How Democrats Set The Stage For Trump’s Assault On Free Speech

Jimmy Kimmel’s show is back on the air… kind of. But the consolidation of corporate control over the media, mixed with a ravenously censorious Trump administration, leaves free speech in America hanging by a thread.

By Marc Steiner, The Real News Network

By pressuring broadcast giant ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show—a decision that ABC reversed this week—the Trump administration has taken its assault on the First Amendment to new heights over the past week. Kimmel’s show is back on the air for now, but the whole debacle has revealed just how vulnerable free speech in America is to political and corporate authoritarianism. This is a crisis, and both Democrats and Republicans have set the stage for it. “As corporate media accelerate their censorship of comedians and journalists,” renowned media analyst Jeff Cohen writes, “we must realize that we got to this dire situation because of old-fashioned, bipartisan corruption in Washington, DC.” In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Cohen about how the consolidation of corporate control over the media, mixed with a ravenously censorious Trump administration, has left free speech in America hanging by a thread.

Guest:

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

Additional resources:

• Jeff Cohen, Salon, “Kimmel’s suspension shows media censorship is a structural problem”
• Bobby Allyn, NPR, “Legal experts say pulling Jimmy Kimmel from air may amount to illegal ‘jawboning’”
• Paul Starr, The American Prospect, “Capture the media, control the culture?”

Credits:

• Producer: Rosette Sewali
• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. Our democracy is under attack and one of the underpinnings of a free society is a free and independent press. Right now, 90% of our media is controlled by just six corporations, and when those in media do their job and confront power, they’re attacked by their corporate owners and by the right wing. We’re in control of the White House. Trump said in response to the firing of Jimmy Kimmel, congratulations to a, b, C for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.

And while Jimmy Kimmel may be back on many stations controlled by right-wing conglomerates like Nexstar, which controls over 200 stations, reaching 220 million people will not carry Kimmel. This monopolistic control of our media is a canary in the coal mine. And to unravel we face, we’re joined today by Jeff Cohen, founder of the Media Watchdog Group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and co-founder of RootsAction.org. He’s a retired journalism professor at the college and author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. Jeff, it’s good to have you with us. I really appreciate you taking the time here.

Jeff Cohen:

Great to be with you

Marc Steiner:

And a propitious moment as well. I mean, we could talk about, as we will, the state of media in America today and where we are, but the Kimmel episode was really a frightening in the beginning, but enlightening and how this is unfolding talk. I really want to hear, start off with your kind of analysis of where that is, why this bloody thing happened in the first place and why it’s turned around the way it turned around.

Jeff Cohen:

Yeah, it’s been a long time coming. We’d almost have to talk about the decades of the federal government, both parties, Congress and the White House, allowing the media, placing the media in the hands of fewer and fewer ever larger conglomerates. That’s the beginning. And then these conglomerates, when they want to merge even bigger, they need to get federal approval. So if there’s too many employees that are interfering or making things difficult with them, for them, with whoever the government is, I experienced this as you know, Marc, I was at MSNBC in the run up to the Invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Marc Steiner:

I remember.

Jeff Cohen:

And we were muzzled by management and then terminated three weeks before the invasion and all the internal memos leaked out. Why? Because of what we were trying to question, ask journalistic questions about the invasion. So it’s been happening decade after decade, but it’s never been worse than now because the conglomerates are bigger than they ever were. And we have the Trump team. So you have all of these companies doing somersaults to please Trump, especially if they have merger business before the Federal Communications Commission. The reason that Colbert was terminated, many of us believe is because Paramount needed to merge with Skydance. When that happened, the boss of Paramount, Sherry Redstone became $2 billion richer than the day before the merger, and the merger could not go through until 60 Minutes had been squeezed. The executive producer 60 minutes left in protest, as did his boss, and they were still holding out.

