Along with more than 12-million other people on Tuesday, I watched the YouTube video of the return of ABC’s late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to the air, after the angry tumult of the previous few days after Disney, which owns ABC, announced that it was suspending Kimmel until further notice, to the gloating approval of President Donald J Trump.
In the days after the announcement, news reporters and fellow late-night comedians exhaustively analysed the supposed comments that had led to Kimmel being booted, only to find that the late-night host, who has been in his chair for more than two decades, hadn’t said anything that contentious in relation to the angry brouhaha that has erupted since the tragic assassination of outspoken Maga cheerleader and pundit Charlie Kirk on September 10.
All Kimmel had done was to point out that Maga supporters had gone to great lengths to make sure that this incident of domestic terrorism couldn’t — like so many previous instances of what they refused to refer to as domestic terrorism — be blamed on one of them.
Far-right and conservative commentators spent weeks hysterically screaming about the terrorism of their favourite imagined villain Antifa, trigger-happy, mad-as-hell transgender shooters and any other far-left fearmongering ghoul they could conjure. When it began to emerge that Kirk’s alleged killer Tyler Robinson was from a Maga, second-amendment faithful, gun-worshipping family, members of the Republican administration and their Maga faithful zeroed in on Robinson’s messages to his transgender roommate as proof of their assertion that free speech was under attack from those who have been wronged by Trump and his base.
The worrying connection between the US constitution’s first amendment, which guarantees the right to free speech, and its second amendment, which protects the right to bear arms — creating a situation where debate can be ended by whoever has a gun and decides to use it to prove their point — wasn’t on the Fox News table.
Kimmel’s unpardonable sin, it seemed, was really to have insulted Trump by making fun of a clip — much mocked by most other late-night hosts and social media wits — in which the president, during a press conference at the White House shortly after Kirk’s assassination, pivoted far too quickly from condolences to celebrating his upcoming renovations to the White House ballroom.
The whole thing spiralled rapidly out of control once Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr went on a podcast and warned that upcoming deals involving Disney and its affiliates would be in jeopardy if they didn’t do something about Kimmel. Disney CEO Bob Iger and his fellow executives were obviously listening as Kimmel was swiftly suspended, even if the company’s official statement tried to pretend the two incidents were not connected.
The public outcry that followed — including warnings from Maga loyalist senator Ted Cruz, who called out Carr for his mobster behaviour and pointed out that the right to free speech extends to speech you don’t like — and the increase in the numbers of consumers who cancelled their Disney Plus subscriptions led to the company backtracking and announcing this week that Kimmel would be returning to late night.
No-one was more outraged by this turn of events than Trump, who went on Truth Social to demand an explanation and remind his followers that Disney had already settled a lawsuit he brought against ABC News with a $15m donation to his presidential library last December.
While the real world waits to see how Trump will use US foreign policy power to ensure he wins a Nobel Peace Prize by ending the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Iger and Disney are anxiously waiting to see how much he might sue them for this time and how much more they’ll have to contribute to his library to keep making profits for shareholders.
In July, Paramount announced the end of Stephen Colbert’s tenure as a late-night host after the end of his show’s current season next year — the entertainment industry responded to the decision with an Emmy Award for Colbert last week — and settled a lawsuit brought against 60 Minutes with a $16m donation to the library, decisions that no doubt helped to secure approval for its long-planned Skydance merger.
The New York Times is facing an outrageous $15bn lawsuit for defamation from the president, who claims the US paper of record is a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party but before the newspaper could be forced to consider whether to fire all its Democrat agents/reporters, the first round of the legal battle went its way, when a federal judge ruled against Trump, citing his complaint as a political document and not a legal complaint.
All of this has raised serious questions — which the Trump administration and Maga legislators are likely to ignore — about the relationship between free speech and political and financial power in America, the willingness of those in power to use the same and in their case far more long-term consequential actions they’ve decried in their “woke, cancel-culture” enemies and the unwillingness of media companies to take any kind of moral stand in the face of threats to their profits.
As Kimmel, whose return monologue on Tuesday night was measured, human and emotional while still containing the jokes that needed to be made, an environment in which the much-touted “leader of the free world celebrates people losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke,” is, no matter your political, religious or cultural beliefs, “un-American” and “dangerous”.
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