For the last decade or so, U.S. cable TV customers have been plagued by a steady parade of content blackouts as cable providers and broadcasters bicker over new programming contracts.
For the end user, so-called “retransmission feuds” usually go something like this: a TV broadcaster demands a cable company pay significantly more money to carry the same content. The pay TV provider balks, and one side or the other blacks out the aforementioned content. Consumers spend a few months paying for content they can’t access, while the two sides bitch at each other and try to leverage consumer anger against the other guy.
After a while a new confidential deal is struck, customers face a higher bill, and never get any sort of refund for missing content. Wash, rinse, repeat. Over and over again. With regulators largely sitting on their hands as U.S. consumers get shafted.
While streaming has fixed some of the shittier issues related to cable TV, these sorts of standoffs have made the jump to the modern era.
For example, Google and Disney have been in an ugly contract dispute since October 30 resulting in YouTube TV subscribers losing access to 21 ABC/Disney-owned TV channels, including ABC, ESPN, and The Disney Channel. Not only that, they’ve lost access to content they’d recorded to the cloud via the YouTube TV DVR system, according to Ars Technica:
“…the corporate conflict is highlighting another frustration in the streaming era. As Google and Disney continue duking it out, their customers have lost some access to content they thought was permanent: DVR files and digital movie purchases.”
As BestNetTech has long noted, you don’t really own any of the things you pay for in the modern Internet era. And that apparently extends to content you thought you had stored on the servers of companies that can get dragged into annoying contract disputes.
A lot of folks got used to having some sort of “ownership” control over the content they’d saved to their DVR, but as YouTube TV’s help page points out, that’s no longer the case:
“Recordings of Disney content will be removed. If we’re able to reach an agreement with Disney and bring their content back to YouTube TV, subscribers will regain access to recordings that were previously in their library.”
In an act of retaliation, Google has also removed content customers may have purchased via Google Play and YouTube from Movies Anywhere, Disney’s centralized platform for content available on various distributors.
If this follows the trajectory of past disputes, this will continue for a few more weeks or months, with users failing to access content they pay for. Possibly without any sort of compensation. Then a confidential deal will be struck, and everybody will be forced to pay even more money for the same content. It’s the exact sort of annoying bullshit that helped trigger the cord cutting revolution in the first place.
Every so often the FCC hints that it might do something useful to prevent companies from taking out their inability to conduct business like adults out on their customers. But nothing ever really comes from it; and it’s certainly not going to be a priority for a Trump administration that’s busy stripping FCC consumer protection authority down to the studs under the pretense of efficiency.
But as we’ve noted earlier, ABC and ABC affiliate executives are pleasuring our dim king for a very specific reason: they want Trump’s FCC to destroy what’s left of U.S. media consolidation limits, built over decades with bipartisan consensus. These rules tried to prevent rich oligarchs from turning U.S. media and journalism into an even bigger homogenized, feckless mess.
And right on cue, they’re getting their wish. Yesterday Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr began the process of eliminating some of our last remaining media consolidation limits preventing one company from dominating local broadcast radio and television. ABC has also been hoping for years to eliminate rules that prevents the big four major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox) from merging.
More specifically, Carr voted to seek public comment on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that would eliminate a Local Radio Ownership Rule that “limits the total number of radio stations that may be commonly owned in a local market” and a Local Television Rule that “limits a single entity from owning more than two television stations in the same local market.”
“Seeking public comment” doesn’t mean what it used to. The FCC will ignore any public backlash, and as usual, the comment proceeding will be presented with a lot of fake support from fake or dead Americans covertly posted by big company PR departments to pretend this is a good idea.
Carr’s argument is that these restrictions are no longer necessary because the online internet media space is just so damn competitive:
“In recent years, numerous online audio and video streaming services have emerged, fundamentally changing how broadcast radio and television compete in the media marketplace. Our broadcast ownership rules should reflect these changes.”
But there are fifty years of clear evidence that media consolidation of any kind, be it new or old media, is immeasurably harmful. You can see the impact of the elimination of oversight on this front everywhere you look across old and new media. Constant consolidation in media has resulted in a feckless, billionaire-owned press that demonstrates to you every day they can’t meet our current, authoritarian moment.
