There has been a huge reaction to the silencing of Jimmy Kimmel by our thin-skinned, can’t-take-a-joke (let alone criticism) wanna-be King. Pundits have pontificated. Some citizens have protested by canceling their Disney streaming subscriptions and/or trips to Disney theme parks, others are demanding a boycott, and a number have even turned up in front of Disney offices in California and New York. All of those actions have been entirely appropriate, but very few have focused on an element of our media environment that has enabled–even invited–the sort of ham-handed blackmail that has allowed the administration to muzzle speech of which it disapproves.
A recent essay from Lincoln Square connected the dots between that blackmail and the unprecedented media consolidation that has made it much more effective than it would otherwise have been.
As the essay noted, Kimmel was suspended because “billionaires who own the American media decided they were willing to capitulate to a dollar-store despot who decided his voice was no longer acceptable.” When a government regulator of broadcasting licenses goes on television and threatens to punish a network if it doesn’t rid the administration of the offending comic, the subsequent and immediate removal of the program “isn’t free will. It is state coercion made possible by billionaire media consolidation.”
The suspension also exposes a structural problem. A handful of companies control nearly every lever of American media. Nexstar is in the process of buying Tegna, a $6.2 billion deal that would give it reach into almost 80 percent of U.S. households if regulators (like Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr) approve it. Sinclair already holds enormous power. Gray is not far behind. Together, they dominate what gets marketed and sold as “local news.”
On the studio side, Larry Ellison and his son, David, just closed an $8 billion merger with Paramount. They are now openly vying for a Warner Bros. Discovery deal. Combined, that would give them control of two of the largest content pipelines in the world. Oracle, Larry Ellison’s company which has made him the richest man in the world, is also expected to play a central role in a restructured TikTok, potentially handing him primary cloud partnership and equity shares in a U.S. majority carveout. Ellison is also one of president Trump’s top political donors.
The picture is stark: The same billionaire network of Trump allies (including Rupert Murdoch and Fox News) controlling the studios, the broadcast stations, and the digital platforms — which we saw with Trump’s recent tech dinner. When government pressure comes, those choke points collapse inward. That is what just happened with Jimmy Kimmel.
And–as the essay points out–it’s interesting that those on the Right who’ve previously been the loudest about the importance of free speech have been suspiciously silent.
The cancellations of Colbert and Kimmel are examples of the power that media consolidation gives to into the billionaires who own the media and especially to the regulators acting–as the essay puts it– as “mob enforcers for the White House.” As it concludes:
If we let this moment pass without rightfully losing our shit and naming it for what it is, then the precedent will harden. The next comedian, journalist, or critic who challenges Trump or his allies will face the same weaponry — or think twice before doing so. And if Rogan and the rest of the self-proclaimed “free-speech advocates” continue to stay silent, then they are not allies in this fight. They are accessories to the silencing.
Billionaires loyal to the president are about to own nearly 80% of local and national media in this country — ahead of midterm elections and widespread military and police crackdowns in Democrat run cities. Jimmy Kimmel may be one of the first high-profile hosts to feel the wrath of this new system, but he will not be the last.
What went dark this week wasn’t just the Jimmy Kimmel Live! studio. It was a signal about where the First Amendment stands in Trump’s America.
Americans who still insist that “it can’t happen here” need to consider a “blast from the past” in a recent column by Charlie Sykes. The column reproduced a 1939 article from the New York Times, titled “Goebbels Ends Careers of Five ‘Aryan’ Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime.”
Read it and weep.
A postscript: since this was written, Kimmel’s show was returned to the airwaves. Evidently, the huge negative public reaction to Disney cowardice had an effect. We the People need to keep up the pressure!
And now we see prosecution of Jim Comey. Not good.
And next we have a very strange world wide meeting of our top military leaders…. Not good. Not good.
patmcc; and where is Nicole Wallace after Trump’s most recent demand she be fired?
News outlet mergers are turning news media into monopolies and soon we will be without choice as to who we want to hear our news from. Kathryn Graham, owner of the Washington Post, and Ed Bradlee, Editor of the Washington Post, went against Nixon’s order not to release the Pentagon Papers because the 1st Amendment provided the press the right to release truth in government to the public. The New York Times was given the first chance and cowered under Nixon’s illegal demand to cover it up. The Washington Post, under Graham and Bradlee, went on to bring down Nixon’s White House. Fear of the press is pressurizing the media to consolidate to provide full power over what we know.
Trump and his MAGA’s have taken control of the 1st Amendment and are in the process of denying those rights to the rest of the nation; and they are doing it at warp speed. They will protect their monopoly of the 1st Amendment by using the 2nd Amendment to do it by force; Charlie Kirk’s killer was raised by Republicans, he didn’t need to be registered with any political party.
“Media Consolidation” is simply a misleading term for monopolizing media free speech.
All these heinous distractions … Meanwhile, “justice” sits on the Epstein files. Hegseth is calling in generals from around the world to a secret conference. In case anyone misses what’s actually going on, the coup is transitioning from faking it to saying f*** democracy. We’ll just take over and start arresting all dissenters.
There will be blood. Somebody or somebodies will have to step up to save the nation from the total destruction created by a psychotic president and spineless acolytes. Remember, Hitler doesn’t rise to absolute power without his collection of knee-bending ass-kissers.
Let’s be clear, even before Trump, the media was controlled by a handful of oligarchs. That should have never happened! Bill Clinton set the stage for that, and why did that happen? Did anybody have kompromat on Bill?