That’s when I suspected they’re waiting for something to be done to either Colbert on CBS, which Paramount owns or comedy the Daily Show on Comedy Central. So now we come to Kimmel, and it’s the same thing. Disney had merger business before the Federal Communications Commission. Disney already owns Hulu, the streaming service, and they wanted to get fubu, and that needs federal approval. It’s currently at the Justice Department, Trump’s Justice Department. And then perhaps even more important than Disney’s collaboration with Trump in suspending, Kimmel was two big television groups. One is the right wing Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is as Trumpian as any media company in our country and the other, and they own or operate nearly 200 television stations. And nexstar owns even more TV stations. And both of them after the FCC threatened to go after a B, C affiliates carrying Kimmel. That’s also unprecedented. Those two companies said were preempting Kimmel and that put pressure on Disney and then Disney folded. But what it has to be understood about both Nexstar and Sinclair Broadcast Group, their government created conglomerates prior to the 1996 Telecommunications Act that was pushed through by Democratic President Bill Clinton, hand in hand with Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.

You could only own 12 TV stations in the whole country. You couldn’t own 200 like Nexar and Sinclair owned. So that brings us up today. They’re going to bring Kimmel back this week according to Disney, but Nexstar and have said, no, he’s not coming back on our stations. I heard from someone in Washington DC they won’t be able to watch Kimmel’s return because of who owns the Washington DC ABC affiliates and nearly somewhere between 25 and 30% of ABC affiliates will not be carrying Kimmel on his return.

Marc Steiner:

It’s so convoluted, but also very dangerous. I’m going to take a step back for just a minute. People may not, who are watching and listening to us now may not be aware of what happened in 1996 and how that allowed all this to unfold and why the Democrats team built Republicans to allow it to happen, why Clinton allowed it to happen to kind of take this massive media world we have in our country owned by many different people across the country, local stations, doing it in local ways. Why that changed? Well, what was the dynamic in 1996 that allowed that to happen and exactly what did happen so people understand really what we’re facing?

Jeff Cohen:

Yeah, it’s really important. When we, for decades, one individual or company could only own in the whole country, seven television and 7:00 AM radio and seven FM radio, and you couldn’t own two in one market. When Reagan took over Fowler, his FCC chair got it changed. So it was 12, 12, 12. That’s how it stood until the point you want me to talk about, which is 1996 when there was this corrupt law written by the telecommunications and media company lobbyists that sort of divided up the media pie among fewer companies that were allowed to get bigger because the caps were relaxed. So instead of being able to own 12 TV stations, now you could own hundreds. And so Sinclair Broadcast Group only owned 12 in 1996, and they’re completely Trumpian, totally right wing. They’ve been right wing since they intervened. I remember in the 2004 presidential election

Marc Steiner:

Running

Jeff Cohen:

A smear documentary attacking Kerry two weeks before the election of Kerry and George W. Bush in 2004. So those companies, thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, they now own or operate around 200 stations. That was illegal in 1995. You could only own 12 nationwide. So other things that happened, Murdoch, because of the 1996 bill, he was able to build his Fox Empire Clear Channel, a right wing radio company out of Texas, closely allied with George W. Bush. Prior to the Telecommunications Act, they owned 50 radio stations. Within two years, they owned about 1200 radio stations. Again, this was written by lobbyists Fair, the media watch group that I founded, we were protesting, we were trying to get journalists to even cover this 1996 telecommunications act, which was the biggest change in media since the 1930s, and you couldn’t get coverage. I remember the Consumer Federation of America was so concerned about how little attention this very dangerous corporate media bill was getting. They went to CNN and said, Hey, we’ve raised the money for a 32nd ad to warn the public, and CNN wouldn’t sell them the 32nd ad time

Marc Steiner:

Would not sell them the ad,

Jeff Cohen:

Right? So it was horrific at the time. I was able back then to write stuff in the Baltimore Sun actually

Marc Steiner:

About

Jeff Cohen:

