[State Sponsored Cancel Culture] Disney cancels the Jimmy Kimmel Show after government pressure

gift link

Brendan Carr Channeling Trump’s Showman Instincts to Overhaul FCC
‘Broadcast licenses are not sacred cows,’ top telecom regulator says in interview

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/...7?st=Qyw7Z8&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

excerpt:

A lawyer who has spent the last eight years at the agency, Carr is relying on a 1934 law that says that, because a given broadcast network is granted airwaves to use exclusively as its own, it needs to operate in “public interest, convenience and necessity.”

While failing to meet the public’s interest can be used to strip a broadcaster’s license, the only time the FCC did so was in 1971, when a Jackson, Miss., station lost its license for defending segregation.

Carr said he was willing to do it again. “Broadcast licenses are not sacred cows,” he said.

The targets of Carr’s criticism, including big media companies, are trying to steer clear of the chairman and the agency, not looking to further publicize his efforts or risk antagonizing him or Trump.
​

more at the link

 

Money over People

They are morally bankrupty

Seriously . . . IMO this is the same combination(with Racism) is why we had Slavery in this country
it was just too profitable and no one wanted to risk their money to fight it

Rocket River

 

"Carr is relying on a 1934 law"

So has been the new Supreme Court in several cases, apparently

 

related

Stop Making Me Defend (Ugh) Jimmy Kimmel!

https://ethicsalarms.com/2025/09/18/stop-making-me-defend-ugh-jimmy-kimmel/

excerpt:

Apparently the Kimmel decision came after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, suggested that the FCC might take action against ABC because of Kimmel’s remarks. Well, Carr was abusing his authority, there was no chance that such action would have held up in court, and ABC/Disney should have replied, “Bite me!” If the network doesn’t mind Kimmel torturing young children for yucks—remember, Jimmy Kimmel is an ethics villain and should have been fired years ago—it certainly shouldn’t punish him for believing the Axis’s lies…and ABC is a card-carrying member of that cabal.

The ethical course for ABC now is to reinstate Kimmel immediately, apologize to him, and then fire him for the right reasons. He sucks, he’s not very funny, and he’s a miserable human being.
​

more at the link

 

Agreed that the FCC chair was abusing his authority. That’s the issue. The “yeah but Jimmy Kimmel sucks and should be off the air” angle is, honestly, irrelevant.

 

… what’s the point?

 

This guy never fails to make a dumb tweet.

I feel sorry for any decent people out there named “Stephen Miller”.

 

Even the Band guy?

 

“In this essay I will justify the domination and annhilation of liberals, leftists, and even other conservatives I just don’t like”

 

See here for more on the "public interest"

Trump’s Ouster of Jimmy Kimmel Is Much Worse Than You Think It Is | The New Republic

Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, tells TNR that chairman Brendan Carr’s move violates both the First Amendment and the Communications Act. Democrats must extract consequences.

...

Rather, Carr basically said to Hannity that broadcasters are operating contrary to the “public interest,” and thus could see licenses revoked, if they cover Trump in ways that Carr decrees are overly critical of him and thus illegitimate.

All of this constitutes a major abuse of power. The problem is that in authorizing the FCC to license network affiliates, the law doesn’t clearly define what “public interest” means. Carr is exploiting this by defining “public interest” in an absurd and dangerous way.

To be as clear as possible about this: Carr himself essentially told Hannity straight out that he reserves the right to declare coverage inimical to the public interest—and thus subject to FCC retaliation via the revocation of licenses—if he declares it by fiat to be overly hostile to Trump.


“This is an unprecedented abuse of the FCC’s power,” adds Caitlin Vogus, senior adviser of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “The ‘public interest’ standard was never meant to be used as a cudgel for the government to pressure broadcasters into only saying what the president wants them to say.”

Carr’s threats may be unlawful in addition to violating the First Amendment, says Anna Gomez, who is the only Democratic-appointed commissioner on the three-member FCC. Gomez notes that federal law also bars the FCC from censoring broadcasters.

“What the administration is doing violates the First Amendment and the Communications Act,” Gomez tells me, noting that the government is “using the public interest standard to go after anything it doesn’t like.”

“This administration is increasingly using the weight of government to suppress lawful expression,” Gomez said, decrying Trump’s “campaign of censorship and control” to “silence dissent.”