Local broadcast affiliates, most of which are run by right wingers (like Sinclair), want the FCC to let them all merge so they can dominate what’s left of local broadcasting. Sinclair has been the butt of jokes for years because of their right wing propaganda pretending to be local news. The company already owns 185 television stationsin 85 markets and wants to merge with Nexstar and Tegna.
While it pales in comparison to online internet video consumption at places like YouTube, millions of people still watch local broadcast news. With the death of many local newspapers, it’s often the closest to “news” many Americans get. The result has been a large number of local news deserts where reliable, accurate local journalism is extremely difficult to come by.
But this Trump 2.0 push to consolidate isn’t just about local broadcasters. National companies like ABC and Disney are also pushing to not just merge with each other, but to merge with modern media giants like TikTok. Telecoms, tech companies, and media companies are all looking to consolidate.
As you can see with what Larry Ellison’s been up to with CBS, Time Warner, and TikTok, the goal of these acquisitions clearly isn’t to serve the public interest, it’s to stifle diverse opinion, undermine real journalism, and create a media full of corporatist bullshit and right wing propaganda. Their efforts, including Musk’s purchase of Twitter, haven’t exactly been subtle.
Saying “we should eliminate the last remnants of media oversight and media antitrust enforcement because everything’s so competitive and grand” is a bullshit argument made by simpletons and ghouls. It’s flimsy cover for the exact sort of harmful media consolidations academics have been warning about for the better part of several generations.
Ironically (?), one of the greatest impacts of media consolidation (an erosion in quality journalism critical of consolidated corporate power) will result in most press outlets either not covering what Carr’s up to, or portraying it favorably. At best you might get stories that quote a media consolidation academic suggesting this could be bad somewhere in the twenty-third paragraph.
Disney’s decision to temporarily ban comedian Jimmy Kimmel for no coherent reason came with some very real costs for the Mickey Mouse club. According to journalist Marisa Kabas, Disney lost an estimated 1.7 million subscribers across Hulu, ESPN, and Disney+ due to public backlash and cancellations.
SCOOP / UPDATE — Disney saw more than 1.7 million total paid streaming cancelations during the period 9/17-9/23, a Disney source confirms to me. The total includes Disney+, Hulu and ESPN.
Disney and ABC, hand in hand with right wing broadcast affiliates, recently tried to appease our dim authoritarian king by putting his least favorite comedian on hiatus. The claim was that Kimmel had said something insensitive about the the killing of right wing race-baiting propagandist Charlie Kirk; the real reason is the companies are lobbying Trump to eliminate the last remaining media consolidation limits.
Meanwhile Disney, like most major streaming companies, can’t help but descend down the rabbit hole of enshittification. With streaming growth saturating and streaming executives fresh out of any sort of innovation or new ideas, major media companies are looking to cut corners, embrace more pointless mergers, raise prices, and otherwise nickel-and-dime existing customers to goose stock valuations.
That’s not just included higher prices, but a steady erosion in popular feature set and an unpopular crackdown on things like parents sharing their passwords with their college kids, which the industry supported for years to goose market share.
The result is creating a streaming TV industry that’s looking increasingly like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. Disney had already been struggling with streaming defections due to a series of relentless price hikes. The company lost 700k subscribers earlier this year due to hikes; and recently imposed another wave of hikes that made them particularly sensitive to the Kimmel backlash.
Disney’s parent company ABC is particularly keen to eliminate media consolidation limits that prevent the big four networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX) from merging, an ask past administrations wisely refused. The things customers really want (lower prices, better programming, improved feature set, better customer service) erode stock prices, while mergers goose earnings and create tax breaks.
But helping authoritarian assholes trample the First Amendment clearly came with some real-world challenges feckless Disney executives were simply too dim to consider. And if recent history holds, they’ll learn absolutely nothing whatsoever from the experience.
There’s a bit of a trend emerging: when you decide to stand up and fight against Donald Trump and his parade of dim authoritarian sycophants, you usually win. If you fecklessly fold (like CBS, Meta, Columbia, and countless others), these annoying assholes just keep pushing you harder for concessions.
That’s certainly the lesson from ABC’s effort to ban Jimmy Kimmel for no good reason.
The flood of public outrage at the Disney/FCC suspension of Jimmy Kimmel ultimately forced the company to retreat and put Kimmel back on the air. Disney apparently didn’t much like the wave of folks cancelling their Disney+ streaming video subscriptions in response to the government and a major corporation coordinating a frontal assault on the First Amendment.