How dangerous this bill was. And we’ve now seen the implications both parties back then. This is before Citizens United Corporations couldn’t give to politicians, but they could give to party organizations. That was what was called soft money. And the big media companies were giving big dollars to the Democratic party organizations and the Republican party organizations. And it passed the Senate, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, 81 to 18. And I remember talking shortly after it passed with Senator Paul Simon, not the singer, the senator from Illinois,

And Paul Simon was the only journalist in the Senate. He had been a newspaper publisher in Illinois, and he said, it’s one of the proudest votes I’ve ever cast was to vote no on this horrible bill giving all of our media information power to fewer and fewer big companies. So the 1996 Act, when I say to people, don’t just blame Trump. If you’re blaming presidents for the censorship that’s going on, whether it’s journalists, whether it’s Colbert, whether it’s Kimmel, also you have to blame President Bill Clinton, a Democrat because of the role he played in pushing this corrupt legislation. And again, Democrats were getting big money from the media companies as well as Republicans.

Marc Steiner:

That period I remember, well, I was on public radio with my show and we covered this. It was almost like was deafening the silence of the opposition to what we saw unfold. And I think so especially what you’ve been writing lately is we are reaping what was sowed then. And I think that this is, as I said earlier, we’re on a very dangerous precipice with corporate control of everything we see, read and hear, and a very right, right-wing government in power in our country. And I don’t think people really understand the clear danger

Jeff Cohen:

That

Marc Steiner:

This poses for us.

Jeff Cohen:

And remember, when these companies want to get even bigger, they need federal approval. And that means Trump and Trump’s basically told every federal agency, you work for me. So the Federal Communications Commission used to be somewhat independent. Now it’s headed by a Trump bite. He wrote part of Project 2025,

He wrote the part of it on the media, and that’s Brendan Carr. He’s maybe even more ferociously right wing than Trump. And so these companies, Nexar, which already owns or operates 200 television stations, and they won’t be running Kimmel, when Kimmel comes back, they want to merge with a company called TEGNA Media. And instead of just reaching 39% of US households, which is what the cap is now, they want it changed to 80%. And Brendan Carr at the FCC has basically said he would do that. So the FCC has to approve the Nexar merger. They need to approve that. The Justice Department will have to, is now investigating the merger Disney wants, where they will take over FUBU to go along with their Hulu. And it’s also the internet tycoons. I mean the billionaires control the media, and you had all of them sitting in the front row of the Trump inauguration. That was unprecedented. Marc, you and I go back a few decades, but for young viewers,

We have to let them know how abnormal all of this is. That instead of in the front row being US Senators who’ve been in office for 20, 30 years, it was the tech moguls. It was Zuckerberg, it was Bezos, it was Elon Musk. Bezos owns the Washington Post. He’s demanded that the opinion page only have free market propaganda. You can’t be critical of corporate capitalism on the Washington Post. People have had to resign their political cartoonists, their award winner. Ann, tell Nate, she had to resign recently over comments about Charlie Kirk that were accurate just quoting what Kirk stands for

Marc Steiner:

Said what actually said. Right?

Jeff Cohen:

Yes. She got fired. The Global Opinions editor and African-American woman, Karen Atia. So the censorship is worse than ever. It’s happening because the media are concentrating in the hands of a few. People always say, well, at least Colbert can go until May. I’ll be shocked if he survives till May Kimmel’s contract. He’s coming back, but he’s coming back limping because those huge station groups aren’t carrying it. At least not now. And I saw a great quote from the head of Nexstar or from their pr, they’re not going to bring Kimmel back to their, I think they have more than 30 ABC affiliates because approval is pending. They want to see if Kimmel will be fostering an environment of respectful dialogue. Now, I guess that means they can’t cover anything that comes out of the mouth of Trump. He’s usually so abusive and name calling, but Kimmel, they want to be more obedient.