There may be another dimension to Carr’s abuse of power, as well. Recall that media conglomerate Nexstar, which runs many ABC affiliates, first announced that it will yank Kimmel, boosting the pressure on ABC. But Nexstar’s move came after Carr suggested that “individual licensed stations” must “step up” and take action against Kimmel.

Nexstar is seeking FCC approval for a merger with megabroadcaster Tenga. So the question is: Did Nexstar understand Carr to be saying that the merger could depend on it agreeing to pull Kimmel from its stations?

“I believe there was strong pressure against [Nexstar’s] broadcasters to preempt Kimmel,” FCC Commissioner Gomez tells me.

Is it legal for the FCC chair to threaten to pull the licenses of broadcasters unless they refrain from Trump coverage that he arbitrarily declares illegitimate? Is it legal for the FCC chair to apparently hint that Nexstar won’t get its merger approved unless it yanks someone whose speech Trump dislikes?

Those experts all told me that Carr may be keeping his public commentary about all this just vague enough to avoid direct lawbreaking. But Democrats should do all they can to find out whether Carr is breaking the law in addition to violating the Constitution. They can scour every corner of the relevant statutes. And they can declare clearly that if and when they retake congressional power, they will scrutinize every crevice of Carr’s decision-making with subpoena power to assemble a clear picture of the deliberations and private communications behind his public threats.

 

FIRE used to be the go-to source for some posters here who supported free speech but have now done a 180. Wonder why, huh?

FIRE statement on FCC threat to revoke ABC broadcast license over Jimmy Kimmel remarks about Charlie Kirk | The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression


FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is once again abusing his position to try to assert government control over public discourse, spuriously invoking the “public interest” standard to selectively target speech the government dislikes.

President Trump has recently called for the FCC to revoke ABC’s broadcast license because he does not like the way the network — and Jimmy Kimmel in particular — speaks about him. Just yesterday, Trump suggested to a reporter that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s statement about prosecuting “hate speech” might mean she will “go after” ABC “because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate.”

Now, Carr is threatening ABC for comments about Charlie Kirk’s shooter that Kimmel made during his opening monologue on Monday, insinuating that the shooter was part of “the MAGA gang."

The FCC has no authority to control what a late night TV host can say, and the First Amendment protects Americans’ right to speculate on current events even if those speculations later turn out to be incorrect. Subjecting broadcasters to regulatory liability when anyone on their network gets something wrong would turn the FCC into an arbiter of truth and cast an intolerable chill over the airwaves.

 

Businesses generally follow the path of least resistance to profit. While some firms brand themselves around principles, most prioritize decisions that maximize returns. In practice, this often means avoiding conflict with authoritarian governments. The cost of defiance: lost market access, sanctions, tariff, or political retaliation outweighs any benefit. There are exceptions, such as when a company’s customer base rewards defiance or when the authoritarian market is too small to matter, but these cases prove the rule: profit-driven businesses rarely risk provoking a vengeful regime.

See Apple's Cook as a shinny, literally 24k gold, example.

 

Someone needs to explain to me how what Kimmel said there rises to the level of something the FCC needs to be coming down on for “the public interest”. He made a statement about how MAGA Republicans were desperately trying to pin it on someone who isn’t one of them (accurate) and he poked fun at Trump.

 

disagree that I have done a 180. On this, I think FIRE is also overreacting to the facts of this specific case. ABC is the entity that did the firing, and thus, the "censorship" if that's what you want to call it. I believe ABC is using "censorship" as a smokescreen to cover up what is essentially an employment termination.

 

no, but the "ABC should just fire Kimmel for the ACTUAL reason they want to fire him for," IS relevant

 

that left-leaning "mainstream" media outlets seem to care more about a left-wing hero loses his job than they are about a right-wing hero losing his life. They treat the Kimmel suspension as some kind of catastrophe whereas the Kirk killing is something to make jokes about. Proving, I take it, that the left-leaning bias of mainstream media is still pretty much alive and well. that I take it is his point

 

We can reasonably guess why his show was canceled. How many companies have been cozying up to Trump out of fear of retaliation? But the speculation on that point is a secondary matter, to me. Even if ABC chose NOT to do anything, the issue remains that the FCC chair was making threats he shouldn’t have.