First, though I’m deeply skeptical about the power of boycotts and protests, this one seems to have worked. A combination of cancellations, petitions, announcements by creatives that they would no longer work for Disney, and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s trash-talking his successor, Bob Iger (though not by name), apparently had a lot to do with the lifting of Kimmel’s suspension.
Second, there are a few factors that have yet to play out. FCC chair Brendan Carr, whose threat to Disney and to broadcasters that continued to carry Kimmel’s show is what started all this, lied on Monday by saying he had not threatened anyone. Well, if that’s what he’s claiming now and he’s sticking to it, then that’s good news.
But though Kimmel may be coming back to ABC, we have not yet heard a final decision from Nexstar or Sinclair, two giant broadcasting companies that together own about 25% of the country’s ABC affiliates. Nexstar is trying to pull off a merger with another media company and needs FCC approval.
Sinclair is controlled by right-wing interests, and the company went so far last week as to demand that Kimmel apologize for his mildly offensive monologue about Donald Trump and the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and make a sizable donation to Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Kirk.
George W. Bush in 2001. Public domain photo via the U.S. National Archives.
FCC chair Brendan Carr’s thuggish threat to crack down on media companies following late-night comedy host Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue about Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk differed from past instances only in that he said it out loud.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said in an appearance on a right-wing podcaster’s show. And Disney, Nexstar and Sinclair, all of which have significant regulatory issues before the FCC, wasted no time in making sure that Kimmel was banished from ABC’s airwaves.
Trump himself put it even more bluntly, saying that broadcasters who are “against me” should lose their licenses, reported Zoë Richards of NBC News.
The first comparison that comes to mind, naturally, is Richard Nixon’s threat in 1973 to take away the licenses of two Florida television stations owned by The Washington Post amid the paper’s dogged reporting on the Watergate scandal. “The difference here is that Nixon talked about the scheme only privately,” the Post’s Aaron Blake wrote about the scheme many years later.
Globe Opinion’s original headline. It was later changed to “Charlie Kirk murder: America needs dialogue, not bullets” online and “An attack on democracy” in print.
Boston Globe columnist Renée Graham has quit the paper’s editorial board in protest over last week’s editorial (sub. req.) praising the slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s commitment to free speech — an editorial that was widely derided by critics who objected to Kirk’s often hateful rhetoric. Graham will remain as a columnist and will continue to write her Globe newsletter, Outtakes.
Graham confirmed those developments in an email exchange but would not offer any further comment.
A Globe spokesperson said of Graham’s decision: “We are grateful to Renée Graham for her valuable contributions to our team and to the editorial board. We respect her decision to resign from the board and are pleased that she will continue in her role as a Globe Opinion associate editor, columnist, and newsletter writer.”
Kirk was murdered during an appearance at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10. It’s been the top story in the news ever since given the public nature of his death (including a graphic video), the devotion of his millions of followers (Donald Trump and JD Vance among them), and his comments targeting Black women, members of the LGBTQ community, immigrants and others.
FCC chair Brendan Carr. Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore.
Donald Trump is unleashing so much chaos in service to his authoritarian agenda that it is literally impossible to keep up. So today let’s just look at how Trump is threatening the broadcast news media.
Trump’s tool in this battle is Brendan Carr, whom he appointed to the Federal Communications Commission in 2017 and then recently elevated to the chairmanship. There are currently four members of the FCC — two Republicans, two Democrats and one vacancy, which Trump will presumably fill in the near future.
Not that the current tie matters. Carr helped author Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a second Trump term that Trump said he knew nothing about during the campaign. Among other things, Carr wrote that the FCC chair has extra special powers that the other members of the commission lack. Thus Carr is large and in charge, at least until someone with power challenges him.
I want to share with you just three actions that Carr has taken during his brief time as chair, all of which represent a threat to the media’s ability to provide us with the news and information we need in a democratic society.
◘ First, he is helping Trump with his bogus $10 billion lawsuit against CBS. Trump is suing the network over an interview that “60 Minutes” conducted last fall with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, claiming that the program was edited to make Harris sound more coherent than she really was.
CBS responded that it edits all of its recorded interviews, and that there was nothing unusual about the way it handled its conversation with Harris. (And really? If you watched her debate Trump or listened to her long, unedited conversations with Howard Stern and Alexandra Cooper, you know she has no problem speaking extemporaneously.) Nevertheless, the network may be on the verge of settling the lawsuit, perhaps to ease the regulatory path for CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to merge with Skydance, as Alena Botros writes for Fortune.
Carr, for his part, placed the FCC’s heavy thumb on the scale by ordering CBS to turn over the raw footage and transcripts of the Harris interview, thus making use of a public agency’s regulatory authority to help Trump do his dirty work, as David Folkenflik reports for NPR. To be clear: Trump would likely have gotten those materials anyway in the course of pre-trial discovery. Carr’s actions serve the purpose of amplifying Trump’s fact-free claim that there was something corrupt about how the interview was edited.
“60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens has said he will not apologize as part of any settlement, according to Michael Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin of The New York Times. Which raises a question: Will he resign? And if he does, will others follow him out the door?
◘ Second, and speaking of NPR, Carr has announced that he’s investigating NPR and PBS to see whether the public broadcasters’ underwriting practices violate their noncommercial mandate.
According to Liam Reilly of CNN, Carr is “concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials,” adding: “In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”
Well, guess what? A lot of underwriting announcements on NPR and PBS do seem like commercials. They’re more restrained than what’s on commercial television and radio, and but when a cruise line pops up before or after the “PBS NewsHour,” or when a rug company’s sponsorship is heard on WBUR Radio, it’s because they want you to take a cruise or buy a rug.
Public broadcasters have to get their money from somebody, and it can’t all come from viewers (and listeners) like you. Very little in the way of tax revenues support PBS and NPR. The rest of it has to come from foundation grants and corporate underwriting. Personally, I’m a huge fan of the BNSF Railway notice that sometimes appears on the “NewsHour,” but that’s because I like trains.
What Carr’s doing is pure harassment.
◘ Third, Carr said last week that the FCC is investigating a San Francisco radio station for the offense of committing journalism. Garrett Leahy reports in The San Francisco Standard that KCBS revealed the location of agents from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) and identified their unmarked vehicles in a place “known for violent gang activity.”
“We have sent a letter of inquiry, a formal investigation into that matter, and they have just a matter of days left to respond to that inquiry and explain how this could possibly be consistent with their public-interest obligations,” said Carr, who made his remarks during an appearance on — where else? — Fox News.
According to Leahy, KCBS declined to comment. But Juan Carlos Lara of public radio station KQED interviewed David Loy, legal director of the California-based First Amendment Coalition, who said:
Law enforcement operations, immigration or otherwise, are matters of public interest. People generally have the right to report this on social media and in print and so on. So it’s very troubling because it’s possible the FCC is potentially being weaponized to crack down on reporting that the administration simply just doesn’t like.
No doubt there will be much more to say about Carr in the months ahead. For now, it’s enough to observe that he is off to a predictably ominous start.