So yeah, it’s utterly dangerous that the billionaires and these conglomerates have been having so much handed, so much media power. All they care about is profit maximization. They don’t care about journalism. They don’t care about the right to dissent. A, B, C News is a shrinking part of the Disney conglomerate. They don’t care about news or journalism. Paramount Skydance because they got rid of, or they’ve terminated Colbert as of May. That merger went through with Paramount that owns Comedy Central and CBS merging with Skydance, which is Larry Ellison’s money. He’s the 81-year-old billionaire who founded Oracle. His son David is the CEO of Skydance. They’ve already announced they’re going to move CBS news to the right. They’re going to make sure there’s no bias, nothing that will offend Trump. People have already left CBS news because of this. It’s going to get worse. And there was an amazing column by a former Wall Street banker who’s now a publisher in the New York Times a couple days ago.

And he said, Larry Ellison, the 81-year-old billionaire who’s now perhaps the billionaire most closely allied with Trump since Trump had his falling out with Musk, this guy is now the behind Paramount Skydance, which owns CBS Comedy Central and so much more. He’s going to get a majority stake. He’s part of this consortium taking over TikTok, and there’s evidence that Larry Ellison wants to take over Warner Brothers discovery, which owns HBO CNN. So we’re in, and again, if Trump gets what he wants out of these conglomerates, he’s going to approve these mergers that would not have been able to be approved years or decades ago.

Marc Steiner:

So one of the things I was thinking about reading all this and leading up to this conversation, but also just covering this because of the years I’ve been doing this work in media, is that this reminds me of the period of the trusts that ran America in the late 1890s, early 19 hundreds before Teddy Roosevelt broke them up. All you can say about Teddy Roosevelt, you can say about him, but he broke up the trusts, he went after

Jeff Cohen:

Them,

Marc Steiner:

He didn’t back down. So where do you think that political force today to take this on?

Jeff Cohen:

Well, what’s fascinating is when you do polls of the public, whether it’s right wing people, left wing people, everyone thinks there’s too much corporate power and too much corporate. It’s just not debatable that the masses want these things broken up. You can do polls on this. Are the insurance companies too big? Is big pharma too big? So you bring up the key point that the reason the media have been able to be put in the hands of such a few companies is antitrust law quit being enforced.

The Federal Communications Commission kept changing its rules to loosen ownership caps. And I mean, think about antitrust, one of the most important cases in the area of media and information when governments still enforced antitrust law that as you say, came about at the turn of the 20th century with a Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt in 1948, the Justice Department in a suit initiated under Franklin Roosevelt’s government that was continued under Harry Truman’s government. They said to the big movie studios, the case is called United States versus Paramount, the movie studios, you want to own movie studios. You shouldn’t be able to own the where you produce the content. You shouldn’t be able to own the movie theaters that are at the end delivery point of the product or the content. Classic vertical monopoly

Marc Steiner:

Was

Jeff Cohen:

Not allowed. And they had to sell off their theaters. And it allowed independent movies to sometimes be shown in theaters because there was no longer this vertical monopoly. That was 1948, beginning in the eighties with Reagan continuing with Clinton in the nineties. And Bush and Obama. They don’t enforce antitrust law. And what was interesting is one of Biden’s best appointments of all was the head of the Federal Trade Commission, Lena Kahn. And she was really a break on some of these mergers. And you had big democratic donors like Kamala Harris’s big donor, Reed Hoffman was demanding month after month. They’ve got to get rid of Lena Khan at the Federal Trade Commission

Because she was obstructing these ridiculous mergers that all would’ve been illegal 10, 20, 50 years ago. And if Kamala Harris had been elected and Kahn was probably going to go. So that’s the problem you bring up antitrust. We used to have rules that made the economy more competitive and allowed smaller outlets, smaller companies, including smaller media companies to compete. That’s a bygone era, and it’s not a natural process that the media were handed over to a few companies. It’s utterly corrupt. These companies were funding both parties, usually done behind closed doors. As you know, the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the biggest change in media law for 60 years was hardly discussed in mainstream media.

