“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” said Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, as he plunged the nation into a bad episode of “The Outer Limits“: For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear.
Carr didn’t explain why that was an opinion the federal government could not tolerate. Only that he would rain down the full fury of the FCC if the network kept Kimmel on the air and yank the broadcast license of any television station that ran the wrong episode of late night TV.
Cowed, ABC and its parent company, Disney, indefinitely canned “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” as the president celebrated the second cancellation this year of a talk show that once made jokes at his expense. Trump called for a complete late-night purge.
“That leaves Jimmy [Fallon] and Seth [Meyers], two total losers, on Fake News NBC,” the president posed on his social media site, Truth Social. “Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT.”
It doesn’t matter if you like watching the Tonight Show. The president wants the Tonight Show off the air, and so far no one has been able to stop him from imposing his personal preferences on America.
Trump purged the Kennedy Center so he could hand out awards to the artists he liked. He rewrote history in national parks and tried to get museums to edit out uncomfortable truths — like the scarred, scourged backs of enslaved men or the Smithsonian’s full tally of presidential impeachments. He paved over the Rose Garden and felled ancient trees to build a ballroom on to the White House.
“We’re not done yet,” Carr said Thursday on CNBC. “No, it’s not any particular show or any particular person. It’s just we’re in the midst of a very disruptive moment right now, and I just, frankly, expect that we’re going to continue to see changes in the media ecosystem.”
The FCC has refused to renew a television station’s broadcast license exactly once in its history, in 1969. WLBT in Mississippi had spent a decade refusing to allow Black people on the airwaves. For 10 years, the station had refused to air network programs it considered “Negro propaganda,” or sell ad time to Black candidates. It once threw up a phony “technical difficulties” alert so it wouldn’t have to air footage of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall explaining the Brown v. Board of Education decision that integrated American schools.
Now Carr is insisting that the same sanctions should be applied to media that make people “upset.” Kimmel had upset people by trying to attribute right-wing motives to the gunman. Trump blamed the assassination on “a radical left group of lunatics” and suggested imprisoning 95-year-old Democratic donor George Soros for donating to “corrupt causes.”
“The issue that arose here, where lots and lots of people were upset, was not a joke,” Carr said Thursday on CNBC. “It was appearing to directly mislead the American public about a significant fact that probably one of the most significant political events we’ve had in a long time, for the most significant political assassination we’ve seen in a long time.”
This marked a sharp shift in worldview for Carr, who just a few years earlier had roared to the defense after the conservative satire site The Babylon Bee was suspended for violating Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct.
“Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech,” he tweeted in 2022. “It challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people in to the discussion. That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.”
President Donald Trump said Thursday that he was ”tremendously thankful” for the pageantry and splendor lavished on him during his second state visit to the United Kingdom as he wrapped up a trip that largely sidestepped major public disagreements over difficult trade and geopolitical issues.