This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 17 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
When Stephen Colbert had his late-night show canceled in July, Donald Trump had a chilling prediction. After a reporter asked the president about the cancellation, Trump predicted that other late-night hosts, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel, would soon find themselves in the same position.
“Fallon has no talent. Kimmel has no talent. They’re next. They’re going to be going,” he told reporters at the White House.
Well, on Wednesday, Trump’s prediction came true. ABC announced that Kimmel’s late-night show had been pre-empted indefinitely. That announcement came just hours after a set of ABC affiliates said they would refuse to air Kimmel’s show because of comments the late-night host made on Monday relating to the motives of the man authorities say fatally shot Charlie Kirk, wrongly suggesting the suspect was part of the MAGA movement.
They do not just criminalize speech they don’t like; they make it virtually impossible to see and hear examples of that speech.
Nexstar, the largest owner of local stations in the country, said it “strongly objects to recent comments made by Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets.”
Crucially, it was just hours before that statement that Trump’s handpicked Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, went on a podcast and suggested ABC could be at risk if it did not suspend or fire Kimmel.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Hours later, ABC made the announcement that Kimmel would indeed be taken off the air indefinitely.
This appears to be the latest chapter in Trump’s long-standing campaign to crack down on free speech and dominate the media — an extreme campaign that has been in overdrive the past week.
On Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche suggested using criminal anti-racketeering laws, or RICO statutes, to go after protesters who heckle Trump. There are also reports that the White House plans to target a variety of left-leaning groups and nonprofits in the coming weeks.
This is all part of a larger, and more dangerous, effort underway, and it follows a playbook we have seen successfully run in recent years by authoritarian strongmen in places like Hungary, Turkey and Russia. They do not just criminalize speech they don’t like; they make it virtually impossible to see and hear examples of that speech by taking de facto control of the media landscape.
In Hungary, the country’s oldest newspaper was suddenly shuttered in 2016 after being bought by a businessman with links to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. According to Reporters Without Borders, the far-right leader has used media buyouts by government-connected oligarchs to seize control of 80% of Hungary’s media market resources.
It is a similar situation in Turkey, where, according to Reuters, “the biggest media brands are controlled by companies and people close to [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan and his AK Party (AKP) following a series of acquisitions starting in 2008.”
Then, of course, there is Russia, where oligarchs friendly to President Vladimir Putin control much of the media, and wartime restrictions have shut down the rest. In each of these countries, they didn’t just arrest protesters and dissident journalists. They used government power to essentially roll up all of the country’s media into a propaganda arm of the government. And if you look around the U.S. right now, it sure looks like that is happening here. In July, Trump’s FCC approved the sale of Paramount and, with it, CBS, to Skydance Media, which is controlled by the family of a pro-Trump tech billionaire named Larry Ellison. That approval only came after Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle the president’s lawsuit against CBS News and “60 Minutes.” The Ellisons also agreed to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs and install an executive, formerly from a conservative think tank, to monitor CBS News for political bias. After that, CBS canceled Colbert’s top-rated late-night show, which was notorious for its criticism of Trump. Then last week, just after Ellison officially leapfrogged another pro-Trump billionaire, Elon Musk, to become the world’s richest man, his new Paramount conglomerate made another media bid. This time, for Warner Bros. Discovery, which happens to own CNN. Then on Tuesday, there was news of a deal to give Americans an 80% stake in TikTok. The investor consortium would include Ellison’s company, Oracle, along with Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm. Andreessen is a Trump donor and DOGE consultant. As Talking Points Memo noted, if all those deals all go through, that would mean the Murdoch family would control Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and its other properties. The Ellison family would own TikTok, CBS, CNN and more. And fellow Trump allies, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, would own X and The Washington Post, respectively. As the Trump administration is threatening to bring the government down on free speech, it is facilitating the sale of some of our biggest private media outlets to Trump allies. It’s a very obvious attempt to consolidate power over free expression.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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