Marc Steiner:

Nobody covered it. I mean, in that period, I forced a conversation on Capitol Hill with our Maryland Congressman about that bill, because you saw the handwriting on the wall. You knew what it was going to mean. So I just wonder, in all the ways of looking where our media is at this moment, how do you see the political opposition organizing to stop it? Or does it exist?

Jeff Cohen:

Well, the fascinating thing is most of the people getting censored are not as famous or big as Jimmy Kimmel, but when he got suspended, it was an uprising. There were demonstrations in the streets. There were all these online petitions. There was let’s boycott Disney, boycott Hulu, 400 of the biggest names in Hollywood all signed an ACLU petition protesting the FCC, putting pressure to get Kimmel suspended. So that’s the good news is people know how to organize on behalf of freedom of speech, the right to dissent. But a broader answer to your question is independent media. That’s the key. I’ve supported The Real News Network since day one. If you know about The Real News Network, and most Americans do not.

Marc Steiner:

Right

Jeff Cohen:

Fund it, tell your neighbors and friends and relatives about it, independent news outlets are doing the serious journalistic work and having the serious debates that are not happening in mainstream media. And so if you’re an activist who cares about these big issues, whether it’s labor rights, environmental rights, environmental justice, anti-racism, you’ve got to also be, if you’re an activist on any of those issues, your second issue should be media activism. And if you’re a media activist, that means you resist censorship wherever you see it, and you use your own email, your own social media, your own word of mouth to promote The Real News Network, to support these places that are doing the real digging and having the voices. I can’t get on mainstream media anymore. I was banned in 2003. They

Marc Steiner:

Won’t have you.

Jeff Cohen:

I mean, with Phil Donahue, I saw what media censorship was up close. And so I’m a big believer in independent media. The independent media is strong, but it needs activist to promote it because The Real News Network doesn’t exactly have a big ad budget.

Marc Steiner:

It does not. I think one of the things in terms of what you’re laying out for people to hear is that most Americans, I think at this point don’t understand the danger we’re in with this kind of right wing authoritarian power in Washington dc. The destruction of our independent media, the monopolies taking place over our media and what we hear and learn. I mean, this is a moment where I think that people have to, the most we can do is to make people understand what we face. Our democracy is under threat. Our media independence is under threat. One of the things about America that made it blossom was freedom of the press. People speaking their minds and presses in the newspapers being owned locally by people in the community.

Jeff Cohen:

You’ve said it. I mean, we were the original democracy. It was always imperfect, always was racist.

Marc Steiner:

But

Jeff Cohen:

We went to Tocqueville, a French nobleman, traveling all around the us. He’s just amazed. Everyone’s reading newspapers. He came from Europe where it was all monarchs. And I’ve marveled as recently as a few weeks ago, that we’re a country where you can have Jimmy Kimmel and Colbert criticizing, ridiculing the president night after night with millions of people watching. But again, that seems to be a thing of the past. Even the comedians are going to have to go independent. Colbert. If he wants to do something, he’ll be doing it online. Probably Kim will, John Stewart, they’re all making plans for a post conglomerate. I mean, we have these great comics that have kept many of us sane through the Trump era, but they’re all employed by conglomerates. Paramount employs Colbert and John Stewart and the team at Comedy Central at the Daily Show, Warner Brothers Discovery, which may have a new right wing owner.

Soon they employ one of the great investigative journalists of our day, the comedian John Oliver Comcast. And Trump’s been threatening Comcast. Comcast is the employer of Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon on NBC. Now, most people, if we had media literacy in the schools, kids would be taught, oh, okay, here are the companies that own the media and information system, but we don’t have media literacy in our schools. So yeah, it’s very dangerous. The comedians have been a breath of fresh air. I’ve always said that you can learn more from a 10 minute monologue from Kimmel or John Oliver or Colbert than from watching like a month of news on those very same channels. The journalists have always been, this is why fair.org exists. And by the way, a good way to fight for media against censorship is with fair.org. But the reason we exist is because of this censorship that has gone on, and you can resist it together as a group, and it’s more effective. I am telling people the worst thing you can do in a period like this where Trump is collaborating with conglomerates to squeeze dissenting voices, the worst thing you can do is sit at home alone. You’ve got to join organizations. You need to become a sustainer of the Real News Network. You have to join fair fair.org. I’m also with Roots Action and Activism Group that fights this censorship roots action.org. When you’d start joining with other people.

