It’s easy to point the finger at President Trump for all of the blatant attacks we’ve seen in recent days on the press and the right to free speech. We cannot ignore, however, that the real culprit behind the assaults on our democracy that we’re witnessing isn’t Trump, but rather the extreme concentration of wealth in America that enables him.
Since his first term in office, we’ve seen how Trump and his administration attempt to muzzle journalists and media outlets they don’t like and discredit the credibility of sources they don’t trust. But last week’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was a watershed moment in their crusade against free speech. Last Monday, in his opening monologue, Kimmel made comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassin which angered prominent conservatives. In a podcast appearance two days later, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr—who has the power to block mergers and revoke broadcasting licenses—made an explicit threat to the companies that broadcast Kimmel’s show. He said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way…these companies can find ways to change conduct, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Hours later, ABC announced that it was suspending Kimmel’s show “indefinitely.”
One of our members, Michael Hirschorn, is the Chief Executive of Ish Entertainment and has had a long career in media and entertainment. He published an opinion piece last week in The New York Times about Kimmel’s ousting and what it reveals about the state of free speech in America. To open the piece, he said:
“Until Wednesday’s shocking announcement that ABC was canceling Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show indefinitely because of comments he made about Charlie Kirk’s killing, it was possible, if one squinted hard enough, to pretend that a broad free speech crackdown was not underway. The down-the-road cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late-night show on CBS was chalked up to financial concerns, though anyone in the business not paid to think otherwise believes Mr. Colbert’s elegant skewerings of President Trump and MAGA were the real reason.
The silencing of Mr. Kimmel, following an explicit threat by Brendan Carr, the head of ABC’s regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, is the mask of ‘free speech’ coming off for good.”
The backlash to Kimmel’s suspension was swift and overwhelming, and came from all sides of the political spectrum. Hollywood unions representing over 400,000 workers publicly condemned the move, and one organized a protest outside the headquarters of Disney, ABC’s parent company. Fellow late-night hosts—including current figures like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Fallon, but also past ones like David Letterman and Conan O’Brien—publicly supported Kimmel. Consumers cancelled their Disney+ subscriptions and their Disney World vacations. Even prominent conservatives blasted the decision. Senator Ted Cruz—who is known for his constitutional originalist positions—went so far as to liken Carr’s comments to those of a Mafia boss.
Michael Hirschorn’s op-ed in The New York Times
Ultimately, in the wake of cancelled subscriptions and growing backlash, ABC caved and gave Kimmel his spot back on TV last night. Carr tried to downplay his role in the fiasco by saying that Disney made its initial decision to suspend Kimmel’s program because of its ratings, but that’s not true. No matter how Carr or anyone else in the Trump administration tries to spin it, there is no denying that this was a classic episode of government censorship.
Freedom of the press and speech more generally is not something that we typically talk about, let alone late-night TV or “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” But we still feel it’s within our lane, and that it’s essential for us to say something about it in this unique moment in American history.
In addition to “Tax the Rich” and “Pay the People,” one of our priorities as an organization is “Spread the Power.” What we mean by “Spread the Power” is taking actions to safeguard the right to vote and get big money out of politics. It also involves ensuring that all people have the ability to speak freely, particularly when it comes to criticizing those in positions of power. If people don’t have that ability, we can’t honestly say we have a democracy. In his monologue last night, Kimmel included a clip of none other than Trump himself saying this: “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. It’s as simple as that. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple just like dominoes. One by one, they’ll go down.”
The issue at the heart of the Jimmy Kimmel debacle goes much deeper, though, than what we have seen in the headlines about this issue. Scratch below the surface, and you’ll find a handful of corporations and their billionaire owners, many of them friendly to Trump, who have amassed outsized control over the media that we consume every day.
In a tweet, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders doesn’t mince words about how an oligarchy impacts who controls the media and what we’re allowed to see and read.
In 1983, 90% of American media was owned by 50 companies. Today, thanks to a long train of mergers over the years, that number is now…five. Disney owns ABC, ESPN, and FX; Comcast owns NBCUniversal, MSNBC, and Telemundo; Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN and HBO—and so on and so on. Trump-friendly billionaires head many of those companies, or own other traditional and digital media outlets themselves. Elon Musk owns X. Mark Zuckerberg owns Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Patrick Soon-Shiong owns the Los Angeles Times. The Murdoch family owns Fox News, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
More recently, Trump allies Larry Ellison and his son David Ellison made headlines about their current and potential media ownership. David Ellison owns Skydance Media, which acquired Paramount (the parent company of CBS) this past summer. Now, David has his eyes on Warner Bros. Discovery. As for Larry, his company, Oracle, is part of the consortium of companies that Trump is assembling to take control of TikTok’s US operations.
It makes a difference, and not in a good way, for so few billionaires to control so much of the media. For one thing, with fewer people to pressure, it becomes easier for an authoritarian like Trump to get his way—especially if those people are already his friends. More broadly, it allows those few billionaires, through their corporations, to control what we all read and watch on a daily basis, and even what is considered “news” worthy of sharing, ultimately shaping what we think too.
America has entered a Second Gilded Age. Wealth inequality is now higher today than it was during the first Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century. Back then, to be rich and powerful, you needed to own the means of production—railroads, steel, oil, and the like. But today, in our new information economy, you need to own the means of information—and billionaires have done an outstanding job of doing just that.
The Jimmy Kimmel maelstrom is over, but that doesn’t mean that Trump and his administration’s attacks on free speech are over too. Last night, even before Kimmel’s show aired, Trump implied on social media that he would attempt to sue ABC. He’s also called for the ousting of other late-night hosts like Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon. The Defense Department has issued new rules controlling what Pentagon journalists can report. The list goes on.
This past week showed us that Americans across the political spectrum can put aside our differences to stand up for one of the few things we all seem to agree on: our First Amendment right to free speech. We must continue to do this if and when Trump strikes again. The long-term solution, though, is to reduce the extreme inequality plaguing our nation, which not only provides a breeding ground for authoritarians like Trump but allows authoritarian-friendly billionaires to be their mouthpieces via their control of the media.
A few weeks ago, we said that inequality beyond a certain level leads by definition to authoritarianism. Today, we’ll take it a step further, and say that authoritarianism goes hand in hand with attacks on sacred rights like freedom of speech. If we want to stop it, we need to get to the root of the problem and tackle inequality before it’s too late.