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ABC Pulls Jimmy Kimmel Live from the Air 'Indefinitely'

pppp

Nexstar, who initially threaten to pull Kimmel's show from all (200) of its stations and started this ball rolling, owns ALL THREE OF OUR LOCAL network affiliate stations. All 3 in one market. Remember when this was illegal?

magicalist

> Nexstar, who initially threaten to pull Kimmel's show from all (200) of its stations

They also have a $6.2 billion bid for even more local stations by acquiring Tegna, a deal which will have to be approved by the guy at the FCC who yesterday was telling local affiliates to threaten to pull Kimmel's show!

https://apnews.com/article/nexstar-tegna-newsnation-cw-trump...

pppp

Sorry, after the Tegna deal they will own all three stations in my market. Essentially, the viewpoints we see will be determined by one man.

armenarmen

The right, has for the past decade or so taken a moral high ground with regards to cancelation. Seems that now they've adopted a "turnaround is fair play" mentality.

paxys

The right is simply good at PR. People forget that they invented cancel culture. Dixie Chicks anyone?

xnx

> The right is simply good at PR

One of the defining characteristics of the right is not placing any value on logical consistency. Being a hypocrite will not lose you any support with them.

HK-NC

Applies to left also.

pupppet

They protect their own above all else. Is their own a POS? Oh well.

user982

Hypocrisy is a show of power.

VikingCoder

Sorry, I thought you were going to end your line with "McCarthyism".

armenarmen

I had totally forgotten about that!

XorNot

Video games all through the 90s as well.

null

[deleted]

wrs

Turns out they're not all that big on "free speech" in general! Who knew.

billy99k

Spreading lies about a terrorist, which will result in more violence, needs to be censored.

On top of this, Leftists use the system of free speech to rot our system from the inside and then feign shock when there is finally push back.

I welcome more networks finally waking up.

armenarmen

[flagged]

ceejayoz

That remains true!

But the First Amendment very clearly says it can’t be the government doing the consequencing.

thatswrong0

The FCC chairman threatened to pull ABC's broadcast license over Kimmel's comments. That's pretty much a direct 1st amendment violation.

good8675309

And they also shared this: https://xkcd.com/1357/

bigyabai

Which is why we're all shocked that the order came from the FCC chair and not the business owner.

keernan

[delayed]

rat87

The right was also calling to cancel people back then. They've just gotten more flagrant now. I'm not sure you can even call it hypocrisy since they don't even pretend to have principles besides whatever Trump wants. The government is blackmailing private companies now. I don't watch Kimmel but looking up stories his comments didn't seem at all offensive, please tell me what I missed.

tptacek

This is one of those interminable sprawling message board arguments that has a really simple resolution nobody wants to accept, which is that commitment to free expression and "right/left" are mostly orthogonal, and both the right and the left weaponize commitment to free expression when it makes sense for them to.

somewholeother

The horseshoe is a bit like a boomerang in that regard, both in form and function!

GuinansEyebrows

i get what you're saying but "the left" has basically zero political power in the united states. it never has. the closest we ever were was with FDR but i wouldn't consider a leader who operated concentration camps to be leftist by any stretch.

we have a right wing and then a righter wing. bernie sanders is an anomaly, elizabeth warren is just left of center, and i can't think of too many other current politicians at the national level who actually lean left. i guess nominally "the squad" but they mostly present fairly centrist platforms by worldwide standards. no current politicians at the national stage are talking about meaningful economic reform (as in, away from capitalism), police abolition, nationalized health care, or any other typical leftist ideas - not that i'm trying to argue any of these points in this thread - just providing examples of what i mean by "leftist".

whether or not "the left" weaponizes commitment to free expression, "the right" is the only side of that binary who has ever wielded serious political power, and they use it to extremely destructive ends at all times.

maybe someday if we ever have a political party that actually represents leftwing politics we can judge them as harshly. i'll wait.

CamperBob2

...but i wouldn't consider a leader who operated concentration camps to be leftist by any stretch.

And that's my cue to take yet another hit to my HN karma by asking, incredulously, "WTF are they teaching kids in school these days?"

yongjik

IMO, being able to cry louder for persecution complex does not equal a moral high ground.

throwawa14223

I believe they changed when the government put pressure on social media during COVID. I think that caused a huge attitude shift among the right.

zzgo

Bill Maher rather famously lost his job on ABC 20+ years ago related to his comments about the 9/11 hijackers. I don't think conservatives cancelling people in the media for speech they don't like is anything new within the last 5 years.

SketchySeaBeast

Wasn't a lot of that pressure coming from a right wing government? COVID's initial year and a bit was under the first Trump admin.

epicureanideal

Is there some way the two sides could reliably arrive at a truce on the issue of cancellation?

armenarmen

Prisoners' dilemma at scale. I don't think a truce is doable unless reporting someone for having what you believe to be unsavory opinions becomes a major social faux pas

kulahan

I don’t think they need to. I think they just need to shake hands and say it’s okay to have a different opinion.

