The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, at the urging of the Trump appointee running the Federal Communications Commission, and the president’s $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times this week make it even clearer that free and independent media are under dire threat from this administration. Silencing critical reporting and commentary is a common tactic of authoritarians—and Trump and the Republican Party are leaning into this strategy even harder now.
ABC announced late Wednesday that it is suspending Kimmel indefinitely. In his shows on Monday and Tuesday night, the late night host correctly noted that conservatives are trying to use the killing of Charlie Kirk for political gain. On Wednesday, FCC chairman Brendan Carr, in an appearance on conservative Benny Johnson’s podcast, suggested that he might punish ABC for Kimmel’s remarks and suggested that local ABC channels refuse to air Kimmel’s show. Nexstar, a company that owns TV stations across the country and is seeking FCC approval of a merger, then announced its ABC affiliates would not air Kimmel’s program.
The Nexstar decision and the likelihood of other conservative-led boycotts and potential attacks from the Trump administration seemed to have led ABC to cave and, literally within minutes of Nexstar’s announcement, boot Kimmel.
But this is not an isolated incident. Far from it. In December, Disney, which owns ABC News, opted to settle a defamation suit against Trump by donating $15 million to his presidential library. As the FCC was considering whether to approve a merger between Skydance and Paramount, the company that owns CBS News, longtime executives at CBS News resigned, facing pressure to cover Trump more favorably. In July, the network reached a $16 million settlement with the president over his lawsuit objecting to CBS coverage of the 2024 campaign. Trump backers are now being appointed to key roles at CBS.
He didn’t stop there. Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal in July, criticizing its coverage of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, he filed a $15 billion suit against The New York Times, frustrated with the paper’s 2024 reporting on him.
ABC, CBS, the Journal and the Times are some of the largest and most prestigious journalism organizations in the country. A president going after them all amounts to declaring war on the free press. And it’s not just journalists. Stephen Colbert, host of the late night show on CBS, had his show canceled a few months ago. The network said it was a financial decision, but Colbert was a harsh critic of Trump. Now, with Kimmel also off the air at least temporarily, it’s hard to ignore the potential that comedians who slam the president nightly won’t be on the air for long.
And it’s not just Trump alone. Congressional Republicans joined in stripping funding from public media across the country. Elon Musk is suing the liberal group Media Matters, which closely scrutinizes conservatives. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, perhaps trying to curry favor with Trump, pushed out many of the paper’s left-leaning columnists, with Karen Attiah being fired last week over her social media posts about Kirk.
This is all very scary. The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, NPR and other outlets are still doing a lot of great investigative journalism that paints Trump in a bad light. The New York Times does great investigative work, too, like Monday’s scorcher on the Trumps and United Arab Emirates and multibillion-dollar crypto/AI chip deals, and it has some very anti-Trump columnists, such as the excellent Jamelle Bouie. But Trump, with his combination of regulatory power and lawsuits, is almost certainly making these big news outlets a bit more gun-shy about criticizing him. And I worry even more, potentially, about smaller outlets like this one and other valuable liberal magazines and websites that perhaps can’t spend millions of dollars to defend themselves from Trump’s lawsuits.
“How, then, can we tell whether America has crossed the line into authoritarianism? We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government. In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power.” So wrote political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt wrote earlier this year in a New York Times op-ed.
“Under authoritarianism, by contrast, opposition comes with a price,” they added. “Media outlets may be hit with frivolous defamation suits or adverse regulatory rulings, businesses may face tax audits or be denied critical contracts or licenses, universities and other civic institutions may lose essential funding or tax-exempt status, and journalists, activists and other critics may be harassed, threatened or physically attacked by government supporters.”
Those scholars argued that America has slipped into “competitive authoritarianism”—the political science term for nations that have elections but are no longer full-fledged democracies. Whether you agree that America is no longer fully democratic, the trend lines are headed in a wrong and frightening direction. We still have a First Amendment that technically protects the freedom of the press. But what authoritarians abroad have done is wear down organizations with lawsuits and regulations, and then, eventually, these outlets give up and sell themselves to allies of the regime. Negative coverage is not outright banned, but it doesn’t have to be: Negative coverage disappears anyway. That’s where it appears things are headed in America too.
I have my gripes about “legacy” media such as The New York Times, which has been far too slow to recognize the radicalism of today’s Republican Party. But we desperately need a robust defense of free and independent media that criticizes the government. Trump is now a threat to all journalism, from left-wing Substacks to The Wall Street Journal, which has a very conservative editorial page but more honest news coverage. Democracy dies without a free press. We can’t let Trump kill our press and therefore our democracy. Jimmy Kimmel is the newest victim of Trump’s silencing of critics but sadly, it’s almost certain that he won’t be the last.
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