Washington (AP) – President Donald Trump He has reshaped the American media landscape, unleashing his long-standing grievances with the industry that he has been groping, criticizing and corning him for years, using threats, litigation and government pressures.
He pulled out multi-million dollar settlements, forced businesses to litigate expensively, and encouraged programming changes they found undesirable.
With his latest victory, ABC on Wednesday Jimmy Kimmelshaw It’s going to happen I took it off in the air For comedian’s comments on the assassination of conservative activists Charlie Kirk. Kimmel’s comments included references to the suspect’s contested political ideology.
A few hours before ABC’s decision, Brendan Kerra hand-selected head of Trump’s Federal Communications Commission warned that Kimmel could face the impact if he was not punished.
“We can do this in an easy or difficult way,” Kerr said. “These companies can find ways to change their behavior, frankly, to take action in Kimmel. Otherwise, there will be additional work beyond the FCC.”
It was kind of Brute Force Response Trump and his loyalty have been routinely bent since the Republican president returned to the White House with a pledge to retaliate against critics and political opponents. Trump’s reach is expanding to use federal devices to put pressure on businesses and make changes that allow them to restructure public dialogue.
During a state visit to the UK on Thursday, Trump said Kimmel “said something horrible about the great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk.” The president said Kimmel “had a very bad review and they should have fired him a long time ago.” He added: “You can call that freedom of speech, he was fired for lack of talent.”
Trump has already reached the village ABC and CBS Due to their reporting, he filed a honour-loss lawsuit. Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Congressional Republicans stripped federal funds NPR and PBS. At FCC, Kerr took advantage of his influence It targets diversity, equity and inclusion programs and eradicates what the nation’s communications regulators describe as liberal bias.
Trump’s efforts appear to escalate after Kirk’s assassination. The future of free speech protection It was the foundation of the American political system.
Attorney General Pam Bondy recently said, “We’re definitely targeting you and if you’re targeting people who have hate speech, we’ll chase you.” Her words can be used to surprise fear of the elastic definition of the term and criminalize dissent.
The First Amendment is widely regarded as protecting even the most light-hearted parochial statements, and the Supreme Court said last year in a unanimous opinion that “governmental officials cannot attempt to force private parties to punish or suppress the government’s imminent views.”
Bondi later said she revised her comments to focus on “hate speech that sets a line on the threat of violence.”
Bondy’s aide Todd Blanche suggested that protesters may have violated the law by screaming at Trump while visiting a restaurant near the White House.
“Is it pure coincidence that the president has dinner in Washington, D.C., and individuals appear at a restaurant trying to sue him with despicable words and scourges rage?” Blanche said. He said authorities could investigate whether it was “part of an organized effort to inflict harm, fear and harm to the United States.”
Politics and comedy clash at a late-night show
As a well-known real estate developer and reality television star before he entered politics, Trump is even more keen on his public image and media coverage than most presidents.
He often complains about ock laughs from late-night comedy hosts. The comedy hosts remain television landmarks despite the declining influence of their influence in the country’s increasingly spreading media environment.
The latest episode began on Monday night when Kimmel began talking about filming Kirk last week.
“We struck a few new lows over the weekend, desperately trying to characterise this child who murdered Charlie Kirk as something other than them, and desperately trying to do everything we could to score political points from there,” Kimmel said. He also compared Trump’s grief over his death to “the way a four-year-old child grieves goldfish.”
Trump’s allies said Kimmel was falsely suggesting that the shooter was on the right. Although authorities have not formally presented the motive for the murder, the evidence shows that he has liberal beliefs. R-Utah Governor Spencer Cox said “there was clearly a leftist ideology.”
On Wednesday, Kerr appeared on a podcast hosted by conservative commentator Benny Johnson, accusing Kimmel of “as much as possible as possible acts of illness.” “We can make a strong argument that this is a deliberate effort to mislead Americans about very core fundamental facts,” Carr said.
Kerr placed the move against Kimmel in the broader context of Trump’s efforts to undermine the power of legacy media companies.
“He destroyed the facade that allowed them to control what we say, what we think, the stories about events,” Kerr said. “And we see a lot of results from President Trump doing it.”
Please remind affiliates that broadcast licenses have an “obligation to operate in the public interest.”
Kimmel is facing corporate backlash
It didn’t take long for Nexstar Media Group, the largest television station operator, to echo some of Carr’s language.
“It’s not at this point in the public interest to continue to give Kimmel the community broadcasting platform we serve. We’ve made a difficult decision to get ahead of his show to prioritize cooler heads as we resume a respectful constructive dialogue.”
The controversy landed at a sensitive period for Nexstar. $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna.
ABC announced that Kimmel will be broadcast soon. It is unknown when or when he will return. Kimmel has not publicly commented.
Later in the evening, TV company Sinclair said the station would carry “a special thing in Charlie Kirk’s memory” on Friday in Kimmel’s regular time slot. The company also asked Kimmel to apologise to Kirk’s family and to donate money to Turning Point USA, a conservative group that has become a political powerhouse.
House Democrat leaders in a statement accused Carr of “bullying ABC” and “forcing the company to bend the Trump administration” and described the “war” over Trump and the First Amendment of the GOP “contradicts American values.”
The news of Kimmel’s suspension broke just after midnight in the UK, but Trump quickly celebrated what he called “American Great News.”
“We congratulate ABC for having the courage to do what they ultimately had to do,” he wrote.
He then asked for the show to be cancelled by Jimmy Fallon and Seth Myers, saying more dominos should fall.
“Do It NBC!!!”
___
This story corrects the spelling of Nexstar.
