The Corporate War On Free Speech, A Zero Hour Conversation With Jeff Cohen

Jeff Cohen discusses the way right-wing moguls from Larry Ellison to Mark Zuckerberg are reshaping both traditional and social media, threatening satire, journalism, and democratic discourse.

By RJ Eskow and Jeff Cohen, The Zero Hour

The fight over Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension and reinstatement was a flashpoint which exposed corporate control over American media—and how easy it is for corporations and their billionaire owners to abuse that control and surrender to authoritarian pressure and billionaire control. Jeff Cohen, founder of FAIR and co-founder of Roots Action, discusses the way right-wing moguls from Larry Ellison to Mark Zuckerberg are reshaping both traditional and social media, threatening satire, journalism, and democratic discourse. Jeff also spotlights a countervailing force: collective action—from consumers and celebrities to grassroots activists—and independent media platforms that will challenge the gatekeepers of information.

Links for this interview:

Jeff Cohen’s column on Kimmel and Media:
https://www.salon.com/2025/09/20/kimmels-suspension-shows-media-censorship-is-a-structural-problem/
Roots Action: https://www.rootsaction.org
FAIR: https://fair.org
https://jeffcohen.org

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Richard Eskow
So let’s start with this. The Jimmy Kimmel kerfuffle, kerfuffle, as I called it, was to me just kind of a glimpse of a deeper, far more deep seated problem. And we can get into the mechanics of that, the structure of it, ABC vs Sinclair vs Nextstar and all the other parties involved.

00:00:32
But I would start with this. Kamala Harris has, and I’m writing about this now, but Kamala Harris had went on the Rachel Maddow show and among other things, she said this. She said when speaking of. Oh, no, wait a minute. Excuse me. Okay. She, Maddow, Rachel Maddow, quoted from the book, from Harris’s book and as follows, quote,

“I predicted Trump’s authoritarianism.”

00:01:09
“I warned of it. What I did not predict was the capitulation about, about meaning of the groveling, scared, rich owners of the LA Times and then the Washington Post pulling their papers, endorsements just before the election.”

Now, Rachel Maddow quoted that after saying that Kamala Harris was the patron saint of “I told you so.” It’s odd to pivot from there to what she failed to predict.

00:01:32
But what struck me about that was that I think almost, I think a lot of us would certainly have predicted that if Donald Trump showed that he was very capable of winning this election, that a lot of wealthy media owners would in fact grovel and will continue to grovel.

00:02:01
Am I fair in that? Am I being too harsh on the former vice president?

00:02:06 Jeff Cohen
No, you’re not being too harsh. Her comment about titans of industry being the guardrails of democracy and First Amendment, it’s utterly absurd. It’s totally naive. The reality is that we knew what Trump was going to do. That was clear. What’s been revealing to many people, including middle of the roaders and liberals, is the total capitulation of corporate liberal institutions.

00:02:42
Nine law firms capitulated to Trump to get federal contracts, huge firms. And they’re going to agree to do pro bono legal work for Trump. Well, that’s the opposite of pro bono. You can’t do pro bono work for a billionaire. For a president. Pro bono means you’re serving those who need attorneys and can’t afford them.

00:03:09
I was, I’m a recovering lawyer, I know that much. The universities, other, those are also corporate liberal institutions, institutions, total capitulation. And now what we’re seeing, because, you know, the media are more in the public eye than law firms or even universities. So people are getting a real education that if you place the news media, the entertainment media in the hands of a few giant conglomerates and then the President of the United States, who doesn’t believe in the First Amendment, leans on them a little bit.

00:03:49
And his Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, who’s even more Trump than Trump, leans on them a little bit. And they’re all capitulating. So it’s been completely eye opening. We should say one thing about Kimmel. He’s back on the air because of an upsurge of activism. So the good news is, while the liberals and Kamala Harris and corporate institutions are totally capitulating, the masses of people are ready to resist, including the people who watch Kimmel.

