For Irish audiences, Jimmy Kimmel is only slightly more familiar than Charlie Kirk was before his murder 11 days ago.
Kimmel’s stints presenting the Oscars may have given him a certain global visibility, but late-night US television tends to reach us as short clips on phones, rather than as a nightly appointment. That distance can make American media panics seem mildly exotic and slightly incomprehensible.
This one really matters, though. In his opening monologue on Monday, Kimmel told his audience on ABC that Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, might have been a pro-Trump Republican and he accused the Maga movement of trying to spin the murder for political gain.
Kimmel also mocked Donald Trump’s answer to a question about Kirk. By then, details about the suspect were beginning to emerge and the first claim looked stale. The second was standard Kimmel, sharp and partisan, and unlikely to go down well in the White House.
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The next day, Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), told a right-wing podcaster that when broadcasters aired material such as Kimmel’s, regulators could proceed “the easy way or the hard way”.
He pointed to affiliate station groups that carry ABC programmes. He then added that companies could change their conduct and take action on Kimmel or the FCC would have “additional work ahead”.
As late-night TV veteran David Letterman said, the language sounded less like an independent regulator and more like a mob enforcer. The signal was not subtle, and it was received loud and clear. On Wednesday ABC bowed to affiliate pressure and suspended Kimmel indefinitely.
The affiliates had reason to be fearful. Local station owners rely on the FCC for licence renewals, for relief from ownership caps and for approval of big mergers that can make or break balance sheets.
Two of the biggest groups, Nexstar and Sinclair, publicly moved against Kimmel, while coverage quickly pointed out that Nexstar is seeking approval for a multibillion dollar deal. ABC’s decision to pull Kimmel’s show cannot be separated from that context.
The affair reveals what a distorted hall of mirrors the US debate over free speech has become.
Americans like to insist that the First Amendment is sacred and uniquely expansive. It is true that the constitutional text is often invoked like scripture. It’s also true that the country is a mass of contradictions, oscillating between loud celebration of individual liberty and a thousand small rules that enforce conformity. You may do as you please, provided you please the right people.
The legal background is also messier than the myth. For much of American history, courts permitted wide limits on expression. The broad protections that people now take for granted were mostly built in the second half of the 20th century.
The US Supreme Court narrowed the scope of defamation law to give journalists room to investigate the powerful. It re-drew the line around political agitation to protect even aggressive and unpleasant advocacy. It loosened restrictions on pornography, then partly tightened them, then loosened them again.
The result was a framework that celebrated speech in principle while leaving significant tools in the hands of regulators.
The FCC has long enforced prudish rules on what can be shown or said on network television and radio that contrast with the much more laissez-faire approach to cable TV and a hands-off attitude to the internet. And its regulatory role in mergers and acquisitions gives it massive power in an era of media downsizing and consolidation.
Carr, whom Donald Trump appointed as chair earlier this year, is a bureaucrat and legal expert who has spent much of his working life at the FCC.
He is also the author of the chapter on media in Project 2025, the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term, which has proved a pretty accurate roadmap for much that has transpired since January.
Carr represents a strand of thinking on the American right that treats the administrative state not as a beast to be slain but as a set of levers to be pulled.
Since his appointment, Paramount, owner of the CBS network, has settled a Trump lawsuit which it would almost certainly have won had it gone to court and has axed left-leaning talkshow host Stephen Colbert.
These decisions came while the company was awaiting an FCC decision for its acquisition by Skydance, a company owned by pro-Trump billionaires David and Larry Ellison. That has since been granted.
Leaning so blatantly on ABC to drop Kimmel a represents a further ratcheting-up of these strong-arm tactics.
And there are signs that other arms of the administration are following suit.
Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Miller, has intimated that the tax status of liberal-leaning non-profits might come under attack as part of the response to the “far-left networks” which allegedly inspired Kirk’s murder. Other administration figures point to the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundation as likely targets.
Meanwhile, US attorney general Pam Bondi declared that her Justice Department intended to go after purveyors of “hate speech”, which she argued was distinct from “free speech”. This proved too much even for some Republicans, who had been arguing the exact opposite for years.
Bondi was forced to walk back her comments, but the glaring hypocrisies hardly stop there. For years conservatives argued that a liberal elite controlled the media, academia and Hollywood, trampling on the core American value of free speech. Now they’re doing the same thing, only far more crudely, using the power of the regulatory state to crack down on dissent.
None of this seems to perturb the self-styled free-speech warriors of the rump coalition. Indeed, they are gleefully appropriating the language of the very cancel culture they so decried a few months ago. Speech is free, they say, but it has consequences like getting fired. You can say whatever you want, they argue, but don’t blame us if you get deplatformed.
The model is not new. For years the American populist right has looked with admiration towards Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, where formal ownership, regulatory pressure and public subsidy have produced a pliant and obedient media ecology.
Some will protest that the US is not Hungary. Its institutions are sprawling and competitive, its courts argumentative. But threats from regulators, delivered during active merger reviews, look like a fast route to outcomes that courts would strike down if attempted by statute.
You don’t have to criminalise speech. You just need a few lawsuits here, a few licences revisited there, a few presenters taken off air. In the end, the result is just the same.