And while local right wing broadcast affiliates Nexstar and Sinclair tried to impose their will and extend the ban, that didn’t work out well either. Both companies continued to “pre-empt” Kimmel last week with reruns and game shows, but announced on Friday they’d be returning his program to the air after annoyed locals had some success convincing advertisers to pull their funding.
Both companies were hoping to curry favor with the Trump administration, which is planning to eliminate the country’s remaining media consolidation limits and rubber stamp another round of mergers that will make U.S. local broadcast journalism worse than ever. And while both companies may have convinced Donald they’re very obedient poodles, their efforts clearly came with a public cost.
In internal memos and public statements, both companies tried to insist they were simply trying to protect local communities from dangerous comedians despite the fact Kimmel said absolutely nothing remotely controversial. Sinclair put it this way in a statement issued last Friday:
“Our objective throughout this process has been to ensure that programming remains accurate and engaging for the widest possible audience. We take seriously our responsibility as local broadcasters to provide programming that serves the interests of our communities, while also honoring our obligations to air national network programming.
…As a company rooted in local stations, Sinclair remains committed to serving our communities with programming that reflects their priorities, earns their trust, and promotes constructive dialogue.”
This line of bullshit is particularly amusing given Sinclair’s history of airing everything from dangerous election fraud conspiracy theories to dangerous right wing medical disinformation. That’s stuff that really does harm the local communities they “serve,” but because it’s in line with management’s radical right wing ideology, it apparently gets a pass.
Sinclair then proceeds to pretend that this had nothing to do with government censorship, insisting they’d decided to engage in stupid behavior all on their own:
“Our decision to preempt this program was independent of any government interaction or influence. Free speech provides broadcasters with the right to exercise judgment as to the content on their local stations. While we understand that not everyone will agree with our decisions about programming, it is simply inconsistent to champion free speech while demanding that broadcasters air specific content.”
This too is amusing, given that all of the major broadcasters, Sinclair, Nexstar, and Tegna, are all pushing the Trump administration to let them merge into one even bigger, shittier, company. Similarly the big four networks (ABC, FOX, CBS, NBC) have been lobbying the Trump administration to eliminate other protections banning mergers among media’s biggest companies.
Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr clearly was (once again) abusing his agency’s merger approval authority to bully companies into doing the administration’s bidding if they want their mergers approved, which is illegal censorship and a trampling of the First Amendment regardless of whether Sinclair and Nexstar executives are feckless dipshits who were enthusiastic about the whole thing.
Brendan Carr had been hinting for months before the Kimmel ban that one of his top priorities would be to strengthen local right wing broadcasters trying to dress up right wing propaganda as journalism. Both by rubber stamping their harmful mergers, and by giving them greater government support in their battles for concessions with their nationwide affiliate partners.
Carr clearly saw the Kimmel situation as an opportunity to test the waters. It went… poorly, with Carr and the agency receiving massive, unprecedented public backlash from Republicans and Democrats alike. Carr’s now making the rounds trying to lie about what happened, hoping to fend off several fledgling investigations into his clearly illegal abuse of FCC power and waste of taxpayer resources.
Earlier this month we noted how Disney and ESPN had sued Sling TV for the cardinal sin of actually trying to innovate. Sling TV’s offense: releasing new, more convenient day, weekend, or week-long shorter term streaming subscriptions that provided an affordable way to watch live television.
These mini-subscriptions, starting at around $5, have already proven to be pretty popular. But, of course, it challenges the traditional cable TV model of getting folks locked into recurring (and expensive) monthly subscriptions. Subscriptions that often mandate that you include sports programming many people simply don’t want to pay for.
So of course Time Warner has now filed a second lawsuit (sealed, 1:25-mc-00381) accusing Dish Network of breach of contract. In the complaint, Warner Bros lawyer David Yohai argues that this kind of convenience simply cannot be allowed:
“The passes fundamentally disrupt this industry-standard model by allowing customers to purchase access to the most sought-after programming, such as major sports events, essentially a la carte for a fraction of the cost that the consumer would have had to pay to watch the event on a pay-per-view basis. For example, a sports fan could simply purchase a day pass and watch select programming, such as a highly popular sports game, without purchasing a month-long subscription or paying a higher pay-per-view fee.”
Not disruption and convenience!
