Censorship Is A Structural Problem: Huge Corporate Power, Not Just A President, Is Muzzling Comedians

Today, a handful of amoral conglomerates control our information and media system – conglomerates that care a lot about profit-maximization and very little about free expression and the right to dissent

By Jeff Cohen

As corporate media accelerate their censorship of comedians and journalists, we must realize that we got to this dire situation because of old-fashioned, bipartisan corruption in Washington. The problem didn’t begin with Donald Trump. It began long ago, especially in the 1980s and ‘90s when presidents of both parties and Congress decided to put the nation’s media system in the hands of a small number of ever-larger corporations.

And, of course, those corporations were big political donors to both parties. Enormous mergers were approved. Anti-trust laws were ignored. Federal Communications Commission rules were changed, and caps on mega-ownership relaxed or eliminated.

Today, a handful of amoral conglomerates control our information and media system – conglomerates that care a lot about profit-maximization and very little about free expression and the right to dissent, especially when expression and dissent interfere with their profits. There was nothing natural or inevitable about the process of conglomeration. It was sheer corruption – and Trumpian censorship is the result.

This week’s “indefinite” suspension of comedian and Trump critic Jimmy Kimmel by ABC/Disney over remarks about right-wing exploitation of Charlie Kirk’s murder might seem abrupt. It wasn’t. It came after an unprecedented threat from Trump FCC Chair Brendan Carr to go after ABC stations and, perhaps more importantly, because of two powerful companies that blossomed over the years thanks to political decisions made in Washington. Those two companies – Nexstar Media and Sinclair Broadcast Group – each own or operate roughly 200 TV stations across the country, including many ABC affiliates, and they acted before Disney by saying they’d be removing Kimmel’s program from their ABC stations.

This is why President Bill Clinton is so important to the story. Working hand-in-hand with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Clinton pushed into law the 1996 Telecommunications Act – a major, corrupt piece of legislation largely written by corporate lobbyists and hardly debated in Congress. It passed the U.S. Senate 81 to 18. (With little media coverage of this corporate-friendly bill, a consumer group approached CNN to try to buy ad time to warn the public, but CNN refused.)

Prior to the 1996 law, a company could own only 12 TV stations nationwide. Not 200. Besides helping today’s TV giants Nexstar and Sinclair, the law helped Rupert Murdoch grow his media company. A conservative Texas-based company, Clear Channel, owned about 50 radio stations before the law – and quickly grew to more than 1,000 radio stations after caps were loosened.

Sinclair is as Trumpian as any media company around. You may remember when Sinclair in 2018 ordered its local TV anchors across the country to read the same pro-Trump script about “one-sided news ” and “fake stories.” If not, watch the this 90-second video. Sinclair had intervened in the 2004 election in favor of President Bush by running a “documentary” bashing the Democratic nominee John Kerry. This week, Sinclair demanded that Jimmy Kimmel apologize to Kirk’s family and donate to Kirk’s political organization.

As for Nexstar, it currently needs approval from Trump’s FCC to acquire the media company Tegna in a $6 billion deal that would create our country’s largest TV company by far. As Washington Post television critic Lili Loofbourow explained, the merged Nexstar-Tegna corporation would reach 80 percent of all U.S. households, way beyond the current FCC limit of 39 percent: “So Nexstar doesn’t just need the FCC’s approval; it also needs the FCC to change that rule or the deal can’t go through.”

Remember what another media conglomerate, Paramount, did to secure the FCC’s merger approval: It tried to muzzle the most profitable TV news show in history, CBS “60 Minutes,” then paid Trump a thinly-disguised $16 million bribe to settle a totally frivolous lawsuit against “60 Minutes,” and then announced the termination of Trump-critic Stephen Colbert, set for next May . . . if he lasts that long.

Suspending Jimmy Kimmel is not Disney’s first action aimed at currying Trump’s favor. Last December, the conglomerate made a bribe-like payment of $15 million to Trump to settle a frivolous defamation lawsuit against ABC News that Disney could not have lost in court.

When the settlement negotiations between Paramount/CBS and Trump were stalled, even after the executive producer of “60 Minutes” and the head of CBS News had resigned, it seemed clear to me that Team Trump wanted a bigger head on the platter. That’s when I started saying that Colbert may be in jeopardy.

In July, after Paramount announced Colbert’s termination, I appeared on Democracy Now! and host Amy Goodman ended the program by asking me for “another prediction” since I’d been right about Colbert.

I responded: “Yeah, I’m sad that I believe that Jon Stewart’s in trouble. And, you know, Jimmy Kimmel, his employer is Disney. He could be in trouble. You learn more from a 10-minute monologue from these comedians than you do from a month of watching the news on those channels.”

TV’s comedic voices have helped many of us survive psychologically amid the craziness of the Trump era. But their own survival is uncertain in the hands of media conglomerates intent on pleasing a wannabe dictator.

As we defend voices like Kimmel and resist Trumpian authoritarianism, we must recognize the need to also resist corporate conglomeration and greed in every sector of society from healthcare to housing to media.

Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College and author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.” In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.