Trump vs Kimmel and the War on Truth
Last week, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s night-time show indefinitely, just weeks after CBS announced the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s show. Both were tied to complaints from President Donald Trump and his appointee, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr.
These talk show hosts did not reveal national security secrets or advocate violence, two very limited exceptions to the broad protections of the First Amendment’s guarantee that the government cannot interfere with freedom of speech. Colbert, in the tradition of night-time hosts for more than 50 years, made jokes about the President. Kimmel, responding to the murder of Trump supporter Charlie Kirk, and said the following:
We hit some 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.
In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this.
There is nothing inflammatory or misleading about Kimmel’s statement, which is sympathetic to the President’s feelings and critical of those who made unsupported accusations, like FOX and Friends’ Rachel Compos-Duffy, who is married to Trump cabinet member Sean Duffy. She said,
You heard the family members say that this man became more political in recent years-what did he do in recent years? He went to college. That is where kids are getting radicalized. Not just online, our campuses are where a lot of radicalization, hate, and intolerance starts from.
Trump appointee Kari Lake made a similar comment at Kirk’s memorial. Neither she nor Compos-Duffy provided any evidence that the faculty at Dixie Technical College in St. George, Utah’s electrical apprentice program was some sort of hotbed of radical left politics. It is more likely that radicalization, hate, and intolerance starts from making unsupported accusations as Kimmel said, to score political points.
Let’s be clear what those political points are:
1. President Trump! Look at me saying what you want to hear!
2. Not our fault.
3. Who is this Epstein you speak of? Not familiar.
4. DON’T MAKE THIS ABOUT GUNS. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DON’T MAKE THIS ABOUT GUNS!!!!!
Let’s be clear. Of course it is about guns. It’s always about guns. Even if Lake’s and Compos-Duffy’s preposterous claims of the socialist cabal at Dixie Technical College were right, Kirk could not have been shot if the killer could not get a gun.
The pressure from the Trump administration presents us with a Constitutional issue even more critical than the Second Amendment. The most important, most foundational, most revolutionary part of our founding document is the First Amendment. It includes the only private enterprise mentioned in the Constitution: the press, assuring its freedom from government restrictions. The expression of opinions without government control is also guaranteed to all of us by the First Amendment. It is based on the crucial conviction that we are not afraid of ideas, which should always be tested and refined by new understandings, new information, new challenges to the way we have seen things in the past. We can always do better as long we continue to welcome criticism and search for better understanding.
Donald Trump thinks television audiences will find it appropriate and somehow persuasive to show us members of his cabinet and billionaires trying to outdo each other with flowery compliments about his power and achievements. He refuses to follow the practices of his predecessors over decades in disclosing his tax and health records. He rewrites history by pardoning insurrectionists and by creating school curricula to literally white-wash America’s past.
Trump is the most avid watcher of television to serve in the White House, picking a large number of his appointees from his favorite channel, FOX News, and commenting frequently on television personalities he does not like. And now, Trump is arguing explicitly that broadcasters cannot criticize him. In an interview, he said,
When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do. If you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative one in years or something. When you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.
On the contrary, and basic First Amendment 101: journalists are not just allowed to challenge the President: it is their job. FOX News itself is an example when a Democrat is in office. The “Fairness Doctrine,” requiring broadcasters to present both sides of issues was discontinued in the Reagan administration because it was predicated on the scarcity of the airwaves. The idea was that with so few channels, it made sense to have a rule that they all had to be even-handed. After the proliferation of options, the vast majority not licensed because they are not limited by access to the airwaves, it was no longer justified.
Chairman Carr appeared on a podcast hosted by Benny Johnson, a favorite of the Trump crowd despite his history of falsehoods and plagiarism. On the podcast, Carr sounded like “The Godfather.”
We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.
He has now said he intends to look into other programs, including “The View,” which since its first episode has been careful to include a balance of political perspectives. He may back down now that ABC has announced that Kimmel’s show will be returning to the air. We may learn more about any concessions or limits Kimmel had to accept. But we have already seen the difference freedom of speech makes as the overwhelming pushback on ABC and Disney delivered powerful messages from media,Hollywood stars, the ACLU, and, most important, their customers and shareholders.
The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel is not about the accuracy of his comments or the importance of the issue he commented on. If accuracy was a concern, the FCC might look into the license for FOX News, which paid $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems and is currently preparing to go to trial on a $2.7 billion lawsuit from Smartmatic, another voting machine company. If outrageous cruelty was a concern, the comment last week by FOX News host Brian Kilmeade that mentally ill homeless people should be killed or Jesse Watters suggesting we should bomb the UN building in New York City might come up in the license renewal.
