President Says Broadcasters Should Lose Licenses for Criticizing Him
37 comments
·September 18, 2025LarsDu88
AlexandrB
HN has a general rule against posts about politics that occasionally gets ignored for particularly noteworthy events.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
jleyank
How will US politics affect HN startup's potential market? How will it affect their ability to form, hire and retain staff? Will it affect the H1b's that underpin all sorts of programming efforts. Will it lead to VC money sloshing into Europe/UK? ... There's all sorts of HN-relevant things that are impacted damn near daily by US politics.
Not counting all of the impact on health, medicine, science, ... One can keep flagging away, but if you're going to watch the cash flow elsewhere and the jobs remain open, I would think some concern is merited. And if, somehow, people working in this area realize what their work has helped produced...
belter
If you are quoting the guidelines quote this one also: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I would say, to see the USA moving into Nazism, in realtime, in my lifetime, is a pretty amazing intellectual endeavor to dissect.
AlexandrB
Can you explain why you think it's moving specifically to Nazism? There's certainly an argument to be made for authoritarianism or some other version of non-democratic rule, however throwing around Nazism weakens that argument instead of strengthening it given how overused that term/accusation is at this point.
belter
Exactly 60 min .... A fair, on-topic critique about policy and its impact on liberty can’t last an hour here...
belter
The most impressive was this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45282482
800 comments and nowhere to be seen in the first 15 pages... :-)
null
ortusdux
hckrnews.com
fred_is_fred
What happened to the party of Free Speech absolutism?
Edit: for those claiming this isn't a free speech issue the President is using the FCC to go after people he doesn't like. He must be a special snowflake.
ordinaryradical
Their speech was never in jeopardy, they just didn’t like its consequences. And now that they have the upper hand they will try to actively impose the same restrictions which they accused others of placing on them.
Victimhood distorts reality and leads to outsized reprisals.
AlexandrB
> Their speech was never in jeopardy, they just didn’t like its consequences.
Can't you say the same about the Jimmy Kimmel situation? He's not in jail, he's free to speak, his employer just didn't want to back him up on it.
All of the arguments used to excuse cancel culture ("right to speech not to a platform", "it's a company censoring you, not the government", "freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences") are now being leveraged by the right. Why did anyone think it would go any other way? Was the assumption that the left would own the cultural zeitgeist forever? This whole approach to politics was folly.
ses1984
Have you not read the news that abc was pressured by the fcc wrt a pending merger?
Isn’t that the federal govt “abridging the freedom of the press” ?
ordinaryradical
I think you’re right on Kimmel while being wrong about TFA.
The president does not get to dictate broadcasting licenses on the basis of whether or not they criticize him but ABC is not required to platform Kimmel.
(I think it’s a bad move to deplatform people and bad for democracy but it’s been misconstrued into an issue of constitutional guarantees and it is not one.)
HankStallone
> Was the assumption that the left would own the cultural zeitgeist forever?
Yes, that was clearly the assumption. It's hard to blame them; that had been the case for 50+ years, and the early 2020s suggested that they had the system licked and would be fully in charge until their internal contradictions brought them down.
krapp
>All of the arguments used to excuse cancel culture ("right to speech not to a platform", "it's a company censoring you, not the government", "freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences") are now being leveraged by the right.
Those arguments are correct though. Free speech doesn't guarantee a platform. Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences. The First Amendment does only apply to the government. None of this was controversial until the right decided shitposting their hot takes on black people and the Holocaust was a fundamental human right.
And they're being leveraged by the same right wing that wanted the government to seize control of social media platforms and force them to allow right-wing content and make moderation illegal. And Jimmy Kimmel's firing was due to pressure by the chair of the FCC, which isn't even the context in which those arguments were made and is an obvious violation of the First Amendment
But zing, I guess..
gridder
Double standard is the standard for those kinds of toxic people and their sycophants
klaff
It's the party of bad faith.
endemic
every accusation is an admission
FranzFerdiNaN
Free speech is for them not for you or me. Always has been.
bilbo0s
In fairness, conservatives never said they supported free speech.
They said they wanted more promotion of conservative viewpoints.
Kind of a subtle, but important distinction there.
Neither liberals, nor conservatives support free speech.
stfp
It’s just a tool, a weapon im their arsenal. They are still pushing the free speech narrative in other places, eg. Europe, when people try to stop candidates and pundits from lying. But then obviously once they succeed lying their way into power that tool isn’t necessary anymore, and controlling speech becomes important.
FranzFerdiNaN
This isn’t true. They couldn’t stop talking about free speech and how their hate speech should be allowed and if you didn’t like it you’re just a snowflake.
josefritzishere
Germany 1933
How many minutes before HN takes this one down? Seen at least 5 political posts get shut down today