Now, it’s only getting worse. I heard an Australian journalist ask Trump a meaningful question, and Trump “asked his name and said that the journalist was doing his country a disservice, and the Australian president was coming to see Trump, and Donny would snitch on him.”
Let’s also be clear, Larry Ellison is more than a billionaire who supported Trump. He is a loyal Zionist and racist, especially of the shade that lives in the Middle East surrounding Israel. He is buying TikTok to control the algorithm so he can drown out the pro-Palestine voices. Let’s also be clear that Biden banned TikTok, not for “national security reasons,” but because Israel wanted it done. Israel was losing the propaganda war to the Palestinians with video cameras.
Charlie Kirk was abandoning his pro-Israel speech (propaganda) aimed at the young people on college campuses. The billionaire Bill Ackman (who donates to the Democratic Party) was trying to convince him to stay on course in July ’25, but Charlie refused, according to insiders. Charlie was assassinated in September at his first speech on college campuses this season.
Now, if you think that Tyler Robinson was anything other than a patsy, you might want to understand who is taking a controlling interest in our media and what their motives are in the grand ole USA.
When I asked Google to tell me all the Jewish or Jewish Americans who operate in the media industry, it told me that is not a metric we follow. But, the first listing was Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_American_businesspeople_in_media
Google Gemini AI gave me a short list and indicated that Jewish Americans are also dominant in the music and Hollywood industries.
If you read Whitney Webb’s book, One Nation Under Blackmail, you’ll know that Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine’s daddy, worked for Mossad and was in the media business in the UK before he came to New York. He ran a spying operation for Israel called Promis Software. A journalist named Casolara covered the whole affair (scandal and spying) and was found dead in his hotel, ruled a “suicide.”
Maxwell was also found dead after he fell off his yacht naked. Robert Maxwell took his daughter everywhere with him and even named his yacht The Ghislaine.
I’ll let y’all connect the dots…is our wannabe Despot compromised?
It’s worth noting that after Kirk was murdered, Bibi Netanyahu stopped his genocide operations to make two public denials that he had anything to do with Charlie’s death. His first denial was while the body was still warm. Why the urgency to get in front of that story? 😉
Todd – if “Jewish Wealth “ + Israel were “The Problem “ – focusing on “The Solution “ would be easier. Sheila – you’ve correctly pointed to: Racism, toxic Christianity. We do need to listen to The Radical- thoughtful voices such as : Chris Hedges, and Jewish males like Peter Beinart and Mitchell Plitnick + Common Dreams , Intercept, even Loretta Ross- and do what we can to Resist
Let us not paint all Jewish Americans as bad guys. Jews got into the entertainment business, by the way, because the banking world would not let them in, and so on.
Media consolidation has been going on for decades, and I’m willing to bet that when Trump met with Orban, he was urged to try top control as much media as possible.
There is much wrong, especially now, with our country. Last year, the problems were mainly contained within our capitalist economy. The effort to obscure that resulted in long-term, relentless attacks funded by oligarchs on our socialist structure.
Those efforts resulted in Trump and his clown cabinet of corruption and incompetence.
The chief effort of our Glorious Leader in these weeks is ruining the lives of well-known people to bury his own faults, as documented in the Epstein Files, through a flurry of news-cycle-breaking news.
“This just in”.
It’s just another political theater act that is ultimately an artifact of our truly eye-watering distribution of wealth. Acts like this will continue until peaceful public protests overwhelmingly pressure for the release of the complete set of the DOJ buried, unredacted files.
Then the healing might begin.
The Kimmel Affair…what a circus. It’s great that Americans love their entertainment and entertainers. We need more entertainers such as Kimmel instead of journalists. Who knew Jimmy Kimmel would be the savior for free speech? What a benevolent actor!
Plus, it’s quite endearing Kimmel still has his $87,000 per episode salary.
Trump is such a puppet. I really look at this administration as the Presidency of Miriam Adelson.
About the new TikTok deal, Chinese control of TikTok is bad. MAGA control of TikTok is good. Welcome kiddies, to your new MAGA media channel.
The key question is why the Fox network, the premier source of lies, innuendo and hateful speech is permitted to carry on.
Complete hypocrisy.
Paul, take some time on AI and ask about Murdoch in Australia. He’s another silver spoon who used his media inheritance to exert pressure on Australian citizens’ voting choices and also pressure the political parties. He now controls over 60% of the market. The government should never have eased its control over licenses nor allowed the concentration of ownership.
Then along came the Wall Street-backed Bill Clinton, who did the same thing in the U.S. He was also a close friend of Epstein.
Ian, your comment about Miriam Adelson is accurate since she is Bibi’s main asset in this country. Her late hubby is the one who bribed the Ecuadorian president, Lenin Moreno, to let them install spying cameras in the London Embassy to spy on Julian Assange. Moreno was Correa’s VP and a strong Leftist who completely sold out once becoming president. China was gaining a foothold, so the US put money in his account, so he sold out. He’s now an Ecuadorian fugitive after hiding in the US for a while.
This is why I laughed every time Trump said he was going after the SWAMP or Deep State, because he’s owned by the Deep State. He may be POTUS, but all he is doing is using it to make his family more money.
https://youtu.be/H-O7dPkA45c?si=ALOUvXdoGTmPb_Ko
This might make you laugh a little… but at the same time is quite serious.