Jimmy Kimmel Fights Back as Trump's FCC Tries to Break Old Media

What the Jimmy Kimmel war is really about

On Tuesday night, Jimmy Kimmel returned to ABC from a brief Disney suspension, with a monologue that’s already reached eight figure views on YouTube. The irony is that his arguably most popular show was also his least distributed. Jimmy Kimmel Live!’s ABC return was not broadcast on roughly 44 percent of network affiliates because Sinclair and Nexstar pulled it in response to his September 15th monologue comment about who killed Charlie Kirk:

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

That was a bad moment for Kimmel, and his TV career appeared to be in peril. But along with the suspension, he was given a gift in the form of a threat. FCC commissioner Brendan Carr went on Benny Johnson’s podcast and blustered in ABC’s direction with:

We can do this the easy way or the hard way.

Donald Trump has a bit more cultural immunity with this kind of warning because many have come to take him more “seriously than literally.” A government official reads as literal though, and certainly isn’t supposed to challenge a comedian over speech in this sort of overt manner. The backlash gave Jimmy Kimmel life, making him a cause célèbre for an otherwise fractured Democratic coalition.

In Kimmel’s monologue, Carr was a central foil, and a useful one. It was Funny Free Speech Jimmy versus the evil humorless Trump bureaucrat. Yes, comedy is subjective, but I disagree with descriptions on the right of Kimmel as “unfunny” and “untalented.” Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t been hosting his show for 23 years absent any talent. When I watch him harness the energy of this controversy, I’m reminded of how adroit an everyman humorist the man can be, even while crying as frequently as Dick Vermeil. Kimmel played a clip of Trump saying, “(Kimmel) had no ratings,” follow by the camera returning to Jimmy:

Well, I do tonight.

And the crowd goes wild.

Quoting a prescient

Mike Solana

tweet from a week ago (Formatting adjusted by me):

Turning Jimmy Kimmel into a free speech icon rather than letting his show wither and die from poor ratings…dumb

So Carr hurt his side, so much so that it inspired pushback, cited by Kimmel, from Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro. Few want to live in a country where entertainers are threatened with shut down by the federal government. “Free speech” had become right coded in the social media era, and now it’s less like that. Having once merely been in office, Trump 2 is in power. Using the FCC to bully media companies is no joke.

At the same time, I find myself thinking about this “easy way or the hard way,” frame, divorced from Carr’s explicit threat. Why didn’t so many mainstream media companies try an easier way?

I’m not talking about firing Jimmy Kimmel. I’m talking about, following the 2024 election result…why didn’t more mainstream figures act like Kimmel’s fellow Disney star Stephen A. Smith? The opinionated sports pundit flirts with running for president as a Democrat. He’s said much that would offend a lot of conservatives, especially on the topic of race. But Stephen A., whatever you think of him, tends to relate to the other side as human beings. Openly, he’s friends with Fox News host Sean Hannity. He debates issues of the day with Clay Travis. If ABC had replaced Kimmel with SAS (a dubious proposition to be sure), I’d bet MAGA World would have been fine with it.

I’m not presenting SAS as a model of openminded discourse. I’m mostly using him to highlight the contrast. Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and all the other late night hosts would have had to do pitifully little to gain more purchase with the broader public. Instead they went all in, on one side, all the time, losing viewership along the way.

I enjoyed the first eight minutes or so of Kimmel’s monologue but once he started citing all the support he got from his Strike Force Five talk show buddies, I was reminded of the bizarre political monoculture they’d come to represent. Indeed, deep partisans like Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro appear more inclined to criticize their own team than the theoretically neutral Strike Force group seems liable to rip the Democratic Party. The latter might make more sense if Blue World was still culturally dominant. But no, Republicans won the popular vote, young men shifted heavily rightward, Trump-supporting YouTubers gained big followings and the Democrats are at their lowest point since I’ve been sentient.

Prestige media outlets covering Trump vs. Kimmel are understandably sensitive to the former’s authoritarian impulses, but they’ve got a big blindspot to the enduring strangeness of the status quo he’s fighting. I remember an era when the Democrats were more popular but also, paradoxically, mainstream media figures were far less overtly pro Democrat. When you take a step back, it’s sort of crazy that The View is one sided political propaganda. It’s a little weird that Kimmel, ABC’s main content ambassador, posts himself at a Trump protest with family. Yes, Fox News exists, but it’s proudly partisan and on cable. What’s with networks, including their news divisions, continuing to advance a singular perspective?

