Until Wednesday’s shocking announcement that ABC was cancelling Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show because of comments he made about Charlie Kirk’s killing, it was possible, if one squinted hard enough, to pretend that a broad free speech crackdown was not underway. The down-the-road cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late-night show on CBS was chalked up to financial concerns, though anyone in the business not paid to think otherwise believes Mr. Colbert’s elegant skewerings of President Trump and MAGA were the real reason.
The silencing of Mr. Kimmel, following an explicit threat by Brendan Carr, the head of ABC’s regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, is the mask of “free speech” coming off for good.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Mr. Carr told a far-right podcaster on Wednesday, suggesting that the government would take action against Disney, ABC’s parent company, if it failed to dispense with Mr. Kimmel. Two owners of local ABC affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair — both of which are known for their right-leaning political orientation, and both of which have pending deals that need the F.C.C.’s approval — had reportedly already demanded action. Disney caved within a day. There was some vague talk of finding a pathway for Mr. Kimmel to return, but his contract is up in May and he is highly unlikely to ever host on network television again.
The clampdown on establishment media and entertainment isn’t just getting started. Incited by Mr. Trump’s thin-skinned responses to even the mildest mockery or criticism, and inflamed by political opportunism in the wake of Mr. Kirk’s death, it is far further along than most people may realize. Everyone now is waiting for word on what will happen to Jon Stewart, the one-day-a-week host of “The Daily Show,” which like Mr. Colbert’s, comes under Paramount’s umbrella. Mr. Stewart this summer ended a segment on Mr. Colbert’s cancellation with a rousing song, backed by a gospel chorus and filled with profanity, spewing invective at his corporate overlords.
After the recent sale of Paramount, those overlords are now Skydance Media, run by David Ellison, the son of one of Mr. Trump’s biggest supporters, Larry Ellison, the centibillionaire chief executive of Oracle. Numerous media reports suggest that the younger Mr. Ellison will install a new leader at CBS News: Bari Weiss, the former New York Times editor and writer who founded The Free Press, a particularly deft practitioner of the shell-game politics of free speech. Skydance has also announced a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN, and Oracle is part of the consortium Mr. Trump assembled for the possible purchase of the U.S. version of TikTok. That hat trick would give the Ellisons unrivaled power over both old and new media. Federal regulators are unlikely to object.
With the exception of Netflix, a hugely profitable public company without apparent immediate need for government favor, every studio is either already compromised or about to be. ABC, and by extension Disney, already paid off Mr. Trump after he filed a comically spurious lawsuit targeting the “Good Morning America” co-host George Stephanopoulos. CBS had gone that same route over a lawsuit involving minor edits to a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. NBC’s soon-to-be-spun-off subsidiary, MSNBC, just fired a contributor for comments about Mr. Kirk. With Mr. Kimmel gone, Mr. Trump is now demanding the ouster of two NBC late-night hosts, Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon. Perhaps he was offended by one of Mr. Fallon’s bits about puppies or holiday sweaters.
Amazon’s and Apple’s media operations are mere appendages to the companies’ core businesses, which makes them even less promising candidates to take risks on content. Amazon is currently making a feverishly unanticipated documentary about Melania Trump, for which she will be paid at least $28 million. The company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, is also the owner of The Washington Post, which just fired its only Black opinion columnist for — perhaps you’re spotting a trend here — posting measured criticism of Mr. Kirk. Apple’s media division, to its credit, has yet to slaughter any of its programming as tribute, though the parent company’s chief executive felt it necessary last month to present Mr. Trump with a “customized plaque with a 24-carat gold base,” according to Politico.
The problem, of course, is that mainstream media — by which I mean the major media conglomerates that control most of the TV and movies you watch, music you hear and books and news you read — is in long-term decline, and therefore weakest at precisely the moment it is most needed to serve as a bulwark for free expression and democracy. Perhaps that’s why the Trump administration picked it as his latest primary target.
