Seeing Jimmy Kimmel suspended from his late night show with, shall we say, the strong encouragement of the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, some conservatives immediately made an analogy to the “jawboning” that the Biden White House used to encourage social media companies to practice various forms of Covid-19 censorship.
This, in turn, prompted an interesting question from the liberal writer Derek Thompson. Even conceding that the Bidenistas might have acted inappropriately, he wrote, their desire to police pandemic speech reflected a desire to serve the public interest by preventing unnecessary deaths. Whereas the Kimmel suspension, he argued, looks like pure partisanship: “I haven’t heard anybody even pretend that there’s a deeper principle at stake here.”
I think many conservatives do see a civic-minded purpose here, and I’ll accept Thompson’s challenge and try to articulate it. The argument starts with the assumption that America’s leading cultural institutions — broadcast networks, movie studios, major universities — are private enterprises but also a kind of public trust, with civic as well as commercial obligations. (On this point, at least, many liberals would agree.)
It’s possible to be a good, civic-minded steward without being perfectly politically neutral. Most cultural institutions have been staffed primarily by liberals since time immemorial (or at least since the 1960s), and while this has always been a source of conservative complaint, it’s something the right learned to live and work with — and even profit from, through the talk radio and Fox News alternatives.
From the conservative perspective, though, the nature of the stewardship changed in the 2010s. There was a shift within liberal culture, an increasing politicization, a ratchet to the left. This shift was mediated by generational conflict and novel technological forces and then embraced by a range of institutions, from academia to Hollywood to Silicon Valley, who collectively decided to enforce an emergent left-wing orthodoxy — through high-profile firings, novel speech codes and statements of ideological loyalty as a requirement for academic employment.
Late night television was an interesting bellwether. This was something I wrote about in the run-up to the 2016 election, describing the strangeness of watching a cultural zone that used to be pretty apolitical suddenly populated by a raft of increasingly partisan comics, Kimmel among them, each offering a different variation on a hectoring progressivism.
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The post The Conservative Principle Behind the Kimmel Suspension appeared first on New York Times.
