When the American version of Niemollers poem is written I could have guessed that immigrants, universities, and political opponents would be near the top of the list. I have to say “late night comedians” is a bit of a strange development. Stewart, Oliver, and Meyers have to know they’re all on the chopping block. Fallon is too bland to attract much attention but he might get chopped to just so that they can say it was a clean sweep.
If Trump were a king in the Middle ages he’d be going through about one court jester a week.
I’ll always have a soft spot for Letterman, and I’m torn between wanting to know how he would be handling this and just being glad he doesn’t have to deal with all of this BS directly.
They’re erroneously claiming that Kimmel said that the killer was MAGA, which isn’t true. Kimmel said that MAGA was immediately trying to say the kid was anything but MAGA, before they knew anything about him, which was true. Immediately after the murder they were screaming “THIS WAS A LEFTIST! IT’S CIVIL WAR!” which is something Kimmel and comment on regardless of what he thinks the motivation of the shooter was.
It’s insane that they – both being government figures and prominent influencers – can immediately decide what the motivations of the shooter were and call for retaliatory violence, whereas if Kimmel even mentions that they did that they’re trying to act like he’s the bad guy.
Kimmel’s comments were apparently too subtle for the MAGA mind to be able to comprehend.
ABC really isn’t the chief villain. Their biggest sin is that they’re a for-profit corporation, which makes them beholden to and subject to the control of commercial and government power. This had always been a weakness of the US broadcasting system, where public broadcasting has received very poor government funding and now, under Trump, none at all. In civilized countries public broadcasting is a vibrant institution with a strictly mandated statutory arms-length relationship between the government and their editorial polices.
The second part of the villainy is that Trump has been ruthlessly exploiting this weakness by threatening the licenses of commercial broadcasters if they don’t bend to his will. So now they can’t even air mild jokes that might be deemed to be critical, and meanwhile Fox News is lying their asses off every single day, which is just fine as long as it’s pro-Trump.
He put up the video of the reporter on the White House lawn asking Trump how he was holding up over the loss of his dear friend Charlie Kirk.
He said, “I think very well” and without taking a breath, he immediately started talking about the ongoing construction of the White House ballroom.
Kimmel said, "So he’s in the fourth stage of grief. Demolition; construction. This is not how an adult mourns a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish."
So make no mistake about it. He didn’t get postponed for talking shit about Charlie Kirk, because he didn’t talk shit about Kirk. He got censured for talking shit about Donald Trump.
Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns the largest affiliate groups of ABC, has called upon Kimmel to apologize and make a meaningful personal donation to the Kirk Family and Turning Point USA.
Yeah, that’s not going to happen. He’s not coming back.
QFT
As the saying goes, politics is downstream from media. This is what has enabled Erdogan, Orbán (eand much earlier Berlusconi) and there ilk to gain and remain im power.
Americans tend to see their 1st amendment rights as very strong. There’s another thread about “the problem with Free Speech in UK/EU” where the US is held up as a shining example of how free speech should be done (I only read the beginning, so I may be missing finer points.
Free speech, enshrined in laws is always subject to political whims. “W didn’t förbid Lenny Bruce from performing, thus no infringement on his free speech.” No but you threatened to withdraw the liquor license from that glub u less they cancelled him, ASF.
I keep reading on this board aboiut how private enitites that stop someone from saying whatever they want is not a violation of the 1st amendment. That only covers that the government is not allowed to do censorship.
But there are obviously ways around that.
Trump is a prickly bully with very low self esteem. Silencing the talk show hosts is his way of getting even for them relentlessly mocking him. MAGA doesn’t view that woke left wing liberal media so this was all bout retribution.
Back in the day, Wolfman Jack broadcast from Mexico, from a “border blaster” radio station, that put out 500,000 watts of power. That could cover pretty much all of the United States and parts of Canada. Mexico was not included, as the Wolfman used reflectors to make sure that his signal went north. At the time, the FCC limit for broadcasters in the US was 50,000 watts, so Wolfman, broadcasting from Mexico, could bypass the FCC’s rules about output wattage.
Now, with AM radio slowly dying, and TV being attacked, I wonder if some similar scheme might work. Not necessarily from Mexico (Trump will use any excuse to attack it) or Canada (same, basically), but from ships anchored offshore, outside the US’s jurisdiction. Anchor a ship in international waters, set up a 500,000 watt transmitter, and blanket the US with anti-Trump messages. Drown out all the pro-Trump stations. But it would all depend on how many people listen to the radio anymore.
YouTube may be the better answer, though how long before anti-Trump channels get shut down, under some pretext that is totally made-up, remains to be seen.
The Walt Disney Company—the parent company of the American Broadcasting Company—has a current market capitalization of over US$200B. It owns multi-billion dollar film franchises, theme parks around the world, the largest cable and streaming sports service, and numerous other properties and holdings. If its corporate officers won’t stand up to intimidation, suppression, and tyranny, what chance do smaller companies, institutions, and individuals have?
Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.
YouTube is owned by Alphabet (Google). They are unlikely to be a solution for Kimmel or Colbert. They are just as likely to censor content to satisfy DJT/MAGA demands.
And that being the truth no one should repeat the lie that Kimmel was effectively fired because of comments about Charlie Kirk.
DO NOT UNITENTIONALLY REPEAT THE TRUMP/MAGA GASLIGHTING
A friend of mind was expressing astonishment about the blowback to Kimmel’s comments, and the viciousness with which the Right is attacking him and demanding his silence.
He’s just a late-night knucklehead, making dumb jokes, my friend said. I mean, can you imagine Hitler going after the Jay Leno of his day?
