Opinion | America Has Entered an Entirely New Situation

My reaction when I heard about Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension was, Oh, [EXPLETIVE]. I immediately flashed back to the television show that Vladimir Putin took off the air. It was a puppet show. It wasn’t even that great, but its whole thing was that it ridiculed people in power. And it reduced them to the size of puppets. It made them look not just plainly human, but even less than human. And I think that’s the real power of comedians in an autocracy, is that they reduce the tyrant to human size, or even to less than human size. If you think about what Jimmy Kimmel said, it wasn’t even much of a joke. “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.” By describing plainly what he had observed over the weekend, Jimmy Kimmel broke with the consensus that is being very forcefully imposed by the Trump administration. Everyone is supposed to be in mourning. Everyone is supposed to act as though the murder of Charlie Kirk is not an individual tragedy, but a national tragedy, a life-changing event for an entire country, and Jimmy Kimmel talked about it as something serious. But he did not pretend that it was something that was a tragedy for the entire nation. And I think that’s what he’s really being punished for, is for breaking with consensus. Disney and the ABC network are taking “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air indefinitely. There’s something extraordinary about the speed with which ABC and Nexstar and Sinclair responded to signals from the administration. What that tells us is that we’re really in a new situation. We’re in a situation where network executives are perceiving the presidential administration not as something that they criticize, but as a place from which they take orders, or at least receive signals that should inform their actions. President Trump says federal regulators should consider revoking broadcast licenses for networks that, quote, “give me only bad publicity.” The only way for the media to resist is to band together to create a joint strategy, to agree, for example, never to settle Trump’s lawsuits, to agree to defend one another, to provide individuals with institutional backing even if they weren’t working for a large institution when they were sued. I don’t see that’s happening. And unless it happens, we’ve already lost.