That personal despair I think can be eroded because we’re taking action and we’re doing it with other like-minded people.

Marc Steiner:

What you’re saying is really critical. Everything you’ve been writing about it, I think is very critical. But what you’re saying at this moment in our conversation is critical because it’s, we’re not done yet. And I can remember in 19, I am dating myself here. I can remember in 1968 when we convened a national media in Washington DC of alternative media, but not just alternative media of media people, of small newspapers across America who came in to start talking about what we have to do to organize, to not allow then the corporate media from owning everything. And I think we’re at that moment.

Jeff Cohen:

Yeah, and we’re at that. I think it’s the most dangerous moment since the height of the Joe McCarthy era

Of Blacklist, where so many journalists were purged. Edward Murrow didn’t even defend some of the journalists that got purged from CBS News. Journalists across the country were purged. Academics were purged. Union leaders were purged. A number of unions were almost smashed during that era. And today, one of the most outrageous things that’s happened in the last week or two is the University of California President has taken the names of 160 professors, students and staff, and turn them over for investigation to Trump on the basis that maybe they engaged in antisemitism. We know a lot of these people on the list are Jewish. It’s a hoax, as we know from the encampments, protesting the Gaza genocide. And my daughter is one of them.

So many of the protesters are Jewish, but they use this charade, this hoax that they’re antisemitic when they protest the University of California being invested with Israel in killing Palestinian civilians. So they’ve turned over a list. It’s like if you’re talking about echoes of the McCarthy era, when a university is turning over a list and the people on the list don’t know what they did, they’ve been notified. They’re on the list, they have no clue why they’re on the list. Many of them are Jewish. They are not antisemitic. So yes, it’s a dangerous time, but we still have independent media. And if you put together the audience of the Real News Network and Democracy Now, and Common Dreams and Truth Dig and Truth Out and Counter Punch, and the Young Turks salon.com, I mean, you’ve got millions of people every day are getting independent news from non-corporate, non conglomerated sources. That’s new. Now, there’s obviously tens of millions that don’t know about these independent sources, but the fact that so many millions of people are getting the news every hour. This didn’t happen in the sixties. In the sixties and early seventies, which was a boom in independent media, which had underground newspapers and liberation news service. But it basically reached a youth demographic,

And it was once a week, aside from Pacifica Radio, it was once a week with the internet. We have these independent outlets that are giving you the real scoop, as you guys say, the Real News on an hourly and daily basis. And we didn’t have that in the late sixties, early seventies when the underground press, the alternative media boomed.

Marc Steiner:

Well, I really do appreciate this conversation, and I do want to have more of these conversations with you and others, and we have to keep this fire burning, and you keep your fire burning and keep putting yourself out there.

Jeff Cohen:

Thanks. And we have to be optimistic. I know The Real News Network emphasizes taking action, not just learning the news.

Marc Steiner:

That’s right. That’s

Jeff Cohen:

Right. That’s the key.

Marc Steiner:

That’s the key.

Jeff Cohen:

Thanks, Marc.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, thank you so much.

Jeff Cohen:

Thank you.

Marc Steiner:

We’ll stay in touch once again. Let me thank Jeff Cohen for joining us today. And thanks to David Hebden for not only running the program, but editing today’s program and producer Rosette Sewali for making it all work behind the scenes and everyone here through the news for making this show possible. So please let me know what you thought about what you heard today and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Jeff Cohen for joining us today and for the valuable work he does for all of us. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.