“now that Trump’s president, and getting lots of criticism from the media, he’s started calling speech that he doesn’t like “illegal.”
“They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. I think that’s really illegal, personally.”
He also threatened TV stations: “They give me only bad publicity…maybe their license should be taken away.”
“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” said his attorney general, Pam Bondi. “We will absolutely target you…if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
They will “target” people?
Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, joined in. When Jimmy Kimmel said nasty and incorrect things about Charlie Kirk’s murder, Carr threatened ABC’s TV licenses, saying, like a mafia boss, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Yet months earlier, he’d tweeted: “Dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights.”
And years earlier, he tweeted that the FCC does “not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.'”
He was right—then.
But power tends to corrupt.
Once Carr was in power, he no longer supported the speech he’d recently promoted.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/22/trump-campaigned-on-free-speech-that-isnt-how-hes-governed/
“Unlike other forms of media, radio and network TV stations broadcast over public airwaves, which the FCC polices by issuing broadcast licenses. Federal law authorizes the FCC to ensure licensees serve “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.”
“Generally, this means [a broadcaster] must air programming that is responsive to the needs and problems of its local community of license,” the FCC claims.
…
The “public interest standard” is in fact “not really a standard because it doesn’t tell you what they can’t do,” Thomas W. Hazlett, an economics professor at Clemson University, tells Reason. “There is some formal structure to the process, but in terms of an actual regulatory standard, it basically means that we’re going to make rules according to what we think is right. And of course, if you want to do things that are different and exercise power in a certain direction, you’ll talk a lot about public interest because it’s a very wide berth for justifying what you’re trying to do. It does dress it up a little bit, that it’s not just politics, it’s bigger than that, but not really: It’s what the five members of the commission vote to do, and that’s the beginning and the end.””
https://reason.com/2025/09/23/brendan-carr-says-networks-must-serve-the-public-interest-what-does-that-mean/
Why Jimmy Kimmel Returned and Bob Iger MUST Go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h-G_IpzvGk
Fox Host Crashes Out Over Kimmel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx-_0qoRZ0o
After Trump’s FCC apparently badgered ABC into suspending Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart and the Daily Show produce a Trump-compliant episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GXNJ3V9lzg
“Monday night on his ABC talk show, Jimmy Kimmel said something dumb about Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old man accused of assassinating conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a college in Utah last week. Two days later, ABC, which is owned by Disney, announced that it was “indefinitely” suspending the comedian’s show.
Maybe the Disney executives who made that decision—CEO Robert A. Iger and Dana Walden, who oversees the company’s television division—were simply reacting to public outrage at Kimmel’s remarks. But the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! was announced several hours after Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), suggested that TV stations might be fined or lose their licenses for broadcasting the show. That constitutionally dubious threat shows how the FCC can abuse its regulatory powers to suppress speech that offends President Donald Trump and his allies…
If the First Amendment means anything, it means that federal bureaucrats may not punish private companies for giving a forum to politically disfavored speakers.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/18/brendan-carr-flagrantly-abused-his-powers-to-cancel-jimmy-kimmel/
“In addition to not being very funny, the observation rested on a false assumption—that the presumed killer, 22-year-old Utah man Tyler Robinson, is a conservative…
Brendan Carr, chair of Federal Communications Commission (FCC), weighed in on the matter; not only did he criticize what Kimmel had to say, he also implicitly threatened the broadcasters. (Kimmel’s show appears on ABC.)…
This was not an idle threat. The FCC licenses broadcast channels, and can fine them or even take them off the air. Moreover, the FCC oversees mergers of companies in the communications space. Nexstar Media, which owns many of the ABC local affiliate stations that air Kimmel, is attempting to acquire Tegna Inc., a rival firm; the FCC needs to okay the deal. There’s a lot at stake, and FCC can make life very difficult for companies that defy it.
And so, on Wednesday night, both Nexstar and Sinclair Broadcast Group—another major telecommunications company—informed ABC that they would not air Kimmel on their affiliate stations. ABC then opted to place the show on indefinite hiatus….
This is outrageous. Not because Kimmel is gone: Private companies have the right to determine their programming as they see fit…
But it shouldn’t be a government decision. By inserting itself into the controversy and appearing to twist the arms of private companies so that they would make editorial decisions that please the Trump administration, the FCC is clearly engaged in a kind of censorship.
As Glenn Greenwald put it, “This shouldn’t be a complicated or difficult dichotomy to understand. Jimmy Kimmel is repulsive, but the state has no role in threatening companies to fire on-air voices it dislikes or who the state believes is spreading “disinformation,” which is exactly what happened here.””
https://reason.com/2025/09/18/the-fcc-should-let-jimmy-kimmel-be/
““The MAGA Gang (is) 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,” Kimmel said. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.””
If this is all he said, then this is a political cancellation that goes against everything many on the right used to say they stand for. Kimmel’s statement is not totally accurate, but is hardly beyond the pale.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/17/media/jimmy-kimmel-charlie-kirk-trump-fcc-brendan-carr
“He has also abandoned the FCC’s posture as an independent regulator in favor of an openly personal embrace of Trump. Though picked by the president, FCC chairs of both parties for years have charted an independent course, launching investigations and passing rules that affect billions of dollars in corporate investment while being careful to operate at a distance from the White House.
No longer: In April, alongside officials at the Justice Department, Carr donned a golden pin featuring Donald Trump’s face. He’s become a familiar presence at Mar-a-Lago, and has flown with the president on Air Force One.
As he picks those norm-busting fights with the mainstream media, Carr is more quietly delivering on big deregulation promises to business interests. These moves are less headline-grabbing, but possibly more transformational.
Carr recently said he wants the FCC to get into the business of online speech, potentially making the commission a major enforcer against the content moderation decisions of the Big Tech platforms like Meta and Google. And despite his stepped-up scrutiny of some legacy networks and shows, he also wants to scale back government restrictions on the owners of individual radio and TV stations.
His tactics are a window into how even relatively stolid, independent Washington agencies are being transformed under the second Trump administration — expanding their remit, rewarding favored players and lending their weight to Trump’s highly personal fights.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/19/brendan-carr-fcc-cbs-media-00299588