This is a follow-up to my last piece, not so much on the Charlie Kirk issue as to its use as a pretext to censor Jimmy Kimmel, and the reason that the federal government has the power to do that.
When I was a lot more outspokenly libertarian, I would come up with joke names for the various alphabet-soup bureaucracies in the federal government. Like, after the Waco fiasco, BATF was “Blame After The Fact.” FBI was “Fucking Bumbling Incompetents”. And the FCC was “Fascist Communist Collusion.”
And I might seem a lot more lefty than I was in the Clinton days, but I’m that much more convinced that Big Government can’t be trusted, especially when “small government conservatives” are in charge of it.
But in the wake of the Trump regime twisting executive arms to remove both Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel from late night, it raises the question of how that is even possible, while media people who are much more rude towards Viceroy Trump still have their jobs.
For example, prior to the merger with Skydance, CBS/Paramount was part of a larger media conglomerate run by the Redstone family, which also runs Viacom, which runs Comedy Central, which plays the Jon Stewart-led The Daily Show, along with the culturally libertarian shock comedy South Park. And in the wake of the corporation ending Colbert’s contract, they renewed the contract for South Park. Which started its latest season by saying PC Principal and Jesus Christ were in mortal fear of Donald Trump, even though his penis is “teeny tiny.”
Then you have Bill Maher, who lately has tried to play Switzerland in America’s culture wars. In the wake of the 2024 election, he decided to suck up to Trump out of mutual contempt for the PC Democratic Left, but that hasn’t stopped him from bagging on Trump recently. But no networks or affiliates can “cancel” him cause he’s not on a network beholden to sponsors.
That is in fact why Bill Maher is on HBO, because previously he was host of a show called Politically Incorrect, which just happened to be on ABC after the late-night news, and got cancelled (both socially and professionally) for “insensitive” comments after 9-11.
This is why guys like Bill Maher and the creators of South Park have not (yet) suffered the same pressures as Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, despite the fact that they are also within media megacorps. That’s not to say they can’t be cancelled; the HBO parent Warner Bros./Discovery has cancelled a lot of projects for reasons that could best be described as arcane. But the incentives are different.
This is also why Brian Kilmeade still has a job after telling the guys on Fox & Friends that it would be a good idea to subject the homeless to lethal injection. He’s on basic cable. Although that doesn’t explain why MSDNC cancelled commentator Matthew Dowd after offering his opinions on Charlie Kirk. That decision was just the general media cowardice we are seeing under Trump 2.0.
Just the day before he engaged in official censorship, Carr told a POLITICO reporter “I think you can draw a pretty clear line, and the Supreme Court has done this for decades, that our First Amendment, our free speech tradition, protects almost all speech”. On the Reason Magazine website it was pointed out that under FCC rules, and Supreme Court precedent, the FCC can regulate broadcast media but not online content. The rationale for this has always been that the broadcast airwaves are a “scarce public resource”. Given that radio waves were the only broadcast communication medium, the FCC was created, and it served a purpose in resolving disputes between parties with regard to signal interference and related issues. But even prior to that, with the Radio Act of 1927, Congress defined that a radio station could only be given a broadcast license “in the public interest, convenience, or necessity”. This according to Wikipedia, which as of September 19 is still defining the FCC as an “independent” agency. In NBC v. United States (1943) the Supreme Court confirmed that rather than simply regulating radio stations to prevent interference with each other, the FCC should also “determine the composition” of content. This essentially made the federal government the ultimate media gate keeper and led to networks developing internal Standards and Practices censorship departments through the television era. Such strictures have rarely applied to premium cable outlets like HBO and Showtime, and the FCC did not seek to expand its control over cable since it was a for-pay service and not free to the public. However as cable/satellite and then streaming became more standardized, pay TV became the standard with broadcast becoming almost an afterthought, and most people picking up television through pay TV or streaming subscriptions, even with local TV networks. (Incidentally, the fact that HBO and similar services were not censored is also why the Fairness Doctrine was never applied to Fox News and other right-wing media on cable).
The idea that the airwave spectrum is subject to scarcity was based on a misunderstanding of physics even considering the limits of contemporary technology. “When a traditional telephone call occurs on copper wire, the same movement of electrons that occurs on “The People’s Airwaves” occurs within the phone wire. It has never been suggested, however, that the FCC limit the number of persons who may have telephone conversations or regulate what they say.”
Like much else in this government (see the Department of Homeland Security), the standard was based on a contemporary judgment that may have been flawed even at the time and as of now not only is useless but actually counterproductive.
All this really begs the question, if the enemies of Our Divine Sovereign are so unfunny and unpopular, and network shows aren’t making as much money as they used to, why is it so necessary for national security and the sainted memory of Charlie Kirk that the freest country God gave Man must ban late night comedians for telling mean jokes that mostly consist of just repeating what Republicans actually say?
As with so much else in this regime, the answer is “because they can.” And they can because of the FCC. The irony being, if network TV is no longer the draw that it used to be, it’s not only because capitalism gives us other options, it’s because those options are not so arbitrarily restricted.
If cancelling late night talk shows is a good business decision because the model is in decline and not making money, it raises the question of just how feasible the rest of broadcast TV is. CBS already decided that it was better to get rid of its 11:30 time slot altogether rather than have its own product on. And ABC, at the direct behest of both Brendan Carr and its right-wing affiliates, had to make that decision on the spur of the moment. To punish dissenting speech, they are undermining themselves. Not to mention, the affiliates that depend on networks for content will no longer get it, and both networks and affiliates are undermining themselves by aligning with an obviously senile and declining tyrant, who is, if not an actual pedophile, clearly covering for people who were, and who is the direct cause of Middle America losing their farms, losing their standard of living and losing their place in the world. People might start to realize who’s on their side, who is against them, and who helped bring about this state of affairs. And that would be bad for business. Although not necessarily America.