The Media Research Center continued to complain that the authoritarian implications of ABC’s Trump administration-encouraged suspension of Jimmy Kimmel was called out in a Sept. 20 post by Clay Waters:
PBS News Hour’s weekly Friday segment with New York Times columnist David Brooks and MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart focused exclusively on ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and the idea that censorship and authoritarianism are big problems. Brooks took a sort of centrist position where he condemned Kimmel and the late night industry as a whole but denounced the suspension, while Capehart warned that authoritarianism is already here, claiming, “We’re in it.”
[…]Brooks began with the cringe-inducing fire in a crowded theater idea, but also acknowledged private companies have the right to police their employees, “Yes, we have lost the boundaries. I mean, you’re not allowed to say — famously, shout fire in a crowded theater. You can’t urge people to go kill somebody. Like, if it leads to violence, that should be prohibited speech, and especially if you’re a private company and you care about the integrity of your institution. But that boundary has been blurred.”
He then urged PBS’s liberal audience to look at things from the conservative perspective: “Imagine you woke up and every media organization you saw preached Christian nationalism. You sent your kids to school, and they were being taught Christian nationalism. You turned on late night comedy, and it’s all Christian nationalism. For conservatives, that’s how it feels.”
[…]Capehart began lamenting, “I would like to think that there would be a media company or a band of law firms or a band of institutions of higher learning who would be willing to push back. It’s not enough that Harvard is willing to push back. It’s not enough that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are willing to push back.”
He added, “And I can’t think of a media organization, other than The New York Times — I’m thinking of television — where they have been in the crosshairs of the president’s rhetoric and have said, ‘No, we’re not going to do it. We’re not going to do what you want.’”
Capehart concluded by announcing the arrival of authoritarianism, “And that’s why this slide, to me, it just — it picks up speed. Every week that we sit here. We’re talking about yet another level deeper into what lots of academicians and others have said, you know, the march to authoritarianism. People say we’re sliding into it. I say, no, we’re in it.”
Waters laughably denied there was authoritarianism involved: “Meanwhile, far from authoritarianism, the most recent report strongly suggests ABC and Disney want Kimmel back, but it is Kimmel’s own pride that forbids him from admitting he did anything wrong that is keeping the suspension in place.” Yeah, it couldn’t possibly be that Trump’s FCC chief, Brendan Carr, effectively threatened the broadcast licenses of ABC and its affiliates over Kimmel by declaring, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Alex Christy groused that the MRC’s favorite fair-weather conservative wasn’t one on Kimmel:
HBO’s Bill Maher attacked his former ABC bosses on Friday’s Real Time for suspending his replacement, Jimmy Kimmel. According to Maher, Kimmel was wrong in what he said, but he has a right to say it, and ABC’s suspension means the network stands for “Always Be Caving.” While Maher’s position may seem like a consistent and principled stand in favor of free speech, he got a couple key details wrong.
Maher began by expressing his solidarity with Kimmel, “It was 24 years to the day that I made comments on ABC that got me canceled from that network, and Jimmy Kimmel took my slot. Did you know that? Politically Incorrect? Oh yes, I got canceled before cancel even had a culture. So, do headlines. Yeah, this is on my wall. From the Variety, ‘White House keeps heat on ABC’s Maher.’ This shit isn’t new. It’s worse. We’ll get to that.”
That is a reference to September 17, 2001’s Politically Incorrect, where Maher declared, “We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away, that’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, not cowardly.”
The two controversies led Maher to declare, “But ABC? They are steady. ABC stands for ‘Always be caving.’ So, Jimmy, Jimmy, pal, I am with you, I support you, and on the bright side you don’t have to pretend anymore that you like Disneyland. That was always a great part of it for me when I got my ass canned over there.”
Christy didn’t mention that his employer was one of the leading right-wing groups demanding that ABC fire Maher over that remark.
Like his boss, nepo baby David Bozell, Christy tried to redefine cancel culture to exempt Kimmel:
Cancel culture usually revolves around stupid posts someone made in high school or having an opinion that someone else doesn’t like. Kimmel is a 57-year old man who was suspended for either winking and nudging at vile conspiracy theories or lying by omission when he refused to explain why MAGA people are trying to disprove the idea that the shooter was “one of them.” If Maher really believes Kimmel was wrong, he should call his friend and urge him to apologize.
