Two wrongs don’t make a right and Republicans are wrong to try and silence their opponents
In the latest sign that Donald Trump’s administration is willing to pressure broadcasters in much the same way the Biden White House pressured social-media platforms (of which, more later), Jimmy Kimmel’s long-running late-night ABC show has been pulled from the air. The cancellation came after the comedian — and four-times Oscars host — mocked the President’s response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Immediately following the shooting, Kimmel criticised those on the left who “are cheering this, which is something I won’t ever understand”. But he also condemned Trump’s failure to “at least make an attempt to bring us together. President Obama did. President Biden did. Presidents Bush and Clinton did. President Trump did not. Instead, he blamed Democrats for their rhetoric.”
The final straw, however, seems to have come a few days later when Kimmel attacked “the MAGA gang” for “desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it”. He then ridiculed Trump’s own reaction — in which the President, asked how he was holding up, replied “very good”, before quickly segueing into an update on the building of a new $200 million White House ballroom. “He’s at the fourth stage of grief, construction,” joked Kimmel, adding: “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
Following a storm of criticism across the MAGA media ecosystem, ABC said Jimmy Kimmel Live! would be suspended “indefinitely” after Nexstar Media, one of America’s largest owners of local television stations, announced it would no longer carry the programme. Nexstar said it had made its decision because it “strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk”.
It’s true that companies such as ABC and Nexstar are not bound by the First Amendment: the Constitution protects them from being compelled to carry speech they don’t want to carry, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed broadcasters’ right to exercise editorial judgment. In light of that, Kimmel’s suspension might look like nothing more than a network making a business call about its output. But because broadcast networks operate under licences granted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the line between private discretion and government oversight has never been clear — and it certainly seems pretty blurred in this case.
In a threat that can’t really be called veiled, Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the FCC, said in an interview with a conservative podcaster that Disney — ABC’s parent company — needed to “take action” against Kimmel: “This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. They have a licence granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest.”
Not only that, but Nexstar happens to be in the middle of a $6.2 billion merger with media company Tegna which requires federal approval — and it’s hard to ignore the fact that just half an hour after dropping Kimmel, Nexstar confirmed it would be filing its merger application with the FCC.
Meanwhile, Trump hailed Kimmel’s axing as “great news for America”. On Truth Social he crowed: “The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.” He then appeared to call for two other late-night hosts, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers — both trenchant Trump critics — to be taken off the air by their network. “That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC,” the President wrote. “Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”
This, you might think, is a slightly odd way to talk for someone who hawks his free speech credentials at every opportunity. Unfortunately, Trump has form in this area. During the period between his two presidencies, he made at least 15 public calls for the FCC to revoke the broadcast licences of national television stations. He also stated that Comcast — the parent company of NBC News and MSNBC — should be “investigated for its ‘Country Threatening Treason’”.
“I say up front, openly, and proudly,” he went on, “that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinised for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things and events.”
Moreover, Trump has repeatedly said that New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) — the Supreme Court ruling that shields the press from frivolous defamation claims by public officials — should be “revisited”. That case famously recognised that “erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate” and “must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the breathing space that they need… to survive”. Rolling back Sullivan would strip away one of the central legal protections that prevent powerful figures from intimidating the press through litigation.
On the UK right, criticising the Trump administration for its approach to media freedom isn’t fashionable at the moment, given his casting of himself as such a champion of free speech. At times, he’s even seen as Britain’s saviour, the king over the ocean, pitted against an authoritarian Labour government that’s turning the country into the “North Korea of the North Sea” [yawn, etc]. But for those who truly care about principle rather than grinding their enemies into the culture-war dust, it’s impossible to avoid uncomfortable truths. Strip away the contextual details, and the parallels with the Biden administration — and what its critics dubbed the “censorship industrial complex” — are as obvious as they are troubling.
Back in 2021, for instance, after Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an official health advisory on Covid misinformation, Biden’s Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced from the podium that the White House was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook”. Psaki’s threat wasn’t terribly veiled either. “Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful violative posts,” she said, adding mention of “legal consequences” for not censoring such misinformation and “a robust anti-trust program” supported by the President.
Indeed, two years later, in a blistering 155-page ruling in Missouri v. Biden, Federal Judge Terry Doughty found “substantial evidence” of an entire censorship-by-proxy scheme. “Faced with unrelenting pressure from the most powerful office in the world, the social-media companies apparently complied,” he wrote, highlighting Facebook’s admission that it had banned posts that “did not violate” its policies at the White House’s demand. All in all, Doughty concluded, the Biden Administration had launched “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history” in an “almost dystopian scenario” of government-corporate collusion.
The political colours may have changed, but the strategy is the same: bullying private companies into suppressing disfavoured speech
Which, I’m afraid, brings us back to Trump. The political colours may have changed, but the strategy is the same: bullying private companies into suppressing disfavoured speech. If we condemned it then, we must condemn it now. Free speech matters most when it protects voices you dislike. It would be wrong to see in Orwell’s ending to Animal Farm simply a parable about communism: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” What we have here is a more general warning about what happens when supposed principles are hollowed out in favour of brute power until only rhetoric — in this case, Trump’s about free speech — remains.
When governments reach for such power to silence their critics, they take the shortcut of coercion over the long road of debate and persuasion — and at that point, it scarcely matters whether the hand on the lever belongs to pigs or men, Democrats or Republicans.