Like Disney and ESPN’s lawsuit, Warner Bros’ lawsuit says that the mini-subscriptions violate existing carriage fee agreements struck between cable channels and cable, satellite, and internet TV providers. SlingTV, increasingly desperate to stay relevant and viable in the wake of Dish Networks slow-motion implosion, continues to insist the lawsuits are “meritless.”
We’ve repeated over and over again that anyone who believes Donald Trump’s claims of supporting free speech is either a brainwashed cultist or the dumbest person alive. And now, in his doddering old age, he’s becoming ever more brazen and belligerent in his attacks on speech. He’s not even trying to put forth a veneer of legitimacy anymore.
Last week, his FCC chair, Brendan Carr, went on a MAGA influencer’s podcast and clearly and obviously threatened both Disney and local ABC affiliates to punish Jimmy Kimmel for his speech. The affiliates (many of whom are trying to get FCC approval for consolidation mergers) got the message and pre-empted their showing of Kimmel’s show, leading Disney to temporarily suspend the show. After the public started canceling their Disney+ accounts in droves, Disney flipped its position and allowed Kimmel to come back last night (with a bang).
And, now facing bipartisan pressure for acting like a censorial bitch, Brendan Carr is trying to doublespeak his way out of what he said last week, insisting that of course he wasn’t abusing his power to punish Kimmel’s speech, a claim that I’m pretty sure exactly no one (including Brendan Carr) believes.
But, even if we wanted to take Carr at his word, his boss, Donald Trump, is not helping matters. Just as Kimmel was about to go back on the air, he posted this to his Unsocial Liars Truth Social site:
That is… [checks notes… checks notes again because surely that can’t be… well… okay] the President of these United States saying:
I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his “talent” was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE. He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers! Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad Ratings.
I mean, what do you even say anymore other than the man is the most censorial, anti-free speech President to hold the office in at least a century and probably more?
First, he’s admitting that the White House talked to Disney about Kimmel’s show, which is, if I remember correctly from all the MAGA whining during the Murthy v. Missouri case, absolutely verboten under the First Amendment.
Second, if it’s true that he had no audience and no talent, then… why would the FCC and Trump need to weigh in at all? It’s obvious he does have an audience and talent given that he has over 20 million subscribers on YouTube and the video from last night is over 15 million views in less than a day as I write this and will surely pass 20 million before too long.
Third, more seriously, the claim that Trump is going to sue over something wholly unrelated to what Carr was threatening an investigation over shows that this has nothing to do with any particular comment or with Kimmel’s ratings or popularity. It is, clearly, our most thin-skinned, can’t-take-a-joke, whiny, insecure, pathetic excuse of a President demanding that the guy making fun of him be silenced.
It’s not worth going into the details but, no, a late night TV host comic making jokes about the President is not, in any way, an “illegal campaign contribution.” That’s not how any of this works.
As for the $16 million payout for the “last time I went after them” that should reveal what bullshit all this is. Trump filed a very, very questionable defamation lawsuit against ABC over a minor technical misstatement by George Stephanopoulos, which the company caved on and decided to pay a settlement fee on (just like a few other media and tech companies in the last year) in the hopes of staying in Trump’s good graces.
But as we’ve said over and over again, when you appease bullies, they don’t go away. You just are asking for more bullying and more demands. Disney/ABC should have known that from the start, but here we are. Trump is basically demanding a payout as punishment because Jimmy Kimmel makes fun of him.
If Disney’s Bob Iger had any principles or any backbone at all, he’d do exactly what John Oliver told him to do earlier this week. Go back to the White House with “Fuck you, make me.”
Now Carr is busy making the rounds, doing damage control and trying to pretend he did nothing wrong. At the Concordia Summit this week, Carr lied and claimed that his effort to cancel Kimmel, opposed by Republicans and Democrats alike, was some sort of Democratic fabrication:
“There’s a lot of Democrats out there that are engaged in a campaign of projection and distortion. The distortion is they’re completely misrepresenting the work of the FCC and what we’ve been doing. I saw there’s a letter from some Senate Democrats that said the FCC threatened to revoke the license of Disney and ABC if they didn’t fire Jimmy Kimmel, and that did not happen in any way, shape, or form.”