Christy whined some more a while later:
Former CNN anchor and self-appointed guardian of the truth Jim Acosta unleashed several bits of fake news in the early moments of his Thursday podcast as he reacted to ABC’s decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel. Most notably, Acosta claimed that all Kimmel did was call out MAGA for politicizing Charlie Kirk’s murder.
[…]First of all, as of now, Kimmel has only been suspended. Second of all, it is not true that “all Kimmel did was call out MAGA.”
We know this because Acosta later played the clip, but not before adding, “Let’s at least play what Jimmy Kimmel said and talk about it on the other side because I think this has been twisted around by the far-right and then just ABC and the stations responded to it.”
In the clip, Kimmel was shown declaring, “New lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
[…]If all Kimmel did was accuse MAGA of politicizing Kirk’s murder, that would’ve been bad, but it would not have generated the outrage that his comments ultimately did. Acosta wants to shame conservatives for trying to paint the shooter as a lefty “before the facts even came in,” even though it was pretty clear from his family and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox that is where the evidence was leading.
Jeffrey Lord used his Sept. 20 column to mock Kimmel’s suspension as just and deserved, not to mention play comedy cop:
Ohhhh no! The world is ending!
Or so goes the underlying moaning and groaning from the Left as ABC suspends the namesake host of its late night Jimmy Kimmel Live! show.
[…]And lo and behold millions of Americans who saw this bit of left-wing humor saw Kimmel’s “funny” and were not only not amused, but took offense that Kimmel was making a point of joking about the cold-blooded murder of a kind, decent 31-year old husband and father of two very young kids.
No dummies over there running ABC and parent company Disney, the execs instantly jumped to “cease airing new episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live! until further notice.”
Lord then endorsed Kimmel’s suspension though he claims to be a “free speech fundamentalist”:
I am what might be called a “free speech fundamentalist.” But let’s be clear here. “Free speech” does not apply to the employee-employer relationship.
If you’re in a debate and call somebody stupid, the world keeps moving.
But if in fact you take a moment in your job to call your boss stupid, well, need it be said that if your boss takes offense he/she “the boss” has every right to can you from working in the boss’s office. The First Amendment does not apply.
Jimmy Kimmel, in his lust to smear MAGA folks (and reminder, “MAGA” stands for “Make America Great Again”) acted out his far-left politics on his live TV show the other night. To say the least, his bosses at ABC and Disney were not happy, and in a blink they suspended his show. Will it come back? That remains to be seen.
But if there is any lesson to come out of the professional self-immolation of both Kimmel and CBS’s Stephen Colbert it is that they are hell-and-gone from the hilarious late night and decidedly non-political comedy shows that were hosted in the long ago by the inimitable NBC Tonight Show host Johnny Carson.
Meanwhile, Lord was silent about Rush Limbaugh went on a three-day misogynistic tirade against Sandra Fluke; he spent a 2016 column insisting that right-wing talk radio wasn’t dying even though several major-market stations dropped Limbaugh after hateful tirade, his ratings notably declined, and he later re-upped with his syndicator for presumably much less than he had been making.
Intern Isaac White dutifully spouted his employer’s narrative in a Sept. 21 post:
As the left-wing media wallowed in their self-absorbed censorship fantasy, MSNBC continued to reaffirm its commitment to being the worst offender. At the end of an exhaustingly boring week, Ana Cabrera Reports decided to add a little pizzazz to Friday morning by blatantly lying about what “comedian” Jimmy Kimmel’s possibly famous last words on ABC actually meant.
In what should have been an easy whine session about the FCC and President Trump, former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy boldly spoke the opposite of the truth: “Look at what Jimmy Kimmel just—we haven’t even talked about what he said. He didn’t say anything incorrect.”
This is what Kimmel said verbatim: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
One didn’t even need a single citation to prove how just how fallacious and moronic Darcy’s defense of the late night comedian was. But here’s one anyways.
White didn’t explain why he and his employer are holding Kimmel — a comedian — to factual standards they refuse to impose on the president of the United States.