Having gained power and culture war purchase, Trump World looks at mainstream media outlets and wonders why it’s still largely constant anti THEM propaganda. Not a bit of bias, not a preference, but a persistent total fight against them on normie bastions like the TV networks.

I listened to talented entertainment reporters Matt Belloni and Lucas Shaw discuss the Kimmel situation, with repeated reference to Trump’s “war on the press.” The podcast was informative but unmentioned (or considered) was that this war wasn’t a one way fight. The shooting of Charlie Kirk has catalyzed a sense on the right of being targeted in a manner that’s beyond metaphorical.

This is the situation that Brendan Carr and others within Trump’s administration seek to address. As they try, and, yes, bungle, I am reminded of the quote Ryan Holiday used to begin his book about Peter Thiel taking down Gawker:

I couldn’t stand it. I still can’t stand it. I can’t stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age. What is more, I won’t. That was my discovery: that I didn’t have to.

—Walker Percy, Lancelot

Thiel was sick of a media status quo and went about using his power to alter it, contra rebukes made on the basis of “free speech.” He’d decided he’d had enough. He acted.

The current status quo cannot be viewed as intolerable to members of the prestige press who prefer it. And beyond preferring it, they’re so used to this cultural norm that they cannot even see it. They’re still living in a world wherein “everyone” hates Donald Trump and his movement. The idea that they must change, even a little, isn’t a thought. They’re the reasonable ones. Everyone else is the problem. You see this mentality reflected in (Disney employee) Michael Wilbon’s thoughts on Auburn basketball coach Bruce Pearl, vocally pro Republican and pro Israel, retiring from his position:

He had become a divisive person, it seems to me, intentionally. And I hope there was pressure to just get him out.

I enjoy Mike Wilbon and believe he’s a good guy. It just speaks to the likely mentality within his millieu that Pearl’s honestly held beliefs read as intentional provocations. When everyone around you has the same idea, contrary ideas aren’t mere differences of opinion: They lack legitimacy. They aren’t even real. People who hold them cannot be tolerated, let alone interfaced with.

From what I’m told by sources, this is the holding pattern movement conservative Brendan Carr seeks to break. It’s not about Donald Trump and his feelings (though to be fair, from Trump’s perspective, it might be about Donald Trump and his feelings). It’s about this. You could argue that Trump and his people should wait around and let the free market do its thing. They would argue, increasingly in private, that the media “free market” is an illusion. Quoting me:

The Internet and social media advent exploded the old system, along with its independent “Fourth Estate” power. Now, in the aftermath of demolition, we witness a scramble for influence among media entities who need the government to decide in their favor. Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t at Trump’s Inauguration because he enjoys D.C.’s January weather. Everyone vying for eyes craves the government on their side.

Carr’s FCC intends to use its leverage in shaping the media future. This is a vast, ambitious, controversial project. Though the mainstream media is its target, that very media is mostly oblivious to the danger here. They’re distracted by Kimmel vs. Trump and this new cause of free speech versus the authoritarian. They can’t perceive why they’re under attack apart from the other side’s want to bully. They can’t understand themselves as a borg made vulnerable by its inflexibility.

From what sources tell me, Trump’s threat that Carr might remove ABC’s public airwaves broadcast license is almost a red herring. Given the difficulty of getting such edicts through courts, it’s a fake threat in lieu of revealing the real one. The real pressure is the administration’s ability to foul up mergers like NFL/ESPN.

You can hate that, consider it a First Amendment violation and say it shouldn’t be. I can’t tell you you’re wrong, but I’m telling you how it is, given the Media Wild West era we’re in. The FCC’s power is a factor in why merger-hungry Sinclair and Nexstar were eager to serve Kimmel’s head on a platter. I believe it’s a factor in why Bari Weiss, though not an official Republican, has an opportunity to run content at Paramount/CBS. From the administration perspective, she at least reflects a break with the network norm. They realize that CBS can’t become upmarket “Hannity.” It can, however, become something other than a stuffier NPR.

The traditional FCC responsibility is to prevent monopolies and excessive concentration of control in the communications industry. This FCC perceives an ideological monopoly within an industry. They can’t stand it. They can’t stand the way things are. They cannot tolerate this media age. What’s more, they won’t.