It’s been clear what Democrats think about the muscular White House response to last week’s assassination. In the wake of tough rhetoric blaming the “radical left,” vows of prosecutions and visa actions, and pledges to crack down on extremism, many liberals see a continuing, worrisome assault on free speech, as California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Mass., summarized:
The memes alone make the back-and-forth almost enjoyable. While the recent suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show was endorsed by some conservatives, such as FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, less attention has gone to other conservatives who have raised some concern. These worries relate to what’s taking place with free speech generally since the assassination, and some specific thoughts about the process leading to the Kimmel cancellation.
Brett Stephens: Don’t hyperventilate about the bigger picture, liberals
Liberal New York Times contributing writer Frank Bruni asked Bret Stephens, “Assure me — to persuade me — that I shouldn’t feel as anxious and scared as I do, that I’m suffering some liberal overreaction when I hear these pledges from President Trump, from Vice President JD Vance, from (who else?) Stephen Miller, to prosecute and punish groups on the left that they’ve painted as sponsors of political violence.”
Stephens offered little reassurance on that point, agreeing that the administration was “wasting no time turning the tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s assassination into a political project.” But then Stephens added: “I do think this is an occasion for some quiet introspection on the part of the political left that has spent a decade treating Trump supporters as wannabe fascists. Speech, of course, isn’t violence, but there’s too much overheated rhetoric coming from the side of the political divide that likes to think of itself as the tolerant, nicer group of people.”
Stephens continued: “Most Trump voters I know are, at least in part, rebelling against a kind of leftist cultural autocracy that tries too hard to dictate what they can say, how they should think, and what identity they must have in order to opine on one subject or another. The truth is that illiberalism courses through both sides.”
He then cautioned against “hyperventilating over the looming end of democracy. America has been through worse: presidents who ignored the will of the Supreme Court (Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln); presidents who imprisoned their political critics (Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson); presidents who sent thousands of Americans into camps on transparently racist grounds (Franklin Roosevelt); presidents who deported over a million undocumented workers (Dwight Eisenhower and Barack Obama). … I could go on. My point is that America is resilient.”
“Enough gloom,” Bruni concluded — asking Stephens: “What if anything have you read lately that gave you hope? Or at least made you smile?”
“Politically, the only silver lining from last week was the emergence of Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, as a composed and statesmanlike voice of decency and good sense, calling on younger people to ‘log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community,’” Stephens wrote.
Matt Taibbi: Feels like a big leap from Vance’s critique of European speech
Compared with progressive critics who see the Kimmel ouster as a cut and dried infringement of freedom, conservatives paint a more nuanced picture. For instance, journalist and podcaster Matt Taibbi wrote, “Of all the network late night acts, Kimmel’s was the most vicious and unredeeming, continually hitting new lows during the pandemic in particular, with the aforementioned AntiVax Barbie and his ‘Rest in Peace, Wheezy’ monologue sure to go down as cultural anti-landmarks. Virtually everything he said in the Trump era was DNC messaging with a punchline …”
“With his ratings in freefall, Disney was going to drop the axe sooner or later,” Taibbi added. But pressure from the White House via the FCC as “press regulator in a full-on truth-arbiter role,” he observed, “feels like a big jump from where the Administration was in February, when J.D. Vance lambasted Europeans in Munich for losing sight of basic tenets of democracy, including the ‘freedom … to make mistakes.’”
Sasha Stone: The Kimmel outcome is good, but not the process
Sasha Stone, who turned away from the Democratic party in 2020, penned a more ringing endorsement of taking the late night comic off air, where she said, “We desperately need to find a way to hold together, and his nightly monologues trashing the Right did not help.”
But then the writer added, “Just to be clear: I don’t think the Trump administration or any president should be pressuring the networks to fire people. I think they should be hands-off if they care about free speech.
“On the other hand, the network caved. That was their choice. They could have fought it. So it isn’t censorship. But it also isn’t something we want. Let the market decide. Let the networks pay (the celebrities) millions. Let the American people see who they are. Let the ratings sink even further. Let them be tossed off the air for that reason.”
After citing this social media post by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Stone added, “Ironically, the late-night talk show hosts have served at the pleasure of the president, but only if they’re Democrats.
“Now, now we will have to listen to the sanctimonious speeches about free speech as though the last 10 years never happened. I’m not sure I can take the hypocrisy. It’s good for America that Jimmy Kimmel is off the air. But bad for America if the government decides that. In this case, they didn’t. But still.”
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr: It’s OK to enforce this ‘public interest obligation’
Compared to news channels like Fox and CNN, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr clarified on Sean Hannity’s Wednesday night show that ABC, CBS and NBC are different because they have an FCC license that carries a “unique obligation to operate in the public interest.”
“Over the years, the FCC walked away from enforcing that public interest obligation,” he argued. “I don’t think we’re better off as a country for it.
“Late night shows, something’s gone seriously awry there. They went from going for applause, from laugh lines to applause lines. They went from being court jesters that would make fun of everybody in power to being court clerics and enforcing a very narrow political ideology.”
Hannity chimed in, comparing recent late night shows to Jay Leno, who he said “took on all comers. He went after the left, he went after the right, he went after Republican presidents, he went after Democratic presidents. His goal was to be funny.”
Hannity remarked that when Stephen Colbert recently got fired, Leno asked, “Why would you purposely alienate half of your potential audience by just being one-sided?”
Carr described how both Nexstar and Sinclair stood up and said, in effect, “Look, we have the license, and we don’t want to run this anymore. We don’t think it serves the interests of our community.”
“Frankly, it’s unprecedented. I can’t imagine another time when we’ve had local broadcasters tell what we call a national programmer like Disney that your content no longer meets the needs and the values of our community.”
Carr called it an “important turning point,” saying, “I’m very glad to see that America’s broadcasters are standing up to serve the interests of their community.”
He suggested that the market agreed — with poor ratings and evidence that Disney and Comcast had been subsidizing both Colbert and Kimmel. “They’re now facing the consequences of the choices that they made to appeal to a very, very narrow audience.”
“Again, you can do that. You can start a podcast. You can go on YouTube. But if you’re going to have a license from the FCC, we expect you to broadly serve the public interest.”