And I said—
Yes, I can, because he did. The man’s name was Werner Finck.
Obviously, television was not a thing in the early 1930s. What there was, though, especially in Germany, was cabaret culture. It was The Thing To Do — go to the cabaret, hear some music, listen to comedians poking fun at current events, have some drinks and food. Finck co-founded a venue, Die Katakombe (“the catacombs”), where he acted as host and MC between other acts, and made his own comic remarks. He claimed not to be especially political, but he disliked how the Nazis were compelling obedience and conformity, and their humorless rigidity made them an easy, rich target for someone with a dryly satirical sense of humor like Finck’s.
After the establishment of the Reichskulturkammer in 1933, part of the Gleichschaltung program instigated by Goebbels, Finck was closely monitored by the Gestapo, and his audience was regularly infiltrated by state observers, trying to catch Finck making directly treasonous or subversive remarks. In 1935, Finck was arrested and briefly placed in a concentration camp. When freed, he was barred from performing for an entire year, and eventually had to accept a military assignment during the war to stay out of prison.
There’s an even crazier example of a dictatorial regime leaning on a popular comedian, though. This one comes out of Iran.
In the late 1960s, the actor Parviz Sayyad created a comic character on a popular TV show, an unnamed kid from a rural village who was simple but kind-hearted. The audience loved the character, so Sayyad gave him a name, Samad Agha, and brought him back in his own TV show and a series of movies.
The comedic premise is pretty straightforward: Samad is a country bumpkin, naive and traditional. Whenever the modern world intrudes on his village, or any time Samad needs to go to the big city for some reason, confusion and frustration result. For a rough analog of the style of performance and humor, imagine Samad as a Persian version of Ernest P. Worrell.
You wouldn’t think this premise would have political implications, but consider the context. The Pahlavi dynasty was in control of Iran (the Shah who was removed in the 1979 revolution was named Mohammad Reza Pahlavi). This regime had been aggressively pursuing a modernization program since the late 50s, co-opting some of the initiatives advocated by Mohammad Mosaddegh before his removal in the coup of 1953 with the aim of centralizing and stabilizing the Shah’s authority in the uncertainty that followed. His reforms were extensive: undermining the power of the Islamic clergy, granting women the right to vote, promoting literacy, and so on (for more, read about the “White Revolution” here).
The irony, of course, is that while these reforms might seem to be superficially Western-minded (the Shah was a Francophile) and were accelerating Iran’s standard of living far ahead of their Middle Eastern neighbors, they were enacted with a heavy, autocratic hand. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi may have claimed to want to make Iran a beacon of progress, and he may even have superficially believed it, but he himself, unquestionably, was a dictator who brooked no personal opposition, using political repression and a brutal internal police agency to force his agenda down the throat of an increasingly restive country.
In the middle of this, the character of Samad appears. He’s befuddled by modern “conveniences,” and frequently doesn’t see the point. He argues with local bureaucrats whose implementation of the reform program is incompetent or corrupt. He struggles navigating urban environments and just wants to go back to his village.
The character was instantly popular. Samad’s frustrations and annoyances mirrored those of the wider population. Change is difficult, and the Iranian regime was bringing a lot of it. Samad was a symbol of “rural wisdom,” echoing the traditional views of people who were bewildered by and resistant to cultural evolution. Sayyad says he didn’t intend any of this as a deliberately political critique; he just saw the clash between tradition and modernity as fertile ground for comedy. Whatever his intentions, the audience loved Samad.
The authorities, though, saw him as dangerous and subversive. The reform effort was being promoted as entirely positive, a program that would make life better for all Iranians. They wanted popular entertainment figures to portray gratitude for the ongoing changes. Samad didn’t do that. He was annoyed. The annoyance was portrayed humorously, but he was still annoyed.
As soon as Samad became popular and it was clear the character would stick around, Sayyad began to be visited frequently by political officers who wanted to scrutinize his scripts and emphasize that there should never be even an implication of political messaging or any kind of criticism of the regime’s agenda. Sayyad struggled more and more, and ultimately he left the country shortly before the 1979 revolution. He didn’t bother to go back afterward, either; he recognized the reality of who had taken over, and he permanently relocated himself to the West. (He’s still alive, too. I would love to hear what he makes of current developments.)
In short — imagine if George Bush didn’t like the Ernest movies and forced Jim Varney into exile. That’s basically what we’re talking about here.
The point of all this? It’s not surprising at all that the Trump cabal has targeted media figures who engage in satirical critique. This has been part and parcel with the authoritarian playbook forever. It’s important that the autocrat not be questioned, but it’s much more important that the autocrat not be mocked. He must project authority and invincibility, and laughing at him and his projects punctures his veil and dispels his aura. And Trump himself, being a TV addict and someone with an instinct for mass-media presentation, is probably even more sensitive to this than his predecessors.
While it may seem utterly ridiculous for the President to care what comedians are saying about him, it’s imperative for his success that they be muzzled. It’s what leaders like him have always done.
It’s remarkable how much shittiness MAGA has managed to put into one package.
Create a regulatory environment where one giant conglomerate merges with another giant conglomerate on the regular in a way that’s against public interest
Create massive networks of secretly conservative propaganda by shifting the content of local stations all across the country, channels they’ve been watching their whole lives and don’t know are becoming little bastions of Fox News
Trump’s grift requires that corporations bribe him to get approval for these mergers that hurt the American public
The bribe is silencing speech critical of Trump. CBS even put someone in charge of “balance” to make sure CBS is never critical of Trump or republicans.
This exact same thing has happened twice to two of the major media companies in the US and they were complicit the whole way. It won’t be long until all political criticism through mainstream media will be silenced.