The letter that got Carr’s attention was the letter three House Representatives sent to FCC Inspector General Fara Damelin, urging her to do her fucking job given Carr’s radical behaviors not only violate the law and FCC rules, they’re wasting huge sums of agency resources (weird for an FCC boss who simply can’t shut up about his quest for agency efficiency, at least as it pertains to consumer protections).
Like most law-trampling authoritarians, Carr has concocted paper thin legal justifications for Trump’s free speech violations, demolition of consumer protections, and other unpopular policies. Legal justifications that would be shredded easily if the Democratic party, major institutions, and prominent media giants (like CBS and ABC) had the faintest hint of any ethical backbone.
For example when Carr abused the FCC merger approval process to demand Verizon to be more sexist and racist — he made the legally incoherent claim that the company’s bare-bones inclusivity efforts ran afoul of the Communication Act’s discrimination language and were somehow discriminatory against white people. That’s absolute fucking gibberish by any standard.
Carr’s offered up similarly flimsy justifications for his destruction of FCC efforts to address longstanding racism in U.S. fiber broadband deployment, despite the fact that the Trump administration’s destruction of the Digital Equity Act (a law passed by Congress mandating the FCC take action on long-proven discrimination in broadband deployment and pricing) was illegal.
And here, Carr is desperately trying to pretend that the pressure he clearly applied on ABC affiliates to trample free speech were all about his desperate love of “local community”:
“What I’ve been very clear in the context of the Kimmel episode is the FCC, and myself in particular, have expressed no view on the ultimate merits had something like that been filed, what our take would be one way or the other. But one of the things we’re trying to do as a general matter at the FCC is to empower local TV stations to serve the needs of the local communities.”
This feigned love of local communities here is particularly obnoxious given his plans to rubber stamp a massive wave of new local media consolidation, the likes of which has already decimated quality local broadcast TV journalism in the U.S. And because of his efforts to destroy federal consumer protection, leaving those locals at the whims of shitty robocallers, predatory telecom giants, and regional monopolies like Comcast.
Like most of the pudding-brained sycophants in Donald Trump’s orbit, Brendan Carr will say or do literally anything to try and support whatever shitty, radical, or unpopular idea that pops into Donald Trump’s head on any given day. And because major U.S. institutions and corporations are so corrupt and feckless, it’s been relatively easy for him, so far, to leverage the thinnest fucking legal justifications imaginable.
In the case of Kimmel, Carr repeatedly levied direct, obvious threats against broadcasters who air criticism of President Trump with statements like “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” He directly demanded that Disney “take action” on Kimmel “or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” His comments have been clearly construed as illegal, dangerous threats by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Just last week Carr went on the podcast of right wing fake journalist Benny Johnson to directly spell out his plan to pressure ABC broadcast affiliates into taking a giant, steaming dump on the First Amendment:
“There’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters and, frankly, I think it’s past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on [NBC owner] Comcast and Disney and say, “Listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out because we, the licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocations from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.” Disney needs to see some change here, but the individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it’s time for them to step up and say this garbage isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities.”
In short, he told Disney and its local broadcast affiliates to censor a comedian critical of the President and then pretend it was some sort of community service to do so. That’s still illegal, regardless of whether Carr tries to dress the censorship up as helpful for rural Americans. Recall that while ABC itself has backed off the Kimmel suspension, local right wing broadcast affiliates are still “pre-empting” him.
You never really get any sense that Brendan Carr, the man, actually believes in much of anything beyond his own career opportunities within the soggy ranks of the MAGA kakistocracy. His “beliefs” (like his dedication to a TikTok ban, or his past adoration of the First Amendment) ebb and flow depending on the whims of our mad, idiot king. And like most of Trumpism, he’s incapable of introspection and will clearly take all the wrong lessons from Kimmel’s return, ensuring more dangerous, bad decisions to come.
Since we know that FCC Chair Brendan Carr sometimes reads what we write here at BestNetTech, I figured I’d post this one just for him and hopes that he watches it, seeing as we know that, thanks to his own mafioso-like tactics, his good friends at Sinclair Broadcasting (along with Nexstar) refused to show Jimmy Kimmel’s show last night in Washington DC where Carr lives and works. You sure missed a good opening monologue. So I figured I’d help him out by making sure it got as widely seen as possible.
