Proposed: A Grand Bargain on the FCC Consternation
Conservatives are using the legal power they have, how dare they
Most people don’t understand what’s actually going on with the Jimmy Kimmel suspension. Partially it’s driven by ignorance. Partially by obfuscation. And partially by the fact that so few of the free speech contrarians are actually conservatives in any typical sense, and have no awareness of how things have changed for conservatives in the past several years.
I include in this number Bari Weiss, who non-conservative people always seem to forget is not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination, and certainly not considered such by actual conservatives. She is a liberal. I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense, it’s just a fact — she’s just a culturally liberal contrarian, as many interesting people who write for her are, too. She’s only falsely called a “conservative” by people who don’t like the prospects of her taking a role at David Ellison’s new CBS conglomerate (even being labeled a “reactionary” by Puck’s Matt Belloni) or by people who say such things and don’t know any actual conservatives in real life. So of course it’s consistent for her response in the editorial The Free Press published yesterday takes that liberal contrarian view. While Bari Weiss sees the Kimmel suspension as a bridge too far, conservatives see it as a good start.
There are three elements that are clearly being left out of the pro-Kimmel calculus in advancing this argument.
First: The climate for conservatives is now one of actual fear for their lives, and the lives of their sons and daughters on campuses across the country. Conservatives understand that, fueled by ceaseless irresponsible and violence-tinged rhetoric from politicians and a constant barrage of media hatred, the radical left has become dangerously extreme. Their actions have made America more divided and less safe. And they are contributing to a real environment where conservatives fear for themselves and their loved ones simply for expressing mainstream conservative Republican and pro-Trump opinions. This isn’t just fear of animosity. It is fear of real, actual violence, and it is based in the reality of what they have seen in the past months and years. It was not lost on any conservative that the reaction to Charlie Kirk’s brutal assassination wasn’t just hailing it and celebrating it — it was calling for more, baying for blood, and representing his death as a good start. Within hours of her passionate speech about her husband’s legacy, radical leftists were calling for Erika Kirk to be gunned down next. “If those are your views, I’m totally ok with you being murdered, because the world is a better place without you at that point.” “One Nazi down, a million more to come.” Conservatives hear what the radical left is saying. And they believe it.
Second: Jimmy Kimmel is part of a television industry that has rules, both written and unwritten. Those rules include a higher level of guardrails for broadcast networks, one that all networks have to abide by and that absolutely restrict what can and cannot be said on the airways. Kimmel pretty clearly violated these rules with his false accusation (which was not by the way a joke), and FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatening to enforce these rules is no more of a threat than toward anyone else who violates them. Kimmel could’ve offered an apology and been fine. He refused, and that choice fueled the decision by ABC. ABC is particularly sensitive to offending significant numbers of Americans, because unlike other networks the actual money for their network comes from a mass media giant that depends on people coming to theme parks and Marvel movies. Kimmel’s aggressively leftist politics had placed him in a position where he was essentially useless to ABC, incapable of being a broadly appealing face of the network as Jimmy Fallon is for NBC. And the unwritten rule is: don’t piss off the affiliates. There are decisions made at the highest levels about who hosts shows based on who affiliates like and who they don’t, driven by audience reaction.
As Ethan Strauss reports, this timing could not have been worse for what Kimmel just tried to do — he quotes an informed source and offers his accurate analysis:
Brendan Carr is trying to lift what's called the national media cap so that stations like Nexstar and Sinclair and Gray TV can buy up more TV stations to basically grow and better compete with big tech entities in the streaming services. Broadcasters have a long time been allies of Republicans, however, ironically, the biggest opponent of this effort is OAN and Chris Ruddy of Newsmax, because they are cable networks and they do not want conservative media outlets to grow and compete with them. They would rather just compete with Fox News and let the Sinclairs and the Nexstars just never be big enough to fight. The problem is that Chris Ruddy is very tight with Trump. This is all an audience of one dynamic.
So, Carr and Ruddy are competing for Trump’s attention on a vision for the media future. This battle has more to do with why ABC affiliates gladly served up Kimmel’s head on a platter than anything Jimmy said this week. Kimmel’s scalp is a gesture from Carr and merger-desperate affiliates that suggests a network TV scenario where pro Trump voices aren’t completely shut out. Apologies for being terminally millennial, but it reminds me of the “Get a gift, give a gift,” kidnapping of Hungry Man in The Wire. Yes, Jimmy Kimmel is Hungry Man in this scenario.