All of which is why the premiere episode of this season of “South Park” — featuring a thrillingly crass depiction of Mr. Trump’s talking micro-penis and scenes of him in bed with Satan — “had the impact of a primal scream,” as Richard Rushfield wrote in The Ankler. “Finally, someone was just saying it all. And doing it in a way that dispensed with the politeness with which we’ve tip-toed around every problem that’s come our way, with an unmistakably profane middle finger in the face of a crackpot demanding servility.”
The irony is that this kind of middle-finger entertainment, or even entertainment that is thought-provoking, is more popular than ever. That “South Park” episode scored the highest ratings the show has gotten since 1999. It’s in good company. The blockbuster Oscar-contender “Sinners,” which used a vampire metaphor to make a deep statement about the cultural exploitation of Black people, has — despite its 137-minute run time — brought in nearly $400 million worldwide for Warner Bros.
Bad Bunny has become one of the most important and most popular musicians in the world thanks to fiercely political messages. Beyoncé’s spectacularly successful tour ended on a giant replica of the Statue of Liberty with its mouth taped shut. On TV, “Andor,” which delved smartly and patiently into the mechanics of fascism, drove more than $300 million in subscriber revenue for Disney+’s streaming service. The latest “Superman” remake illustrated Lex Luthor’s villainy by having him murder an immigrant and use his fortune to corrupt the Pentagon. It is currently tracking north of $600 million worldwide.
Even before Mr. Kirk’s death and the crackdown that followed, it almost certainly took leverage and guile to get these cultural products made and released. The “South Park” creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, waited until the day of the broadcast to tell executives from Paramount, with which they had just closed a $1.5 billion deal, what they had in store for viewers. The director Ryan Coogler, on the strength of his prior film, “The Black Panther,” compelled Warner Bros. to give him complete creative control on “Sinners” — and the eventual rights to the film, an all-but-unheard-of concession.
Are arrangements like these going to be possible in the wake of Mr. Kirk’s death? Paramount has pulled reruns of a “South Park” episode that mocked Mr. Kirk — even though he had said he was amused by what he saw of the episode. An episode scheduled for this past Wednesday didn’t make it to air at all. In an Instagram post, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone took responsibility, writing, “This one’s on us.”
“Blink twice if they’re silencing you, Matt and Trey,” one of the comments said.
The complaint about so-called big media, historically, was that it was too commercial. Is it possible that these purveyors of popular culture will ignore the 50 percent or more of this country that want television, film and music that doesn’t feel like it was extruded directly from the president’s brain? Similarly, is it naïve to ask that legacy media respond to the looming threats of economic and authoritarian oblivion with a certain pluck, a third act, hey-kids-lets-put-on-a-show, high-school-musical defiance?
“Get some guts and do something interesting,” Ben Collins, the former NBC journalist who is now the chief executive of The Onion, recently said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “It’s not that hard.” The Onion had just published a parody editorial titled: “Congress, Now More Than Ever, Our Nation Needs Your Cowardice.”
Of course, it’s slightly easier to get some guts if, like the Onion, you’re not part of a big conglomerate. As the former Twitter and other big social media platforms increasingly come under control of Trump-aligned ownership, that might be what saves us: alternative journalism platforms such as Substack, podcasts, the coming boom in low-cost A.I.-enabled video, a handful of studios like A24 and Neon that are still wedded to daring TV and film. Dozens of small, independent publications are sprouting up around the country and flexing their independence. And the growing number of TV journalists who have been fired or quit their legacy jobs after some disagreement or perceived infraction — Mehdi Hasan, Terry Moran and Joy Reid come to mind — are gaining enough traction to begin to be considered a new kind of deconstructed TV network.
Since Mr. Kimmel’s defenestration, various Hollywood figures have expressed their objections, as have industry guilds. None of that will matter if the studios and distributors ignore their creative and business acumen and simply defer to the wishes of the president and his minions.
Mr. Trump’s ability to silence his critics remains indirect, for the moment, meaning that multibillion-dollar conglomerates like Disney could still theoretically decide to sacrifice a few of those billions to assert the right to actually speak freely. There’s no telling how soon that right, too, might be gone.
Michael Hirschorn is the chief executive of Ish Entertainment.
Source photographs by Bryan Steffy and Leon Neal/Getty Images
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