00:04:25
I mean, it was a dynamic, instant rebellion of people canceling their Hulu, which Disney owns, Disney owns abc, canceling Disney. Plus threats of more consumer boycotts, protests in the streets and online. And then you had 400 of the biggest celebrities in Hollywood, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Natalie Portman, Jennifer Aniston, they all signed the ACLU letter.

00:04:58
And the implicit threat there is we’re big stars, we’re creatives, we may not work with Disney the next time Disney wants us in one of their projects. So it was a rebellion that came from the working class news, you know, consumer of media, all the way up to celebrities. And it got Kimmel back on the air, and then it got Kimmel back on the air over the objections of Nextstar and Sinclair, which each own or operate 200 TV stations across the country.

00:05:32
So that’s the good news. I know, rj, you know, you and I are activists. We’re not just analysts. This was a victory of activism. You know, it’s not a huge one. The big corporations still dominate the media, but it shows. We got Kimmel back on the air and it was because of activism.

00:05:51 Richard Eskow
Well, that’s the silver lining. And I do not mean to diminish it in any way because I think it’s a demonstration of people power and it’s as purest form. But I’ll tell you what I worry about, Jeff. It is that even at his best, Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert or, you know, these various figures, there are certain things they don’t talk about.

00:06:17
Right. They don’t. I haven’t heard Jimmy Kimmel talk about ending the genocide in Gaza. I haven’t heard Stephen Colbert talk about. Maybe he has and I’ve missed it. We’ve so we, we have. My fear is one of this is where I think people like us come in as activists is I want to make sure that people don’t confuse the victory over Kimmel as a.

00:06:44
As the end of what should be the beginning of a struggle. In other words, do you know, you know what I’m saying?

00:06:51 Jeff Cohen
Oh, I agree with you. You’re right about those two. Jon Stewart, on the other hand, who has the same boss as Colbert, it’s ultimately Paramount, Skydance. Jon Stewart’s been quite good on Israel going back years, being a Jewish person on the air critical of Israel. And John Oliver has been great. He’s on HBO and his boss is a Warner Brothers discovery.

00:07:22
All of them are in jeopardy. Whether I agree with you that Colbert and Kimmel, while they’re great on criticizing and ridiculing Trump, and they do it with long sound bites where they show you what Trump or Trump’s team are saying in a deeper way than the news on television on those very same channels.

00:07:45
So they do a great job of that. I mean, the last week, John Oliver did a whole 20 minutes on Bibi Netanyahu in Israel and he’s done other things on Israel that have been quite good in speaking out for the survival and the rights of Palestinians. So, yeah, it’s a slightly mixed bag.

00:08:09
But all of these individuals, these comedians in a 10 minute monologue, whether it’s Kimmel, Colbert or Stewart or John Oliver, you get more insight about how the system works and what’s wrong with Trump and what’s wrong with the people capitulating to Trump. You get more from the comedians in 10 minutes than you would get watching a month of news on those very same channels.

00:08:40
So that’s why it’s so interesting that the political comedians have played this role. And yeah, you’re right that some are deeper than others. Seth Meyers, his boss is Comcast, he’s on NBC News, he’s good on Israel. So, you know, they’ve been willing to speak out against the genocide. It’s the main humanitarian issue facing the globe that the US is causing the problem.

00:09:10
But I’m fascinated. You know, I go back decades in the media world and we used to raise a lot of money in Hollywood for fair. And I would meet Hollywood creatives and we would talk about, wow. You can say more about the, the Nicaragua Contra terrorist army that Reagan is funding in entertainment programming, whether it be LA Law or what have you, than the news does.

00:09:41
So, you know, even though they work for the same conglomerates as the journalists, there’s no doubt that people in Hollywood, whether they’re comedians or they’re writers or they’re directors or actors, they’ve sometimes been able to say things even though they’re working with the same conglomerates, they say things more than those journalists who are employed by those conglomerates.

