Maybe now our progressive friends understand why these columns oppose government control of business and fought liberal cancel culture.
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As a private company, Disney has the right to run or cancel shows as it wishes. Perhaps in this case it saw pressure from government as an excuse to drop Mr. Kimmel, who had turned his show into a daily anti-Trump diatribe. But anyone who thinks this is the free market at work is ignoring the ways government can punish companies. Disney’s executives had to look out for the best interests of their shareholders and the Disney brand.
All the more so given how Mr. Trump has pursued retribution against political opponents in his second term. He’s used regulatory leverage against Paramount and CBS in a weak lawsuit and squeezed liberal law firms to do pro bono work, while the Justice Department is investigating prosecutors who brought cases against him. A regulator like Mr. Carr who might have ignored Mr. Trump’s musings about revenge in the first term doesn’t need direct orders in the second.
The squeeze on Disney looks to be a case of cancel culture on the right. Mr. Kimmel’s comments Monday associating Charlie Kirk’s killer with the “MAGA gang” were false, callous and stupid. But they weren’t inciting violence, and in a free society they shouldn’t be cause for the government to push someone off the airwaves. Compared to the malevolent garbage on social media about Kirk and his killer, Mr. Kimmel’s words were only mildly offensive.
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As victims of cancel culture for so long, conservatives more than anyone should oppose it. They will surely be the targets again when the left returns to power.
That’s why these columns have urged Mr. Carr and Congress to pursue deregulation of the airwaves. The agency’s power over broadcast networks is an artifact of the era when there were only three networks, and they ceased broadcasting each night. The FCC doesn’t regulate cable-TV or the internet, though many Democrats argued for both when they controlled Washington. Imagine what the Carr FCC would now be doing had the left succeeded.
The political cycle of using government to punish opponents is taking the country into dark corners that will result in less freedom, and less free speech, for all sides. The best immediate remedy is getting the FCC out of the business of regulating media.
Thomas Berry puts the matter this way: “The government shouldn’t play ‘truth police.'”
And so, on Wednesday night, both Nexstar and Sinclair Broadcast Group—another major telecommunications company—informed ABC that they would not air Kimmel on their affiliate stations. ABC then opted to place the show on indefinite hiatus. (Disclaimer: Nexstar owns Rising, the news show I host for The Hill.)
This is outrageous. Not because Kimmel is gone: Private companies have the right to determine their programming as they see fit, and a washed-up comedian telling lame jokes about a subject he is clearly misinformed on—for a declining number of viewers, as part of a media format that is antiquated and perpetually losing money—is not a recipe for riveting television. Letting Kimmel and the rest of the late night crowd go extinct is perfectly fine. It’s a business decision.
But it shouldn’t be a government decision. By inserting itself into the controversy and appearing to twist the arms of private companies so that they would make editorial decisions that please the Trump administration, the FCC is clearly engaged in a kind of censorship.
As Glenn Greenwald put it, “This shouldn’t be a complicated or difficult dichotomy to understand. Jimmy Kimmel is repulsive, but the state has no role in threatening companies to fire on-air voices it dislikes or who the state believes is spreading “disinformation,” which is exactly what happened here.”
Moreover, the Trump administrations actions are functionally equivalent to the Biden administration’s attacks on private social media companies, which caused numerous free speech infringements during the COVID-19 pandemic. I explored this subject in great detail in my March 2023 cover story for Reason, “How the CDC Became the Speech Police,” which explored federal officials efforts to coerce Facebook, Google, and X into taking down content. In that article, I reported that social media companies routinely felt compelled to compromise their explicit terms of service as well as their stated commitments to free speech in order to appease both the CDC and the White House itself. I pointed out that threats by President Biden—who accused Facebook of “killing people” when it declined to censor anti-vaccine content—as well as his comms staffers were likely motivating factors behind a whole host of regrettable moderation decisions.
Andrew McCarthy properly reminds progressives that ‘we told you so.’ A slice:
More than a dozen years ago, the Obama administration joined with Turkey’s despotic strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and other sharia-supremacist regimes to craft United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18. The provision bound the concurring governments to enact laws that would prohibit speech or expression that could incite mere hostility to religion. And as should go without saying when it came to the Obama administration, there was only one religion under consideration for this special dispensation — Islam.
Many of us pointed out that an American codification of Resolution 16/18 would be unconstitutional. This was so patently true that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, playing point on the speech-suppression effort and planning a 2016 presidential run, had to backpedal. Finally, she vowed, law or no law, that the Obama administration would “use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.”
Yup. If such annoyances as the First Amendment directly obstructed (by legislation and regulation) accomplishment of the left’s Islamist-friendly wish list directly, then they would achieve it indirectly, by extortion and intimidation. It would be government by extralegal pressure tactics and signals to the radical mob — as when Obama bent bank executives to his will with the blunt warning at a White House meeting: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” It was the administration that moved Alinskyite strongarm “direct action” tactics from the street into the administrative bureaucracy.
To my horrified friends on the left, though, I feel compelled to ask a different question. Now do you understand why all speech is worth defending?
Like some conservative writers and a handful of hardy liberals, I’ve written repeatedly over the past several years about the threat to free expression from the left. Since 2020, we’ve seen White journalists and academics punished just for repeating words that qualified as “hate speech”; the issuance of inoffensive language manuals by groups such as the American Medical Association and the Sierra Club; and the removal of books from library shelves and bookstores because they trafficked in uncomfortable stereotypes, or because the authors were said to be bad people.
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I’ve often encountered another argument that’s particularly popular among the young and the academic: that free speech as a concept has been fetishized by the powerful, who use it mostly as a tool to oppress those with less resonant voices in society. Why was my right to say whatever popped into my head, they asked me, more sacred than someone else’s right to feel safe and included?
Well, to paraphrase one of my favorite lines from “Hamilton”: If you don’t know, now you know. Protecting speech from outside forces that would quash it — even when the speech is stupid and heinous, and even when the censorship is lawful — matters because the quashing never ends there.
On Monday, the predictably left-leaning late-night host opened his show by saying America had hit “new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
Conservatives reasonably interpreted this as a reference to the implausible theory that Kirk’s killer was a far-right “groyper” rather than some flavor of left-winger. Kimmel’s writers might have been spending too much time in the progressive fever swamps. But Americans don’t need federal regulators to tell them what jokes are funny or what programming to watch. The market can take care of that. It already was in the case of Kimmel, who had seen a decline in ratingsand relevance in recent years.
Enter FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who sees things differently. On Wednesday, he suggested on a podcast that ABC affiliates that air Kimmel might lose their FCC licenses. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Hours later, Kimmel’s show was suspended indefinitely.
This government coercion violates the First Amendment. The government can’t block speech because it’s politically offensive. Nor can it do an end run around that prohibition by enlisting third parties to do the dirty work. You might think the FCC is a wholesale exception to this rule, given that it regulates broadcast television. You’d be incorrect. “The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest,’” noted an expert in 2019 — a fellow by the name of Brandon Carr
Juliette Sellgren talk with Tom Palmer about authoritarianism.