There have been a number of studies around the world, plus some real world examples (Utah gubernatorial 2020) where showing your opponents in a sympathetic light can make a big difference in reductions in political polarization.

It’s especially effective when signaled by the “elite”: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00323217241300...

Edit: I hear plenty of stories of people abandoning family members over a difference of political opinion. My MIL won’t talk to a niece of hers after the niece made the same decision. I won’t go so far as to say that’s never warranted, but it seems these days that it’s happening a lot more.

To me, this implies we’re losing acceptability of political “others”.

techpineapple

I think the problem is it’s not the moderate 80% of each party that’s doing it, so all of the people who might be inclined to a truce are already at the table waiting.

xp84

Couldn't agree more with this. The majority of Americans think that the "leftest and rightest" people they know are absolute wackos.

XorNot

Who do you imagine represents the "sides" in negotiations? Do they have names and group bodies which they represent? Are they able to sign and enforce diplomatic agreements?

fullshark

Not gonna happen until the left acknowledges its cultural dominance and how it's shaped public discourse the past 15 years via fear.

panarchy

Which side brought about things like McCarthyism and the Satanic Panic again? Which side feared the gays and violently suppressed them through governmental authority and community violence and shunning? Which side was more inclined to engage in things like lynching innocent black people through hysterical fear?

This is nothing new.

UtopiaPunk

Pronouns? Or do you mean something else?

lawlessone

Are things like racism and sexism being bad exclusive to the left?

rat87

What truce? Sometimes cancelation is good, sometimes it's not. It depends on the why. Also Republican principles these days are just to blindly follow whatever Trump wants including complaining about cancelation and renaming bases to confederate generals and blackmailing companies into firing people

ceejayoz

> The right, has for the past decade or so taken a moral high ground with regards to cancelation.

Have you been in a coma for that decade?

PaulHoule

I first saw a moral panic over ‘cancel culture’ circa 2013 from The Atlantic and the opinion page of the New York Times. (The first because it’s demo is the naive liberal and pearl clutching parents of college students and the second because folks like Brooks and Blow don’t want to be canceled themselves). It was until 2017 or so that conservatives noticed the phenomenon and started to talk about it in The National Review and such.

Ezra Klein, who I generally respect, said he got more crap over

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/opinion/charlie-kirk-assa...

than anything else he’s written but I think it was unfortunate that he chose the words because Kirk, among other things, promoted Trump’s lies about the 2000 election, bussed people to the Jan 6 riot, and had a hit list of professors he wanted to punish just like David Horowitz, dad of the Andressen-Horowitz Horowitz. That bit about “prove me wrong” was always disingenuous, it would fool the pearl clutching parents who read The Atlantic and the likes of Ezra Klein. Probably the most harmful thing about illiberal campus leftists is that they allowed illiberal rightists to appear to take the high ground.

kulahan

Man, can you at least elaborate? This kind of comment isn’t what I wanna see HN devolve into.

He’s definitely right with that sentence. Do you not think it’s generally true that the right has been on the defensive with regards to cancel culture, and thus is constantly preaching about how cancelling is wrong?

The few times they’ve gotten to go on the offensive, they play the same game, cancelling whoever it is they’re upset about. It’s horseshoe theory all over again.

tonfreed

Why would we defend the rights of someone that refuses to defend ours?

JohnFen

Because "their" rights and "our" rights (whoever "us" and "them" happen to be) are one and the same. You wouldn't be defending or attacking "their" rights, you'd be defending or attacking rights in general, and that includes yours.

jjfoooo4

I expected Kimmel to have somehow criticized Kirk, a dubious enough reason to pull the show. But this isn’t even that. Comments quoted in stories assert that the shooter was MAGA - maybe that’s somewhat controversial, but it’s ludicrous to suggest it’s offensive. That paired with comments criticizing the Dear Leader were enough. This is a new low in corporate cowardice toward Trump bullying.

Terrible precedent aside, how could Disney think that capitulating here will result in anything other than more attempts to control their programming in the short term?

breadwinner

Are we officially Trumpistan yet? Consider this: Stephen Colbert was cancelled, many suspect, to please Trump. Now Jimmy Kimmel for saying that the murderer might be MAGA. Trump is suing New York Times for $15 Billion for "defamation". Universities, lawyers, media, all being silenced. The administration is violating the constitution continuously, including 1st amendment, emoluments clause, etc. Violating laws continuously, and suggesting a lot of Americans actually want a dictator. At what point do we say we are no longer a democracy, we are Trumpistan?

collinfunk

He also sued The Des Moines Register because they released a poll that he did not like [1]. It is sad that people defend this.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/us/politics/trump-sues-de...

paxys

The fact that comments on HN saying that the government shouldn't threaten to jail citizens for first amendement protected speech are getting downvoted and flagged should tell you that we are way beyond that point.