00:10:08
It’s always fascinated me going back decades.

00:10:11 Richard Eskow
And you’re right. And it’s not just an American phenomenon, of course. And which is why so many totalitarian regimes have, you know, have kicked out whether it’s Egypt or whether it’s elsewhere in the world. I mean this is a known phenomenon because satire is such an incisive way of pointing out absurdities and yet the literal minded bureaucrats who censor they don’t it sometimes it goes by them because they are so literal minded.

00:10:45
It gets on the air and then there’s blowback. But of all things, we saw South Park. Yes, I’ll admit I think sometimes is hilarious and sometimes it’s a little too gross for me. And you know, but they went after Netanyahu. Now going after Netanyahu is not the same as going after the US role But of all people, you know, South park has spent 20 years positioning itself as a kind of ironically distant from any opinion about anything.

00:11:16
You know, that’s kind of their brand. And the punk kids, you know, throwing spitballs in the back of the classroom and, and here, there they are. So you know, as long as we keep satire alive, you never know who’s going to step up at the last minute. Right.

00:11:33 Jeff Cohen
Well what’s interesting is these comedians. The following of millions not just on the air the next day through YouTube. You know, these comedians are big on YouTube. And just like we’ve always said RJ, that a lot of the more sophisticated, more serious news consumers have turned off corporate mainstream media and they’re finding independent news sources whether it’s the Young Turks or Zero Hour or Democracy.

00:12:06
Now that phenomenon’s been happening that people don’t trust corporate news. It I think an intense pivot point was when the mainstream media got the invasion of Iraq completely wrong. The run up to it and people started moving over as continual trend. What’s going to happen now is these comedians, we know that Colbert is going to be off the air because Paramount, Skydance, in order to merge, they’ve become more and more right wings.

00:12:38
The money came from Larry Ellison, a billion 81 year old billionaire completely aligned with Trump. Now that Trump and Musk have had a falling out or at least a, a minor falling out. The billionaire who’s most Trumpified and most Trump allied is Larry Ellison who is about to be the most powerful media mogul in the world, at least in the western world, more than Murdoch.

00:13:07
So Ellison, through his son David Ellison they took over Paramount, Skydance and they’re moving it to the right. 60 Minutes is going to be more and more muffled. CBS News is getting an ombudsman and it might be Bari, Bari Weiss.

00:13:25 Richard Eskow
Oh God.

00:13:26 Jeff Cohen
So you know, and in the merger they not only gave $16 million to Trump to settle a lawsuit that they could not possibly have lost, that was over the 60 minutes editing of Kamala Harris interview. They also, according to right wing media sources that are very close to the Ellisons, they also got a side agreement where Paramount has agreed to run 15, $16 million of PSAs in support of right wing causes for Trump.

00:14:05
Now, Ellison, so here you have Colbert will be off the air in May. Kimmel’s contract comes up in May, he may very well be off the air. Jon Stewart’s contract only runs till the end of this year. So what we are going to see, just like, you know, some of the better journalists can’t work in corporate mainstream media.

00:14:34
And they’ve started their own and substacks and podcasts. I think we’re going to see these comedians who have huge names going more and more independent. And that’s because as big as they are, as much profits as they can bring for media conglomerates, the media conglomerates are more attuned to what Trump can do for them in allowing their mergers to go through.

00:15:01
When Disney canceled or suspended Kimmel. They have a merger that’s now at Trump’s Justice Department. They want to take over the FUBO streaming service which they will then merged together with their Hulu and their Disney plus and they needed Trump for that. And then you have Next star which owned 200 of the, you know, they own 200 TV stations across the country, including I think about 30 ABC affiliates.

00:15:37
And they wouldn’t even put Kimmel back on the air for a number of days beyond Disney’s capitulation. And they want to merge with Tegna, which is another television company. It will require not only Federal Communications Commission approval, which has already been sort of green lighted, but it will require that the caps on ownership, the rules be totally changed so that one company instead of owning, bringing television to 39% of the households, they, they’ll be able to bring television to 80% of U.S.

