Donald Trump Forcing Jimmy Kimmel Off the Air Crosses a Line

It’s very bad.

There’s no other way to put it.

It’s very bad when American regulators call on American media companies to shut down a TV show they don’t like. And it’s very bad when American media companies follow those demands.

Which, of course, is what happened on Wednesday. Disney suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show hours after Brendan Carr, Donald Trump’s pick to head the Federal Communications Commission, told Disney to “take action, frankly, on Kimmel” because Kimmel had made a joke about Trump supporters and Charlie Kirk.

To get this part out of the way: It’s certainly within Disney CEO Bob Iger’s rights to decide that he didn’t like Kimmel’s comments and discipline him in some way. It’s also within the rights of broadcast station owners to decide they don’t want to carry Kimmel. Which is what both Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair, which collectively own dozens of ABC affiliates, announced before Disney said it was taking Kimmel off the air.

What is not right is a government regulator urging both Disney and the broadcast station owners to do that — and threatening to make life difficult for them if they didn’t.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said in an interview with right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on Wednesday. After Kimmel’s suspension, Carr sent me a statement praising Nexstar in particular. Then he went on Fox News, where he complained about late-night hosts in general: “They went from being court jesters that would make fun of everybody in power to being court clerics and enforcing a very narrow political ideology.”

I don’t really think we need to belabor this point, but imagine the world where a Democratic president’s administration did the same thing: You’d hear, quite rightly, a riot of complaints from the right (and hopefully everyone) about First Amendment violations, government censorship, and the death of free speech. Maybe they’d compare it to Saudi Arabia forcing Netflix to take down a TV show that criticized its crown prince.

It’s that simple. And that bad.

Carr, by the way, always notes that his agency only regulates broadcast media — which means he doesn’t have anything to say about cable channels, like the one Fox News operates. And he doesn’t regulate internet companies — so he doesn’t have anything to say about Johnson’s YouTube show.

But the way things are headed, I’m not sure those distinctions are going to matter.

Trump, unrestrained

That’s because the Trump administration has made it quite clear that it wants institutions of every stripe — colleges, law firms, media companies, giant tech companies — to operate according to Trump’s desires. Sometimes it tries to justify those decisions with legal arguments, but oftentimes Trump simply makes it clear that this is what he wants.

Which is what he did after Kimmel’s silencing on Wednesday, calling on Comcast’s NBC to shut down Jimmy Fallon’s and Seth Meyers’ late-night shows as well.

That’s the kind of thing Trump has called for many times in the past — including in his first presidency. But up until his reelection last fall, he never flexed the muscles to make it happen. Now he has people around him willing to act on his demands, and is learning that he can often get his way.

“You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they will come after ABC,” Trump told ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl earlier this week — noting that last year, after Trump was elected but before he was inaugurated, ABC’s parent company Disney paid Trump $16 million to settle a defamation suit.

That’s a case Disney almost certainly would have fought in any other circumstance. But if it was meant to make peace with the new administration, it didn’t work.

Here let’s point out that not every Trump target has folded. For instance: Gannett, the publisher that owns The Des Moines Register, and pollster Ann Selzer are continuing to fight a spurious suit Trump filed last year. The New York Times says it will fight an equally dubious suit Trump filed against it this week.

But we’re just eight months into the second Trump presidency, and he’s already crossed lines that would have been hard to imagine before he came back to the White House. It’s hard not to imagine things will get worse.