This is about much more than the careers of two show business figures who have late-night talk shows and the hundreds of people who work with them. It is about how we talk to each other, how we listen to each other, how we find the facts and values that form the basis for our views. The man Trump is mourning was willing to talk to people who disagreed with him. Trump is not. People of principle and integrity welcome a chance to respond to questions with facts and logic, to understand other perspectives and incorporate new information. They understand that you begin conversations with people who think you are wrong by reaching back to find a common goal, even if it is just: “We both agree that it is important to create a safe and stable future” or “We both agree that people should have the freedom to live according to their values.” And then you are on the same side, figuring out which is the best, fairest, and most practical way to achieve that goal.
Trump does not debate. He does not even argue. And for sure he does not listen. He believes insult is argument. People who disagree with him are not just wrong; they are “losers” or “low-IQ” or “ugly.” His response to questions is frantic and terrified, like the humbug pretending to be powerful in “The Wizard of Oz:” “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
Challenges and hard questions are how we make sure we have the best ideas. We need comedians for the same reason kings kept jesters. Comedians circumvent our barriers and challenge our assumptions. What makes us laugh is the shock of recognition. When Lyndon Johnson was President, he wrote to the Smothers Brothers, whose variety show was canceled for being too political.
It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists.You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.
Trump is waging an all-out war on information, from canceling crucial health data from the CDC, emissions disclosures that were required by the Environmental Protection Agency, weather data corporations and communities rely on for planning, financial disclosures required by the Securities and Exchange Commission relied on by Wall Street and investors, his own tax and health information made public by previous Presidents, and firing the head of the Labor Department’s highly respected Bureau of Labor Statistics because he did not like the report. His effort to keep secret how tax dollars are being spent has been overturned by a court. Then there is the defunding of PBS and NPR, two of the most trusted sources for news, and, in the case of NPR, the only source of local news for most rural communities.
The attack on Colbert and Kimmel also raises very serious concerns about the role that corporations play in shaping our understanding of the world. Who made the decision to suspend Kimmel? Was it his employer, the ABC television network? Or the owner of ABC, the Disney company? Both Colbert and Kimmel, by many credible reports, are casualties of corporate maneuvers unrelated to the quality of their work or the size of their audience. Both conglomerates that employ them needed government approval for mergers that will result in gigantic payoffs for the people at the top. It is not a coincidence that the Paramount-Skydance merger was approved only after Colbert’s show was canceled and “60 Minutes,” known for its fearless exposes, was defanged so severely its executive producer resigned in protest. We can expect approval for Nexstar, which owns 32 ABC affiliate stations, to complete its $6 billion purchase of its competitor, Tegna’s 13 stations. Is this consolidation in the interests of the communities these stations serve, which is the question the government should be asking? The only question they ask now is whether the President’s feelings have been hurt. This even extends to comments made by individuals who are not public figures, comedians, or journalists, again, not national security secrets or advocating violence, just expressing their opinions.
The government’s effort to cut off criticism could not be effective without the capitulation of corporations. Back when CBS News set the standard for what was then referred to as “The Tiffany Network,” the network’s founder William S. Paley did not make revenue a priority for the news division. But once a network becomes part of a conglomerate, the news becomes just another product, as humorously portrayed in the new series, “The Paper.” As newspapers shrink and fail, truly independent, non-profit news organizations become even more valuable. That includes PBS and NPR, along with Pro Publica, which has received eight Pulitzer Prizes, five Peabody Awards, eight Emmy Awards and 16 George Polk Awards since it was founded in 2008. The New York Times, still independent because it is controlled by the family who has been in charge for generations, is now being sued by Trump for $15 billion dollars because, among other complaints, they quoted someone who said that Trump’s business office was shabby and smelly. (The suit was thrown out by a court last week but the ruling allows it to be refiled, and Trump’s lawyers have said they will.)
In 1961, my father, the John F. Kennedy-appointed 35-year-old Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, told television broadcasters to do better. He often said he was sorry the two words most often quoted from the speech were his description of television as a “vast wasteland,” when what he wanted them to remember was “public interest,” the commitment broadcasters made for the opportunity to access the airwaves. Often overlooked was a commitment from him in that speech:
I am unalterably opposed to governmental censorship. There will be no suppression of programming which does not meet with bureaucratic tastes. Censorship strikes at the tap root of our free society.
Chairman Carr used to agree. In 2019 he wrote, “The FCC doesn’t have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.’” But then he was appointed to the FCC position by Donald Trump, who is easily rattled by criticism and quick to silence and punish those who challenge his view of himself. That includes the people who work for him. He insists on what he calls loyalty but what is in reality cowering, fulsome (what Congreve called “nauseous flattery”) servitude, and that is what Carr delivers.
This partisan thuggery from Trump and Carr has been strongly criticized by people from all sides of the political spectrum. Charlie Kirk often spoke about the importance of an expansive embrace of free speech: “You should be allowed to say outrageous things.” He would have joined Trump enthusiasts Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro in objecting to Carr’s threats and ABC’s capitulation. Journalists and comedians are among the best at revealing that the emperor has no clothes. We cannot allow them to be silenced. This assault on information, comedy, journalism, and tough questions is reckless, unconstitutional, undemocratic, and terrifying.