00:16:17
households. So I see a couple of these trends. Larry Ellison already has a hand in Paramount, Skydance, which controls Comedy Central, cbs, they say he’s going to make a move or Skydance. Paramount will make a move on Warner Brothers Discovery, which brings you HBO, which is John Oliver and CNN. And then we know he’s already taking over the US operation of TikTok.

00:16:54 Richard Eskow
I was going to bring that up. I think that’s critical to this conversation.

00:16:58 Jeff Cohen
Well, and yeah, and when we talk about media today, it’s not just broadcast and cable.

00:17:04 Richard Eskow
Right.

00:17:04 Jeff Cohen
Most important has become social media. It’s completely right wing. Now you have Elon Musk took over Twitter and made it X. Larry Ellison and other right wing billionaires are taking over TikTok and Zuckerberg at Facebook, Instagram, they gave the big bribe to Trump. As soon as Trump won in November 2024, Zuckerberg went down to Florida, wined and dined with him.

00:17:35
Then he and the other Internet tycoons, including Bezos of Amazon, the Google CEO, they’re all sitting in the front row of the Trump inauguration. That never happened before. That’s where senators are supposed to sit. And they all gave a million dollars to the inaugural fund for Trump in January 2025. And then Zuckerberg gave this $25 million thinly disguised bribe.

00:18:05
Why? Well, they had fulfilled their well known guidelines. You can get away with a lot on Facebook, Instagram, but if you incite violence, we suspend you. So after January 6th, Facebook and Instagram, pursuant to their own internal guidelines, well known to users, they took Trump, they suspended Trump. Trump sued. There was no way, you know, Zuckerberg was going to lose in court, but he gave a $25 million bribe.

00:18:36
And the latest one was Google. Google did the same thing. They own YouTube. That’s Alphabet, Google, YouTube. For the same reasons they suspended Trump. I think they brought him back in 2023 on YouTube and he sued them. It was a suit that Alphabet, Google, YouTube could not possibly lose. But they just gave $25 million to Trump in the last week.

00:19:03
Most of it will go to build the ballroom in the White House. I mean, it’s utter corruption in a democracy. The theory of democracy is that you have an informed public because the media are independent and in our, and, and of course, one of the main roles of media in a democracy is to expose government corporate corruption.

00:19:31
But when you look at government corporate corruption in the last few months, it’s in the media sector itself. So you can’t really count on these corporations that are utterly corrupt giving bribes to Trump, making deals with Trump, that they’re going to be the ones exposing societal corruption of the government and corporate elite.

00:19:54
It just, the system is utterly breaking down. Thankfully, independent media keep growing and that’s what we have to count on.

00:20:03 Richard Eskow
Well, and there are two aspects of this that I wanted to underscore one is when we talk about free speech, the fact that Jimmy Kimmel’s on the air, the fact that John Oliver is on the air as we speak, and so on. As you say, their futures are indeterminate. That’s not really free speech.

00:20:28
If their presence in people’s lives, if their availability is dependent on the whims or self interest of a few handful of billionaires, that’s not freedom of speech. That’s, that’s, you know, that’s like saying when you get yard time in prison, you’ve been released though you haven’t been released, you just get an hour or two in the sun.

00:20:49
And I think that’s important for people to bear in mind.

00:20:52 Jeff Cohen
Yes.

00:20:53 Richard Eskow
Other piece of it is as we move into exactly what you were talking about, alternative media, I mean, let’s take John Oliver just picking him at random. Let’s say that he’s not where he is anymore and he goes on, creates his own video program. It’s great. It’s on substack or some other ghost or some other platform.

