] looking for ways to get attention.”
The comedy critic who happens to hold the power to halt corporate media mergers and revoke broadcasting licenses also used the menacing language of a black hat-wearing villain in an old Hollywood Western film when he told Johnson, “When we see stuff like this, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” sounding every bit the enforcer of what I am even more justified in calling a “lawless bandit of an administration.” Carr added, “These companies can find ways to change conduct, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
America, say these words aloud: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Does this sound like a request?
Let’s dig into Carr’s reasoning for why he believes FCC action would have been appropriate. He said: “We have a rule on the books that interprets a public interest standard that says news distortion is something that is prohibited. Likewise, we have a rule that addresses broadcast hoaxes, and so again, over the years, the FCC has stepped back from enforcing it, and I don’t think it’s been to the benefit of anybody. Just look at the credibility of these legacy media.”
Shortly after Carr’s threat, Nexstar — which has a pending merger deal that is subject to FCC approval — announced it was pulling Kimmel’s show from the ABC affiliate stations it owns. Hours later, ABC “indefinitely” pulled the plug on Kimmel’s show entirely.
Carr gloated to media reporters by sending cheeky GIFs. President Donald Trump celebrated that Kimmel had joined the recently canceled Stephen Colbert (Kimmel’s show has not, to date, been canceled) and called on NBC to cancel Jimmy Fallon’s and Seth Meyers’ late-night shows, as well.
The FCC chair justified his intervention by invoking the “public interest,” but during the first Trump administration he tweeted: “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.’”
The comedy critic who happens to hold the power to halt corporate media mergers and revoke broadcasting licenses used the menacing language of a black hat-wearing villain in an old Hollywood Western film.
In 2022, Elon Musk released the “Twitter Files” after allowing a small group of hand-picked journalists to read internal communications from before he purchased Twitter (now known as X). The files showed members of both the Trump and Biden administrations jawboned the company in hopes of getting it to moderate content to their liking. But despite the outrage ginned up by Musk and MAGA, people who actually understood what they were reading in the “Twitter Files” raw material found that while the company did submit to demands in some cases, for the most part, Twitter told both administrations to pound sand.
It was jawboning, for sure — an attempt to coerce self-censorship. But it was a largely unsuccessful attempt at censorship.
What is happening now is actual, successful, speech-chilling censorship. And it shows what may just be a preview of the levels to which the Trump administration is trying to make a “Reichstag fire” moment out of Kirk’s assassination — exploiting the fears of a traumatized public to use government power to silence political dissent. I expect the MAGA thought police and their civility cop allies will take issue with the comparison, but the historical precedents are there.
For good measure, Benny Johnson posted after Kimmel’s suspension: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re just getting started.” And Sinclair, the largest owner of ABC affiliates, in a statement Thursday called for the FCC to “take immediate regulatory action to address control held over local broadcasters by the big national networks” and demanded Kimmel “issue a direct apology to the Kirk family” and “make a meaningful personal donation to the Kirk Family and Turning Point USA,” adding that even if ABC puts Kimmel back in the air, Sinclair stations won’t “until we are confident that appropriate steps have been taken to uphold the standards expected of a national broadcast platform.” And speaking on “The Scott Jennings Radio Show” on Thursday, Carr suggested he might pursue FCC intervention into ABC’s “The View.”
As I also wrote Wednesday, “America doesn’t have time to litigate the double standards; the future of free expression in this country is at stake.”
This is not a time to “both sides” the censorious tendencies of Democrats and Republicans. This is a time to choose sides — between free speech for all and submitting to the ideological thugs who currently run the most powerful government in the world.