The flood of outrage at the Disney/FCC cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel ultimately forced the company to retreat and put Kimmel back on the air. Disney apparently didn’t much like the wave of folks cancelling their Disney+ streaming video subscriptions in response to the government and a major corporation coordinating a frontal assault on the First Amendment.
Some insiders at Disney indicated that Disney had a planned Disney+ price hike coming this week, and executives worried the backlash to both was going to cause significant financial harm to their quarterly numbers, as revealed by independent journalist Marisa Kabas.
SCOOP — Part of the reason Disney/ABC may have rushed to sort things out with Kimmel is because tomorrow they have a planned price increase for Disney+ streaming, a Disney source tells me. With subscriptions hemorrhaging since last week, they couldn’t risk losing more users with this announcement.
Indeed, on Tuesday morning the price hike was confirmed.
Local ABC broadcast affiliate owner Sinclair Broadcasting, however, appears intent on pushing its luck. We’ve long pointed out how the right wing broadcaster is basically GOP propaganda pretending to be local news. The company has an extended history of kissing Trump’s ass, airing all kinds of pro-Trump propaganda (the company’s infamous “must run” segments), and is often cozy with white nationalists.
“Beginning Tuesday night, Sinclair will be preempting Jimmy Kimmel Live! across our ABC affiliate stations and replacing it with news programming. Discussions with ABC are ongoing as we evaluate the show’s potential return.”
Soon after Sinclair’s announcement, Nexstar followed suit and said it would also not show Kimmel’s show despite the high ratings it was guaranteed to get last night.
Sinclair owns 39 ABC-affiliated stations across the country, including WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C. The company, along with the nation’s other major right wing local broadcaster, Nexstar, originally demanded Kimmel issue an apology (for doing nothing really wrong), and donate to Charlie Kirk’s right wing outreach (and dim college kid disinformation project), Turning Point USA.
Nexstar is pushing for Trump FCC approval of a $6.2 billion deal merger with Tegna, which is part of a massive new wave of harmful media consolidation under Trump 2.0. The Kimmel saga began when FCC boss Brendan Carr, once again abused the agency’s regulatory approval powers to convince Sinclair and Nexstar that pre-empting Kimmel for criticizing the President would be in their best interests.
That’s clearly an illegal government effort to cancel free speech, and Disney has paid the price already. The censorship effort saw widespread, bipartisan backlash, including (somewhat surprisingly) from the likes of Senators Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell, and former Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson. They’re at least aware enough to know that this sort of abuse of government power could inevitably be turned against them.
Sinclair likely still believes that pushing its luck and continuing to “pre-empt” Kimmel gives them additional leeway within the Trump administration, cements their power in the right wing propaganda ecosystem, and makes merger approval more likely. But that’s going to come with an obvious ratings cost, and any costs incurred by those identifying Sinclair stations and contacting their advertisers to complain in the weeks to come:
Ultimately Sinclair and Nexstar may get more harmful media consolidation approved, but it’s likely going to be more trouble than it was worth. The MAGA set clearly thinks they can exploit Charlie Kirk’s death to escalate their war on their ideological enemies, but having been pickled in their own propaganda, one gets the sense they’re really not tuned into how violently unpopular their “movement” is becoming (something set to get worse as the impacts of things like tariffs, the elimination of all corporate oversight, and the evisceration of the social safety net begin to arrive in concussive waves).
Meanwhile, local broadcast television was also already seeing steady viewership declines as their mostly older audience dies off; advertising yourself as a bunch of weird censorial zealots engaged in fake journalism in service to an unpopular idiot king isn’t likely to help the company make inroads with a younger target demographic essential for the company’s longer term survival.
Trump supporters cycled through increasingly desperate explanations for why the Jimmy Kimmel situation was totally legitimate. First came the absurd “low ratings” defense—because sure, networks routinely cancel shows minutes before taping due to sudden ratings revelations and just hours after the chair of the FCC threatens them with “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” And also, if it was low ratings, how do you explain why they brought the show back after less than a week? When that collapsed under basic scrutiny, they pivoted to something even more dishonest: claiming Brendan Carr’s explicit threats to Disney are somehow identical to what the Biden administration did, and falsely claiming this makes hypocrites of those who agreed with the ruling in Murthy v. Missouri.