00:21:18
You know, all these things are publicized and, and go viral because of places like TikTok, which Larry Ellison is now going to control, as well as traditional media, because of places like Instagram, which is, you know, fading, but it’s still there, which Mark Zuckerberg control. I mean, I know from personal experience if I put one of my political articles on Facebook or act, nobody sees it.

00:21:44
If I say, here’s a cute picture of me with my daughter’s dog, you know, hundreds of likes, and that may just be because I’m a bad writer and my daughter has an adorable dog. But I suspect, you know, there’s an algorithmic element to all of that. So when you have these guys driving the algorithm, sure, a John Oliver is always going to have people who are going to seek him out, track him down, find him, subscribe to whatever he puts out, because he’s really talented, he has a great audience.

00:22:11
But, you know, the next John Oliver may not come out. And the John Oliver that is, John Oliver, if he goes to another platform, may not have the reach that he would have if we really had freedom of the press. So I wonder what your thoughts are about.

00:22:32 Jeff Cohen
Yeah, you made two important points on the first one. There’s that great quote from AJ Liebling, who was a press critic at the New Yorker 60 years ago. He says, freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. So, yeah, ultimately those billionaires are in charge. They’ve taken over the media.

00:22:56
Bezos has the Washington Post. They wouldn’t endorse the Democrat, even though that’s what the editorial board said over Trump. Louisiana Times has another billionaire. Same thing happened. And the billionaires that we’ve already discussed. So that’s the problem. And then the second point you make that these social media platforms that have been so important for people to promote their stuff further than their own website or their own show, they could be strangled now by these Trumpified people that control social media, which is Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg.

00:23:40
Google just sold out and they have YouTube. So yes, there’s, there’s the. The future is bleak. There will always be. Is one thing I’ve learned as I study media media history, that the first people taking advantage of a new technology have usually been the rebels and the progressives. Remember when small video cameras, it was all these underground and progressive filmmakers and video that took to that.

00:24:21
I mean, sometimes pornographers get there first and then progressives and rebels get their second. And that happened with blogs. The first bloggers were progressives and radicals who couldn’t get into mainstream media and they built up their blogs during the Bush years, the early aughts, a lot of it by doing the journalism that the mainstream media didn’t do when it was cheerleading this invasion based on false pretense of Iraq.

00:24:55
And you had these bloggers going through the roof. Democracy now using social media was going through the roof. So I have confidence that there will be new platforms and new technologies. That’s what we need. And you’re right that the stranglehold of a few billionaires over the legacy media and now over the Internet and the concentration of ownership of the Internet is, as the great media scholar Robert McChesney has pointed out, the monopolization of the Internet taken over by a few companies.

00:25:36
It happened faster than taking over the railroads or the oil industry, whether it was Vanderbilt and Rockefeller. So it’s happened in record time. But yeah, we need new platforms. We know that the talent, whether it’s journalistic talent or artistic talent, is on the left historically. Progressives and rebels and radicals, that’s where the talent is.

00:26:04
And if we can reach enough of the masses to bring them with us to newer platforms where we are not totally censored. That’s the magic. And people, masses of people, especially young people, that are propelling the Zoran Mamdani campaign in New York City, for example, young people using newer media, newer technologies of communication.

00:26:37
They’re the ones who are most against the Gaza genocide. Why they don’t watch CBS News Or ABC News or, you know, so why are young people the most anti racist generation, the most anti sexist generation, the most pro LGBTQ generation, the most anti Israel genocide? So I mean, I have. That’s the only, the only cause for optimism is that young people are finding these technologies as fast as the monopolists are trying to lock them down.

00:27:17
We still have this phenomenon. How else could Zoran Mamdani be the leading candidate for mayor of the biggest city in the country?

00:27:25 Jeff Cohen
The New York Times hates him, the New York Post hates him. And the legacy, you know, the television broadcast channels have been pretty bad. And yet without. Even though the legacy, the big media are anti Zoron, he seems unstoppable. As you and I talk at the beginning of October, the election still a month away.

