Free speech scholars say ABC’s decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show indefinitely represents “jawboning,” when government officials pressure private companies to suppress speech.
As First Amendment scholar Evelyn Douek watched the news unfold of ABC yanking Jimmy Kimmel from air, she was aghast: “The hypocrisy is enough to give one vertigo”, she said.
It’s shocking to Douek, because she is a close-watcher of what’s known as “jawboning”, when regulators or government officials pressure private actors, like a social media company or broadcast network, to stifle speech. The libertarian Cato Institute calls the practice “censorship by proxy.”
For years, Republicans excoriated social media platforms over their belief that the Biden administration overly pressured Twitter and Facebook to remove Covid misinformation. It spurred a constant drumbeat of online attacks, Congressional subpoenas and hearings in Washington.
Now, the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission appears to have bullied ABC into dropping Kimmel, said Douek, a professor at Stanford Law School. She said it makes social media companies’ removal of Covid-related posts at the request of government officials “gentle by comparison.”
The Kimmel episode follows CBS’ cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, which often pilloried President Trump. Together, the incidents have intensified concerns among free speech experts that the Trump administration is using the extraordinary powers of the federal government to muzzle political speech.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who in 2020 called political satire one of “the oldest and most important forms of free speech”, wrote on X on Thursday that broadcast stations have “long retained the right to not air national programs that they believe are inconsistent with the public interest, including their local communities’ values.”
Gigi Sohn, a former senior advisor to the FCC under President Obama, wrote on X that Kimmel’s suspension is the result of decades of media consolidation, where financial determinations can override concerns about free speech.
“When control of media and tech are in the hands of a handful of companies, it becomes easier for authoritarian leaders to control them”, Sohn wrote.
