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Jimmy Kimmel’s Firing Comes As Feckless TV Networks Lobby Trump To Destroy Remaining Media Consolidation Limits
from the merge-everything-into-a-giant-ball-of-dogshit dept
As Mike just got done noting, our major media companies continue to respond to authoritarianism by being pathetic and feckless little shitweasels. First with the ABC and CBS bribery payments to our mad idiot king, and most recently exemplified by ABC’s firing of Jimmy Kimmel because he gave Republicans a sad. Who could have imagined the “free speech” “anti-cancel culture” folks were liars?
Mike mentioned this a bit, but one of the main reasons our major media networks are being extra feckless on free speech is because they’re lobbying the Trump administration to approve a massive new wave of harmful media consolidation. Which will lead to even more of the fecklessness we’re seeing now.
The Ellison family needed Trump FCC approval for its plan to merge Paramount, Skydance, CNN, Time Warner, CBS, Bari Weiss’ Free Press, and TikTok into one giant right wing piece of shit. But ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox have also been lobbying the Trump FCC to eliminate some of the last remaining media consolidation limits Trump hasn’t killed yet: rules prohibiting the “big four” networks from merging.
Their argument in filings at the agency has generally been that the modern media space is just so gosh-darned competitive, that it makes no sense to worry about media consolidation limits. That’s gibberish, in part because as you can see everywhere you look, there are real and very obvious harms in letting giant tech, telecom, and media companies consolidate under the ownership of morally repugnant oligarchs.
It harms the diversity of journalism coverage, it harms competition, and it generally results in a monolithic, shittier culture dominated by white, male, c-tier podcasting comedians. And the consolidated power structure, if you hadn’t noticed, is more easily exploited by authoritarian zealots.
At the same time the big four networks are pushing to merge, what’s left of our local broadcasters are desperately trying to consolidate as well. The right wing affiliate owner of many ABC networks that was first to fold under threats from FCC boss Brendan Carr, Nexstar (who also owns the feckless DC gossip rag The Hill), is currently looking for FCC approval for their $6.2 billion merger with Tegna.
After that deal gets approved, I strongly suspect Nexstar will look to merge with Sinclair Broadcasting, another right wing company that has spent decades dressing up propaganda as local news, made famous by either this John Oliver segment or this seven-year-old Deadspin video:
Their goal really is to consolidate national media as well as what’s left of local broadcast “news” under the ownership of one right wing company. These companies get to dominate local and national media, and Republicans get to leverage that power to spread party propaganda and censor critics. It’s quite the unholy symbiosis.
And this is just the start. I suspect ultimately, as the AI hype bubble pops, tech, media, and telecom companies will look to unprecedented consolidation across industries to drive tax breaks and additional brief stock bumps. And authoritarians are going to exploit all of it to centralize their information warfare and propaganda efforts in a bid to quell public backlash to shitty, unpopular policies.
Understanding this is central to the public understanding why our already pathetic major media institutions are being even more pathetic than usual. Yet if you pluck pretty much any of the major media stories about Kimmel’s firing from the newswires, the consolidation stuff is either buried in a single paragraph halfway down the page or not mentioned at all; itself an indictment of letting major media companies consolidate under the ownership of a handful of rich, right wing billionaires.
I’m beating a dead horse on this but media academics and experts have warned us about this, constantly, for literally the last fifty years. The United States, at every conceivable point, ignored those warnings and did the exact opposite. Now the check is coming due and the folks who could never quite seem to grasp why these sorts of media limits were necessary are getting an ugly crash course on their importance.
And I’m not sure it’s not too late.
Filed Under: brendan carr, censorship, consolidation, firing, free speech, jimmy kimmel, journalism, media, mergers, propaganda
Companies: abc, cbs, disney, nexstar, paramount, sinclair broadcasting, skydance, tegna
Comments on “Jimmy Kimmel’s Firing Comes As Feckless TV Networks Lobby Trump To Destroy Remaining Media Consolidation Limits”
The view refused to discuss the news.
Abc, fox, msnbc, cnn, etc can all be considered anti American propaganda networks kissing a pedophile dictators ass.
General Strike or General Lee
We need a national general strike but how?
Re: 50501.org
Look up the 50501 .org for next opportunities to network in your local town, city and state. This November will either destroy our rights or we can fight with our vote to save our rights without Musk chicanery.
Re: Wrong URL
Fiftyfifty(dot)one:
This is the correct URL.
Which is exactly the point. Ignorance Pride and Good-ole-boy Pride have grasped the levers of power, and are happy for everyone to understand that. Their main opponent is their own incompetence.
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It’s a joy watching you cope and seethe as these corporations finally have a plausible, convenient excuse to jettison dead weight like Kimmel and Colbert.
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You’re simply making reactionary excuses for unacceptable behavior.
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Last week, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said on air that any mentally ill homeless person who doesn’t accept help from programs meant to help them should face—and I quote—“involuntary lethal injection or something”. The very next words out of his mouth: “Just kill ’em.”
In the tiniest iota of fairness I can grant Kilmeade, he apologized for his remarks after they went viral. I’m guessing his apology was more about saying what he thought on a live mic and less about not believing what he said, but he did apologize.