00:27:47 Richard Eskow
Yeah. Hopefully it, it will remain that way. I don’t put it past them, broadly speaking, to pull some trick or another, but we hope, I hope he’ll win. You know, back in 2013, I suggested in Salon that inter social media companies be regulated like public utilities. You would have thought I had called for, you know, a forced pacification program like Pol Pot in Cambodia or something, sending everybody to the, to the countryside.

00:28:24
And yet to me, I mean, I love your optimistic vision, Jeff, I really do, but. And I think there’s a lot of merit to it, but I’m a worrier by nature. And, and we’re both activists by nature. So with that in mind, I guess I would say I’m essentially, you know, what’s a phrase, A pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

00:28:49
But with that in mind, you know, what kind of activist work do you think we can and should be doing?

00:28:56 Jeff Cohen
Well, you, you’re right that we needed structural reform. It’s something fair. And the group Free press dot net, you know, have fought for structural reform. You had one that social media should have been public Internet provision, you know, it shouldn’t be these few ISP providers. It’s Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, you know, and they can screw around with who gets prominent and who.

00:29:26
Who gets pushed into a slow lane. We needed Internet service providers to be public. It could have been provided at the municipal level. So, yeah, we needed structural reform. We didn’t get it. Obama, when he was running Hope and Change for president, he met with Free Press. Oh, I like your agenda. He didn’t lift a finger.

00:29:50
In fact, his FCC chair sucked. So we know what needed to happen. Structurally, it didn’t happen to break up the monopolies, build independent media, have Supports for nonprofit media. Not allow these billionaires to be gatekeepers. Make the gatekeepers the public, left, right or center. You know, content neutral gatekeeping. But the kind of activism, in turning to your question, is the kind of activism that fair does.

00:30:21
At fair.org people are fuming. And they did about Kimmel, but they took action. And fair.org allows people. It doesn’t just critique the mainstream news media. And they’ve been all over the New York Times, the for its coverage of Zoran Mamdani. Fair mobilizes people to act against media bias and censorship collectively. If you’re an individual and you’re watching the shenanigans of Trump, the awful moves he’s making, and the capitulation by the corporate liberal institutions that somehow is just shocked Kamala Harris, and you’re only an individual just consuming all of this, it’s easy to get despondent, go into a total funk of despair.

00:31:17
The only thing that lifts you out of that is collective action. That’s what we learned from Noam Chomsky. Join organizations, support organizations, support independent media. Don’t be sitting at home or grousing just to your spouse or your roommate. Get into organizations. Look at what Democratic Socialists of America has accomplished in New York City, winning one election after another because they formed organization.

00:31:49
I swear by fair.org as a media action organization, challenging bias, challenging censorship, and doing it collectively. RJ, you and I work with rootsaction.org, the Great Peace and justice group, if anyone’s listening to us, that is still sort of atomized and alone, you gotta join. It’s the only way you can resist the authoritarian drive, the fascistic drives that we’re witnessing.

00:32:24
It’s form, organization, joint organization. Support independent media with your donation and use your email. Use your social media to promote independent news outlets because they don’t have ad budgets. Whether it’s Democracy now, the Young Turks, Hassan Piker, Zero Hour, you know, counterpunch, Common Dreams, Truth out in these times, the nation.com they don’t have advertising budgets, but that’s where the serious journalism is being done.

00:32:57
And so if you’re tuned into Zero Hour, make sure your friends, neighbors, relatives know about Zero Hour. If you’re already tuned into progressivehub.net which features Zero Hour, tell your friends about it. That’s how we fight the monopolists. We take every inch of turf that we have, every freedom that we still have, every inch of media that we still have, and try to expand it outward.

00:33:29

Richard Eskow
And you know, we learn as we go by doing that. And we get, you know, human beings, regardless of what our prevailing ideology says, are communal creatures. So we also get the sustenance and reinforcement and energy that comes from talking with like minded people, like, for example, me talking to you.