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Before Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show was yanked off the air last week, media in President Donald Trump’s America was already in a dire state.
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On top of the avalanche of layoffs that have distressed the industry, CBS’ shocking cancellation of “The Late Show” — a decades-old institution hosted by Stephen Colbert for the last 10 seasons — stunned many in July who speculated the move stemmed from the host’s critique of the $16 million settlement between his network’s parent company, Paramount Global, and Trump over a “60 Minutes” episode.
That news preceded the shuttering of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting at the end of this year, which Congress voted to defund after nearly 60 years of educational and cultural programming in the U.S. Not to mention defamation lawsuits Trump has filed against publications like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal recently for allegedly damaging his reputation.
The target of American media under Trump’s 2.0 administration has reached authoritarian levels this year. However, Disney’s decision to suspend ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” indefinitely on account of comments the host made about the man accused of killing right-wing activist Charlie Kirk — the latter of whom Trump dubbed a “martyr for truth” — felt like the most direct attack thus far, and there was nothing subtle about it.
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Before Kimmel’s benching, Trump-nominated FCC Chairman Brendan Carr didn’t mince words on a podcast when he said ABC and its affiliates needed to “find ways to change conduct and take action” on the late-night host, “or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he added, which some took as a threat.
Carr has since clarified his comments, denying that he threatened to pull the licenses of ABC stations if they didn’t fire Kimmel. Still, such statements suggest that government censorship in America — a clear violation of the First Amendment — will not only worsen from here on out, but that the implications may change the meaning of free speech as we know it.
In a surprise turn of events, however, ABC reversed its decision to suspend Kimmel’s show by announcing its return on Monday, following a Disney boycott and celebrity protest in support of Kimmel.
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“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country,” the network said in a statement. “It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive.”
It added, “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
Meanwhile, TV station groups Sinclair and Nexstar, which control more than 20% of ABC’s local stations, have vowed to continue boycotting “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” by pre-empting the show indefinitely in dozens of markets across the country.
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In his first monologue back, Kimmel acknowledged his controversial suspension with light humor and a callback, quoting fellow once-censored late-night host Jack Paar: “As I was saying before I was interrupted.”
After clarifying the intention behind his Kirk remarks, the host took a moment to discuss what his benching meant in the broader context of Americans’ right to freedom of speech.
“This show is not important,” he said bluntly. “What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.”
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Kimmel went on to share how freedom to speak is a liberty he once took for granted until “they pulled my friend Stephen [Colbert] off the air and tried to coerce the affiliates who run our show in the cities that you live in to take my show off the air.”
“That’s not legal,” he pointed out. “That’s not American. That is un-American, and it is so dangerous.”
He’s right. And so many others have echoed the same sentiment over the past week, as Google searches for free speech have skyrocketed in the wake of Kirk’s death and become an even bigger hot topic after Kimmel’s suspension. Now that the latter has exposed a clear threat to that right in Trump’s America, the big questions now are who’s next on the chopping block and, more importantly, what else is at stake here?
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Trump has already suggested that Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers should lose their late-night shows next — “Do it NBC!” — and if he has his way, with folks like Carr doing his bidding, that might happen. Carr himself said on Fox News (per NPR) that he doesn’t think the halting of Kimmel’s show will be “the last shoe to drop” as far as media retaliation is concerned.
“This is a massive shift that’s taking place in the media ecosystem,” he noted, “and I think the consequences are going to continue to flow.”
What those consequences may be is something Americans shouldn’t have to dread. But it’s become quite difficult to predict the fate of anything in this country amid our increasingly volatile political climate, much less what rights we’ll have left once Trump is through with his second term.
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Even though Kimmel is back on air (mostly), Trump and his administration have shown Americans that they are capable they are of getting what they want to silence speech they dislike, whether their methods are constitutional or not. That kind of abuse of power disarms a people and erodes democracy, something the president claimed he wanted to restore in his inaugural address earlier this year.
In his own words, Trump, during his presidential campaign, said in 2022, “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country … If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple just like dominoes, one by one.”
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The sitting president has a penchant for making inaccurate statements, but on this — and I hate to admit it — he may have been right. It’s just a shame the messenger no longer believes in the message.