All Sides Agree: Shutting People Up Is Good
By now I expect most of you know that ABC has pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show off the air. I’m going to go through (some of) the details as far as I know them because I think they matter.
On the show Kimmel said, among many other things “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.”
Now this is not at all central to what I think is important about this, but I just have to say it. Does that look like a line from a comedy show to you? It does not to me, it looks like a line from a political commentary broadcast.
[To be fair, Kimmel later in the monolog showed a clip of Trump saying he was holding up well after Kirk’s murder, then immediately drifting into talking about the great reconstruction of the White House ballroom that was taking place. Kimmel said ‘He’s in the fourth stage of grief: Construction.’ That’s actually kindof funny. Sad, but funny.]
I got rid of cable long ago, so have not watched late night TV since, but I used to enjoy Jon Stewart and Colbert and – eons ago – Carson and Cavett. They made jokes about many things, including politicians, and they were more often than not, funny. Making fun of politicians and university bozos and celebrities is all healthy and useful. Where is the joke in that first line from Kimmel? Must everything be political commentary?
Ok, rant over, what happened next is that – and I am quoting The Free Press here, I did not see it – Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr went on Benny Johnson’s YouTube show and offered Disney-owned ABC a choice. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” said the country’s top regulator of broadcast television. “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.”
As the Freeps says, this is called Jawboning. A government official suggesting that there will be trouble if some private actor does not take some action. ‘Nice little network you got there, ABC, be a shame for it to lose it’s licence’, basically.
[I’m dramatizing, here, the FCC licenses individual stations, not networks, but you get the picture….]
Jawboning has a long history, it was not invented by Mr. Carr, indeed Joe Biden’s admin used it on Facebook, trying to pressure it to remove what his administration referred to as ‘misinformation’. Biden’s people were sufficiently self-aware to do it quietly, however.
Like the editors of The Free Press, I thought that was wrong then and I am alarmed at Carr doing it now. And, Mr. Carr himself is on record as saying it is wrong. In a WSJ editorial this morning, Kimberly Strassel prints the following quote from Carr from 2019: “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest’.”
Exactly, Mr. Carr. However, we live in a world in which 1) no one in government is expected to have any principles and 2) it is always ok to get revenge on anyone who plays for the other side.
Had ABC simply shut Kimmel down for being an embarrassingly ignorant boob, then I would not care. I mean, I would really really not care, because as I wrote above, I do not watch these guys any more. What I object to deeply is an official in the US Federal Government implicitly threatening ABC if they do not fire Kimmel. I agree with the Free Press that this ‘undermines our most fundamental values’, where the Free Press is no doubt referring to the value of free speech in the US, but I regard that as one of my fundamental values also, living here in Canada.
The Federal Government of the US – or of Canada – has no business shutting people up, no matter how stupid or insensitive is what they say. And sadder yet, Carr is hardly the first member of the Trump admin to talk about shutting people up since the murder of Charlie Kirk. As appalling as that murder was, it does not justify bringing the force of law – or jaw – down on people who talk about it in ways the current government does not like.
And, it gets worse from there. As always, there are plenty of reader comments in the Free Press below any of its articles. Here are those following the editorial which alarmed me the most:
– “I disagree with the way that this happened, but I don’t necessarily disagree with the fact that it did. Private companies can do as they want.”
– “Disappointing. The FP apparently felt that it needed to tack a couple of degrees to the left.”
– “Frankly, I don’t care. We’ve been subjected to so much hate, including from Joe Biden as president, and now the former president Obama, that we have to draw a hard line. Kimmel was inciting further violence against us by falsely claiming the assassin was MAGA.”
– “Good riddance, drag him through the streets. You underestimate how many people despised this man. I couldn’t care less about his freedom of speech.”
– “I fully support free speech in the media. But sometimes, payback is the only way to expose hypocrisy.”
– “It is nice to see the right punch back a little, instead of laying back and taking it, as they have for so long.”
To be fair to Free Press Readers, there were also some finely nuanced comments on the editorial.
The very existence of the FCC as a broadcast regulator means that Carr’s veiled threat is (probably) not a straightforward violation of the 1st amendment. However, an ignorant comment made by the host of a little-watched show should not be enough to get a license pulled, and Carr should not even be hinting that it could be. That amounts to gangster government (as did Biden’s people leaning on Facebook) and it should have no place in a democracy of free people.
The main point made by Strassel in her WSJ editorial mentioned above is that it is time for the FCC’s control over broadcasting to end. That power is a holdover from the days when the three US TV networks were the primary source of news for the country, and those days are long gone. I think I agree with Strassel’s point. I doubt Mr. Carr does. Now.
So far as I can tell, no one in Trump’s Admin can comprehend that it is better to let the clueless talk, it is how we learn how clueless they are. Shutting them up just sanctifies their ignorance.
Final note on this, utterly independent of my worries about Carr’s actions. I knew nothing about Charlie Kirk until reading about his murder, but based on what I have read about him since, I wonder – does Carr or Trump or J D Vance understand that Kirk himself would likely be appalled by Carr’s threat?
In an odd turn of events, I came across some other writing online about contemporary journalism while following the various paths taken by the story about Kimmel/Carr. That is, I came across some people writing about how journalism should be done today, and to be honest, I cannot re-construct the path that got me from this Kimmel thing (which is not really about journalism) to where I ended up.
That said, I think this stuff I ran into is important, and it is certainly new to me, so I’m going to write about it in a separate post – this one is long enough.