That said: What Jimmy Kimmel said was far from being as offensive as calling for the execution of an entire class of people. But I doubt I’ll see you calling for Kilmeade to be punished to anywhere near the same degree as Kimmel.
You can no longer call yourself an enemy of censorship or a champion of free speech. You’re on the side of the people who want to light a bonfire and keep it going with books they don’t like. How does it feel to be one goosestep away from being an actual fucking Nazi?
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You miss the point. Colbert and Kimmel were fired not for being offensive or because their employers were pressured to do so. Rather, they were fired because their shows are costly to produce (much more than podcasts with far larger audiences).
Both performers are expensively compensated, yet their viewership is meager, making them money-losing propositions.
Now the networks will be unburdened by them, using the excuse of responding to the host(‘s’) ‘offensive statements’ (or ‘acting after the government started to indirectly pressure them’) to kill two money pits and have it seem like they’re doing it for cowardly but not nakedly-capitalistic reasons.
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Funny how Colbert and Kimmel’s late-night shows were ranked 2nd and 3rd in viewership, and 1st and 2nd for their particular timeslot.
Always interesting when people just make shit up out of thin air to defend the indefensible.
Colbert’s show was canceled for the simple reason that the Paramount – Skydance merger put David Ellison at it’s reins, you know, the guy that’s a personal friend of Trump’s and the son of Larry Ellison, also a buddy of Trump. Add to that, Brendan Carr was the one who could sign off on the merger only after Paramount settled the lawsuit between Trump and 60 minutes, you know, the stupid lawsuit about how unfair it was that 60 minutes edited down Kamela Harris interview. That Colbert’s show was axed came really as no surprise to many with all that shit going on.
What actually happened with Kimmel’s show was that Brendan Carr threatened to pull ABC affiliate broadcast licenses which would have been devastating for Nexstar among others affiliates, and that led Disney to preempt the show. Another thing that spurred the decision was the sheer amount of death-threats and doxing aimed at the show’s staff members and Disney/ABC employees.
And the really interesting thing here, Trump foreshadowed on Truth Social that Kimmel was the next late-night host to get axed after Colbert:
MAGAs only know two things it seems, what their masters tell them and do things they condemn others of doing.
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I could believe Disney yanked Kimmel because it wanted to “turn the temperature down” after his jokes about Trump, his supporters, and Some Asshole who killed Charlie Kirk. But the timing of Kimmel getting yanked, which was right after Carr threatened ABC and Sinclair Broadcasting (which is looking for Trump administration approval of an impending media merger) asked Kimmel to be yanked, makes it look like Kimmel was yanked for political reasons. The fact that Kimmel was yanked for joking about Trump and his supporters makes the move look even more political.
One can reasonably argue that Colbert getting the boot next year was about economics, even if I believe political considerations were also part of that decision. But that argument doesn’t fly when you’re talking about Kimmel getting yanked. That shit was nakedly political; saying “his show was too expensive” won’t make it look otherwise.
CBS and ABC could’ve found ways to make them profitable, or at least ways to make them lose less money. Don’t tell me they couldn’t.
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And now apparently Disney has decided that all the people canceling their subscriptions and expensive Disney cruises weren’t a good exchange for the money you think they’re saving by axing the show.
This comment aged like a fine turd.
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Well, their excuse is certainly convenient, but it’s far from plausible.
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Thanks for once again exemplifying the adage that stupid people are easily entertained.
ETTD, fitting punishment for complicit companies
ETTD: a fitting punishment for media companies and outlets that are complicit and bend the knee to 4547. Silver lining is they’re helping me to save money by not doing business with them. It also gives a valid reason to sail the seven seas once again in this day and age.
2025 has taught me that those civics classes I had to pass to graduate high school were bullshit. The Executive Branch sets the Constitution on fire, the Judicial Branch wipes their ass with the Bill of Rights, and the Legislative Branch either sucks the dick of the Executive Branch or jerks off while watching. I still love this country but I have never hated the government like this.
They could just stream Kimmel from abroad. Some of the pirate IPTV sites also sell bandwidth for anything.
Kimmel and/or ABC could buy bandwidth on one of these pirate IPTV sites, and stream Kimmel in from abroad and US law could not touch sites in Singapore, Vietnam, China or Russia.
American laws do not apply in those countries
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This is fucking stupid even for you. Go do your homework, kid.
It’s a good thing.
Isn’t it? Jawboning, that is. Left-wing radicals loved jawboning just a few short years ago.
What goes around, comes around. Perhaps the left-extremists will be more circumspect next time. Maybe.
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Thank you for a clear example of Wilhoit’s Law in action.
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Funny how you thought jawboning was bad, and now you think it’s a good thing.
You have no principles or morals at all, you are just a hypocrite to the bone.
The Hill may or may not be a “DC gossip rag”, but calling it names won’t make TD more trustworthy.
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i’m sure you had a point.
The problem is that those “academics and experts” have had no real recourse to influence policymakers, especially in the face of a Republican Party that has made a concerted effort for decades to not only ignore but outright discredit them so they can’t stand in the way of letting billionaires and big corporations do whatever they want. Having the right course of action on your side doesn’t mean much when you don’t have any way of convincing the right people of it, or of getting the right people in position to enact it.
The silver lining here is that the backlash to Carr’s activities may assure a lot more voters turning out this election. Is that a blue wave washing over the US mid-terms?