The Firing of Jimmy Kimmel

The firing of Jimmy Kimmel by ABC -- which is exactly what his "suspension" is -- is the latest step in the road to fascism being paved by the current President of the United States and his allies. It began with the hounding out of their jobs of FBI and other people who lawfully investigated Trump's instigation of the January 2021 attack on the Capitol, the pressure on universities to end DEI and other policies distasteful to MAGA Americans and their theorists, and of course the firing of another late-night host, Stephen Colbert, by another cowardly media operation, CBS. (William Paley must still be turning over in his grave.)

In the case of Kimmel, rumblings were being made about the FCC doing something about him. I've thought the FCC was blatantly unconstitutional as soon as I was old enough to think. From the day it was signed into law by FDR in 1934, the Federal Communications Commission violated the First Amendment's clear proscription on the government "abridging the freedom of speech or of the press" -- what else would any honest person say a late-night comedian, ridiculing Trump and his policies, was doing? What Kimmel said about Charlie Kirk's assassin was clearly a form of speech -- Kimmel spoke it -- and an op-ed or opinion-presenting press, which the press has been doing since the day that broadsides began pouring out of lumbering printing presses. The only crime in what Jimmy Kimmel said would be in how easy it was to make those jokes, if it was indeed a joke at all. Kimmel's firing, meanwhile, is a threat to our democratic way of life that obviously is no joke.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though certainly one of our greatest Presidents, jeopardized our democracy when he signed the Communications Act of 1934 into law. So did Felix Frankfurter in the 1943 Supreme Court decision "NBC v. the US," which he wrote, and which ratified the FCC's power to regulate broadcasting. Ironically, that was in the middle of our war with Nazi Germany which FDR was so instrumental in winning, not to mention that Frankfurter was a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920.

I started teaching at universities in the 1970s, and the danger of the FCC has always been a part of my courses about the media and their impact. My main point has always been: imagine the FCC under the control of a President bent on willfully superseding our democracy and its protections from dictatorship (see, for example, my 2005 Media Ecology conference Keynote address transcript and video The Flouting of the First Amendment). Although Trump was a student at Fordham University from 1964-1966, that was long before I arrived in 1998, so I guess I can't count what he did to Kimmel and Colbert as a failure of my teaching.

And today, in typical Trump fashion, his response to all the criticism he's been receiving for scaring the Walt Disney Company (which owns the American Broadcasting Company) into firing Kimmel was to double-down on his obsession with routing out all criticism of him and his policies from the media. On Air Force One back from the United Kingdom, he mused that maybe it was time for the FCC to rescind the license of any broadcast medium that was critical of his policies, presumably including his policy of silencing late-night talk show hosts that criticized him or dared to make a joke about him.

I've been warning about this danger in my classes for decades, but I take no satisfaction and indeed am saddened and deeply concerned to see this patent threat to our democracy so vividly realized by this President and the many people who support him.