Third: No one cares about Jimmy Kimmel. The simple fact is if Jimmy Kimmel was popular or liked by any significant portion of the ABC audience, there would be far more reluctance to ice him out. This is for any successful host an apology level event — I’m sorry we blamed the wrong people for Charlie Kirk’s death, I didn’t mean to offend, take a day off and come back on Monday, no harm done. But that’s not the case with Kimmel, who is another expensive vestige of the days when late night had cultural resonance. There has been far edgier and insulting comedy receiving much wider viewership from the likes of South Park, especially this year as they’ve leaned into literally making Donald Trump Satan’s butt buddy — the difference is South Park is funny, and enormously popular — literally worth billions of dollars to Paramount. Kimmel is neither of these things, so when the major affiliate networks say “We don’t want this any more, our viewers don’t like this crap”, ABC — having already had to bend over backwards because of the lies of the unpopular Democrat partisan at the head of their news network — decided to cut their losses. Sorry, Hollywood — no one will cry for Guillermo.
So the follow-on argument to this is about free speech, and it typically comes from the same people who happily stood by as the Joe Biden administration used their own leverage to target conservatives and contrarians via the massive force of Silicon Valley and engage in repeated NGO-backed smears and lawfare against people who ran afoul of their messaging preferences. But forget that they’re almost all either ignorant or hypocrites, and let’s take them at their word that the FCC is abusing its power, and engaged in a dangerous new precedent via a pressure campaign designed to eliminate the platforms of the president’s critics.
Well, if such a campaign is ongoing, it doesn’t seem to have had much of an impact in nearly any area of media, which abounds with anti-Trump voices as far as the eye can see. Even sticking with ABC, The View has no place for conservatives while engaging in a non-stop drumbeat of pro-Democrat propaganda. And if Kimmel said the exact same thing on virtually any other platform — cable, social media, Substack, a popular podcast, or the pages of many a publication all across the internet — instead of an unpopular broadcast TV show, none of these regulations would apply. He would’ve had an advertiser hit and criticism from the right, but the FCC tool at Carr’s disposal wouldn’t exist.
(It would be a different scenario if, say, Kimmel had joined the anti-Israel letter signed onto by numerous Hollywood luminaries and was then subject to a corporate denunciation from Disney such as the one delivered by Ellison’s Paramount. That’s where you get into more clear-cut free speech territory. ABC has shown the willingness to ice much more popular shows — Roseanne was canceled when she was at number one, and that was for Ambien tweets.)
The arguments raised by many people who say the FCC is a relic of the past and that it has no place in the modern media landscape have a strong case. In a hypothetical world, I happen to agree! But the FCC exists, and will continue to exist, and Brendan Carr or whoever Trump wants will use the power that is there because they have it and they understand the current climate as liberals do not.
Of all the network late night acts, Kimmel’s was the most vicious and unredeeming, continually hitting new lows during the pandemic in particular, with the aforementioned AntiVax Barbie and his “Rest in Peace, Wheezy” monologue sure to go down as cultural anti-landmarks. Virtually everything he said in the Trump era was DNC messaging with a punchline, putting him on course to spend the afterlife doing laps in media hell with Keith Olbermann. With his ratings in freefall, Disney was going to drop the axe sooner or later.
But acting so quickly after Carr’s “easy way or the hard way” line opens a can of worms. Now the organic demise of legacy media (definitely happening, and at lightning speed too) can’t be an unmuddied story. What Carr described would reimagine the FCC as a press regulator in a full-on truth-arbiter role, in the spirit of Britain’s hated OfCom. That feels like a big jump from where the Administration was in February, when J.D. Vance lambasted Europeans in Munich for losing sight of basic tenets of democracy, including the “freedom… to make mistakes.”
So here’s where an obvious compromise emerges, one that will satisfy everyone by satisfying no one: Brendan Carr keeps using the FCC the way that he can, and the way conservatives want, for the next three years. And then the administration eliminates the FCC. They can even offer an apology for all of that icky use of the executive power they have. “You convinced us! It just took three years.”
Problem solved.
Related:
Washington Examiner: Jimmy Kimmel’s Ouster About Free Market
Washington Examiner: FCC Chair Becomes Political Lightning Rod
Variety: Kimmel Suspensions Prompts Protests Over First Amendment Rights
Washington Times: Conservatives Hoot as Leftists Launch Disney Boycott
Semafor: Why Brendan Carr and the White House Forced Out Jimmy Kimmel
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