By Slamy Mokhter (Tert Slamy)
NEW YORK, NY – Donald Trump's administration has been attacking free expression since he got back into office, threatening critics with prosecution, targeting colleges and law firms, and deporting or detaining student op-ed writers who are here on legal visas for the views they expressed. The administration has even arrested people who protested those deportations. While none of these actions have been particularly popular, the White House's latest overreach appears to have ignited an angry national backlash.
In an unprecedented move, the administration is openly using the threat of government power to pressure one of the country's biggest, most storied corporations, Disney, to indefinitely suspend ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for offending MAGA sensibilities. It is arguably Trump's most high-visibility, authoritarian attack on free speech yet, which is truly saying something.
Hundreds of demonstrators, many of them writers and actors, gathered outside Kimmel's Hollywood studio today, as well as Disney's Burbank offices and ABC's Manhattan headquarters, to protest his suspension. Meanwhile, Google searches for "cancel Disney+" spiked across the country as droves of social media users posted that they were ending their subscriptions to the media giant's app.
In a rare public comment, Michael Eisner, the former longtime CEO of Disney, took to social media to blast the company for its capitulation to the government. "Where has all the leadership gone?" he wrote. "Suspending indefinitely of Jimmy Kimmel immediately after the Chairman of the FCC's aggressive yet hollow threatening of The Disney Company is yet another example of out-of-control intimidation."
Even some Republicans recognize this censorship campaign for what it is and are openly expressing worry about the precedent it sets. On his podcast today, Senator Ted Cruz likened Trump's FCC Chairman, Brendan Carr, to a mobster.
"And so he threatens explicitly, 'We're going to cancel ABC's license. We're going to take him off the air so ABC cannot broadcast anymore.' And I gotta say, he threatens it. He says, 'We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way,'" Cruz explained. "And I gotta say, that's right out of Goodfellas. That's right out of a mafioso coming into a bar and going, 'Nice bar you have here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.'"
Today, when Trump was asked about Ted Cruz comparing the FCC Chairman to a mobster, the President defended his man and managed to sound like a mob boss himself.
"These airwaves, they make millions and millions of dollars," Trump said. "The news makes millions of dollars. ABC, your network, your network wrote very badly about me and they had to pay me $16 million... I think Brendan Carr is a courageous person. I think Brendan Carr doesn't like to see the airwaves be used illegally and incorrectly and purposely, horribly. Does he like to see a person that won the election in a landslide get 97% bad publicity before the election?"
Meanwhile, Jimmy Kimmel hasn't been fired, and the show hasn't been canceled yet, but it seems increasingly likely ABC's suspension won't be reversed. Two insiders told Rolling Stone that in the lead-up to Kimmel's suspension, multiple executives at ABC, Disney, and their affiliates "felt Kimmel had not actually said anything over the line, but the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed."
That threat of government retaliation, in the form of Trump's Federal Communications Commission, is precisely what puts this censorship campaign in a completely different category from any past instance where local stations refused to air network content. In 1997, a special episode of the ABC sitcom Ellen, in which the character played by Ellen DeGeneres came out, was boycotted by family values groups. They succeeded in getting at least one network affiliate in Alabama to refuse to air the episode. That was about it.
Then in 2003 came The Dixie Chicks, the hit country band whose lead singer, Natalie Maines, told a London crowd she was not proud of the President of the United States as the Iraq War loomed. The public backlash was swift and enormous. Scores of radio stations banned their DJs from playing The Dixie Chicks for years, and the group had to essentially break up for more than a decade. But in neither that case nor in Ellen's was there overt government pressure for censorship from an FCC Chair making mobster-like threats.
The only thing that might come close was back in July when CBS announced it was canceling Stephen Colbert's late-night show at the end of the season, and the President of the United States celebrated, posting on social media, "I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next." Last night, Colbert noted the similarities between his case and Kimmel's.
"So, a company apparently capitulating to the whims of the president in order to ensure their merger goes through. Has that ever happened before?" Colbert joked, before feigning being told by his producers not to answer the question.