tptacek

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tptacek

Colbert was almost certainly on track to be cancelled anyways. The program was tremendously expensive and was losing boatloads of money. I don't know if Trump accelerated the cancellation or not, but the writing was on the wall.

xp84

Indeed, it was just a smart move by Viacom/whatever to curry some favor with Trump by doing it now instead of waiting for another time, figuring that favor would be more valuable than the bad PR they earned. Probably a good bet since with the mergers (including the one they themselves were supposedly trying to push across the finish line) it's impractical to hold grudges for long. With only a few oligarchic firms in each industry you can't practically boycott more than maybe one at a time, and they all do shady stuff.

allturtles

It's exactly the problem that currying favor with the President is a smart move for businesses.

alpha_squared

I'm unsure where we as a society go from here. The left's cancel culture resulted in the firing of private citizens from their jobs, or at least some reprimand. The right's cancel culture is the full weight of the federal government brought down against opposition, in stark violation of the First Amendment; that is, until the Supreme Court can find some new carve-out for why this isn't protected speech.

Realistically, how could anyone be okay with the level of power this administration is wielding? I struggle to see a peaceful transfer of this specific set of powers. Unless the assumption is just that the left will always behave "more responsibly."

moogly

> the assumption is just that the left will always behave "more responsibly."

Probably true, which means you're in for a full-blown dictatorship for, oh, 30 years or so before (perhaps) some violent revolution.

JohnFen

We start by rejecting the cartoon labels of "left" and "right" as if all conservatives or all liberals believe the same things and think the same way. The left/right division is a longstanding technique intended to keep us divided.

The reality is that outside of the actual extremists, liberals and conservatives agree on 80% of everything. We can, and need to, start there. We are all Americans and have to realize that just because we may disagree about things (particularly a small percentage of things) doesn't have to mean we're enemies.

But, if history offers any lessons, then our path is likely set and we're going to have to push through some nightmarish times before we find a way to be better.

null

[deleted]

iamdelirium

Sorry but the fact is a government agency (the FCC) pushed for this. This is a completely different thing than Disney deciding to do it on its own.

This is a 1st amendment issue.

bediger4000

I thought we had freedom of speech, and we're broadly against "cancel culture".

paxys

It's only cancel culture when the left does it.

And this one is infinitely worse than a bunch of internet commenters disagreeing with his comments or private advertisers pulling out. Trump and the FCC directly threatened to pull ABC's license unless they regulated his speech, and ABC caved. The first amendment is dead and people are celebrating on the streets because their favorite political party was the one to kill it.

vFunct

What's the end game of these right-wing legacy media? The median age of TV viewers is like 65. How do they expect to maintain any viewership once all the elderly people die off? The only thing people watch anymore are live sports and local news, and even those are showing signs of declining.

potato3732842

Probably to wring a few bucks out as they circle the drain in the same fashion as every other old formerly prestigious brand name.

Gigachad

It’s not the company behind this. The federal government forced them to do this. All media is being taken over by the state.

wstrange

Well, you have Larry Ellison and Elon doing their best to corner social media - so I think the right wing has it's bases covered.

techpineapple

There was an article recently that basically said lots of moves on the right aren’t strategic they’re ideological. So yeah, I think the right really wants to control media, and isn’t worried about the inevitable backlash.

But I do keep thinking about the fact that the move to the right among young men, will probably pretty quickly reverse itself, if they keep going after media/video games/porn, etc.

_wire_

Republicans are continually outraged by cancel culture, and Republican hypocrisy is (without hyperbole) sociopathic.

News just today--

Republican DoJ censored longitudinal study previously published by DoJ which revealed that far and away the most U.S. political violence is perpetrated by... Republicans! Both internally and internationally.

Utah Republicans put a suicide watch on Kirk-shooting suspect because they want the pleasure of killing him themselves.

Noem is bragging that she shot the family hunting dog because he was "worthless"; all he would do is "massacre chickens" at her hunting lodge, and tried to bite her. She also put down a "disgusting, musky billy goat" that lived around her compound. She said wanted to come clean and show how she can "responsibility". She bragged that the story of shooting her dog got her the top slot at ICE.

Republicans:

- Bullying - Bigotry - Censorship - Election interference - Gerrymandering - Blackballing - Targeting for death - Persecuting - Trafficking - Inciting & agitating - Grifting

The beat goes on.

As W used to say "You're either with us..."

rolph

"Noem is bragging that she shot the family hunting dog because he was "worthless"; all he would do is "massacre chickens" at her hunting lodge, and tried to bite her. She also put down a "disgusting, musky billy goat" that lived around her compound. She said wanted to come clean and show how she can "responsibility". She bragged that the story of shooting her dog got her the top slot at ICE."

this is so chillingly reminiscent of a serial killers autobiography.

xenospn

Hey look it’s cancel culture all over again