During a state visit, U.S. President Donald Trump and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer had a public dispute about the recent suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show. The talk brought to light a growing worry among media and academic experts that the Trump administration is using legal and regulatory pressure to change what the media covers.
The fight started when ABC, a network controlled by Walt Disney Co., put Jimmy Kimmel Live! on hold for an undetermined amount of time after Kimmel made a joke about how Trump and his fans were reacting to the murder of Republican activist Charlie Kirk. Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has already publicly criticized the comments.
When reporters asked U.K. Prime Minister Starmer about ABC’s choice, he said that free expression is “part of who we are” in Britain and that the country fought alongside the U.S. in World War II to protect this right. President Trump, who was standing next to him, had a different opinion. He said that Kimmel “is not a talented person,” has “very bad ratings,” and was “fired for lack of talent.”
A Pattern of Stress
Media executives and scholars say that the Kimmel suspension is part of a bigger trend in which the Trump administration is using or threatening to use its regulatory power and the courts to get major media companies to give in. Juan Manuel Benítez, a journalism professor at Columbia University, claimed that media companies are “bending to the will” of the government and making “business decisions” to avoid controversy.
Other recent cases have used this method. In July, Paramount Global paid $16 million to the Trump campaign to settle a complaint while waiting for the FCC to approve a merger. Not long after, CBS said it would discontinue Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, which often criticized Trump. The merger was approved by the FCC six days later. ABC also paid Trump $15 million in December to settle a slander case.
The FCC has a lot of power over broadcasters, such as the right to take away a station’s license. Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC and a longstanding Trump supporter, has already looked into ABC, CBS, and NBC. He said on a recent podcast that Disney might have to do more if it didn’t deal with the Kimmel issue. He said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Nexstar Media Group Inc., a big owner of ABC stations that needs FCC permission for a big purchase, said shortly after Carr’s comments that it was yanking Kimmel’s show from its stations on its own.
Responses and the Future of Free Speech
A lot of famous people have spoken out against ABC’s choice and the supposed political pressure behind it. Democratic members of Congress have asked Carr to step down because they think he has gone too far with his rules. Saul Austerlitz, who teaches comedy writing at New York University, stated that the end of Kimmel’s show marks a “dire turning point for the state of free speech in America.” This means that the range of speech that is permitted on TV has gotten much smaller.
Some news organizations, including The New York Times, have promised to fight back against the administration’s legal efforts, while others seem to be going along with them. The Free Press, a news outlet that usually supports conservatives, even labeled Kimmel’s suspension “government coercion.”
Trump hasn’t shown any evidence of changing his mind, even when many are angry. He praised ABC’s choice in a recent statement and said that the FCC should be able to take away the licenses of any station that airs information he doesn’t like, calling those stations a “arm of the Democrat party.”