An Independent Agency Under Fire
All of this is happening because Trump is weaponizing the Federal Communications Commission in ways that have never really been done before. The FCC has been around for nearly a century, created as part of the New Deal to ensure fairness in broadcasting. It was designed as a nonpartisan agency that's independent from the executive branch; it's not part of the White House or the Cabinet.
That independence has always been the responsibility of the FCC's five leading commissioners, who are picked by presidents and confirmed by the Senate for five-year terms. Thanks to resignations under Donald Trump, there are now only three commissioners. There's Brendan Carr, Trump's Chairman; Trump's latest appointee, a former Republican Senate staffer; and there is one Democrat on the FCC, her name is Ana Gomez. She worked in a variety of roles at the FCC before she was appointed as a commissioner by Joe Biden in 2023. She joined Chris Hayes to discuss the situation.
Chris Hayes: What's it like to work there right now?
Ana Gomez: It's really alarming. I am very alarmed by this administration's campaign of censorship and control. It is damaging to our democracy. It is censoring what the broadcasters can or cannot say about this administration or whatever ideology this administration wants to espouse. And that's not good for our democracy.
Hayes: Do you think that Brendan Carr's statements were defensible or appropriate uses of his powers as commissioner?
Gomez: I think it's very important to say that the FCC does not have the authority, the constitutional right, or the ability to take action against broadcasters because the FCC does not like their editorial decisions or a comedian's jokes, whether you like them or not. That is not what the FCC can do. In fact, the First Amendment prohibits us from censoring broadcasters, and the Communications Act specifically prohibits the FCC from censoring broadcasters.
Hayes: I noticed that you didn't answer the question. Do you think that Commissioner Carr's statements were appropriate?
Gomez: I don't think that we should be threatening broadcasters. It is a chilling of speech that is prohibited by our First Amendment. And the FCC is a powerful regulator of our broadcasters. As you noted, the broadcasters have transactions before the FCC. They need to get the FCC's authorization if they want to merge with another broadcaster, or if they have a license renewal. Or right now, the FCC is considering lifting ownership caps to let them consolidate even more. They have been before the FCC. They want to make the FCC happy, so they are going to censor in advance. And that is not appropriate.
Hayes: There's sometimes questions between things that are norm-breaking or inappropriate and then there's things that seem flatly illegal or unconstitutional. Do you think the essential trading of policing speech in favor of regulatory favors, do you think that is legal?
Gomez: No, I think it's unlawful. It's both a violation of the Constitution and the Communications Act. It's not in our authority. Under the Communications Act, we have the authority to regulate broadcasters in the public interest. This administration is taking the public interest and making it about anything it doesn't like. Well, that is inappropriate. It is very difficult to take action against broadcasters for the content that they broadcast on purpose because we need to be careful about not crossing that line of violating the First Amendment.
Hayes: My sense has always been, this is an independent agency, but its priorities and its policy changes when there's a new administration. But there is still some sense of independence that they aren't simply an arm of the White House. Do you agree with that? And do you think something has changed now?
Gomez: Yes. The FCC was created as an independent agency. Congress created the Federal Radio Commission, which was the precursor to the FCC, and it thought about placing it in the Department of Commerce but decided that it was too dangerous to have such an important broadcast medium being regulated by one person, subject to the whims of one political party. And therefore, it created an independent, multi-member commission. Over the years, the FCC has asserted its independence from pressure from the White House. Very famously, Newton Minow told the President he wasn't going to pull a broadcast license because it was too important to maintain that independence. We have had to assert our independence for decades from exactly this type of political pressure because it's so dangerous.
Hayes: The President seems to have a theory here of a kind of new Fairness Doctrine that has been violated. Take a listen.
President Trump [Clip]: They have a licensing procedure... they have to show honesty and integrity. And when they take a great success, like you often do, and you make it into like it's a loser or you put a negative spin on it, I don't think that's right.
Hayes: To the extent there's a theory here, it seems to be that if there's too much negative content on networks, that means they're in violation of the law and they can have their licenses revoked. Is that true?
Gomez: No. License revocations are very rare, and we have rules about license revocation. It's very rarely done. The last one I can think of, we revoked a license because the broadcaster did not air for over a year. That would be contrary to the First Amendment.