This false equivalency isn’t just wrong—it’s embarrassingly so. But since MAGA supporters are now running with it (and some mainstream outlets are credulously repeating it), it’s worth demolishing the argument piece by piece. Of course, the people pushing this narrative won’t bother with the details and will immediately skip to the comments to shout “you lie!” without addressing the actual points raised here as to why they’re wrong, but for everyone else, let’s dig in.
You can see some of this nonsense in a NY Times article over the weekend by Peter Baker, in which a White House spokesperson claimed (falsely) that (1) Trump supported free speech, and (2) Biden censored social media:
Asked about the disparate justifications offered by Mr. Trump and administration officials, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said, “President Trump is a strong supporter of free speech, and he is right — F.C.C. licensed stations have long been required to follow basic standards.” She added that “the Biden administration actually attacked free speech by demanding social media companies take Americans’ posts down.”
Vice President JD Vance likewise pointed to allegations of censorship lodged against President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to defend the Trump administration’s actions. “The bellyaching from the left over ‘free speech’ after the Biden years fools precisely no one,”he wrote on social mediaon Friday.
That NY Times article was even worse originally, as there was a quote from so-called “presidential historian” Craig Shirley claiming (falsely) that “President Biden” forced social media companies to deplatform Donald Trump in 2021:
It says something about Trump’s all-out war on free speech that the New York Times couldn’t find a more credible person than “presidential historian” Craig Shirley to defend it. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/u…
Craig Shirley, a presidential historian and biographer of President Ronald Reagan, said Mr. Trump’s experience was so searing that he did not believe the president would improperly restrain others’ free speech, whatever his public exhortations.
“We all especially know Biden used government to censor Trump, kicking him off many media platforms, a clear violation of the law,” Mr. Shirley said. “As his own First Amendment rights were abridged, my guess is he’s especially sensitive to anyone else seeing their First Amendment rights taken away.”
Except that’s just factually wrong, as even a basic understanding of linear time (let alone a simple fact check) would have determined. Donald Trump was banned from most platforms on January 7th and 8th in 2021. When DONALD TRUMP WAS PRESIDENT, not Joe Biden. It was literally impossible for Biden to “censor Trump” at the time. Indeed, when it happened we wrote an article about why this clearly was not censorship, but a difficult choice private companies had to make about encouraging safety. You know, like how the MAGA crowd is now demanding that platforms silence anyone who speaks ill of Charlie Kirk.
The Times later quietly removed the first half of Shirley’s quote without noting the correction—a telling admission that even they recognized how factually bankrupt it was. Beyond the basic chronological impossibility, the entire premise is absurd: Trump was deplatformed by private companies exercising their own editorial judgment in the days after he had actively encouraged the storming of the US Capitol in an effort to prevent the peaceful handover of power… not government coercion.
That said, this idea that Biden “censored” people on social media keeps making the rounds, and in particular some have been arguing that the Supreme Court said that this was okay in Murthy vs. Missouri, and are then claiming that people who supported the administration in that case have nothing to complain about. Here are a few examples:
All three of those tweets are just factually incorrect in embarrassing ways. Many people have pointed out to them in the replies (correctly) that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Murthy was about standing, not the merits, but that’s not even what’s so egregious here.
The more important thing is the reason why the Murthy ruling was about standing, which was that the Supreme Court correctly found that none of the plaintiffs in the original case presented enough evidence to suggest they have standing to challenge the administration’s actions. Five times in the ruling, Justice Amy Coney Barrett mentions “no evidence.”
The clear implication, which all these people pointing to Murthy are missing, is that if they had actual evidence of coercion by government officials then they would have had standing. Nothing (literally nothing) in the Murthy case “blesses” or “supports” the idea that it’s okay for government officials to coerce intermediaries into silencing speech. It just says you can’t just claim that happened without any evidence to back it up.
At no point did the ruling condone government pressure on intermediaries to silence speech. Quite the contrary. Rather, the ruling in Murthy (and also confirmed a few weeks earlier in the Vullo ruling, which was heard on the same day as Murthy, so clearly both issues were on the Justices’ minds) was:
No, the government cannot coerceintermediaries to suppress speech that is protected by the First Amendment
But if an intermediary suppresses your speech as a private entity, to have standing, you need to show that it was actually in response to government pressure and you can’t just handwave that away.
To understand this, it really helps to read Vullo and Murthy together (again, remembering that the two cases were effectively heard together). We quoted from Vullo a lot in our first post, but as a refresher, from the opinion:
A government official can share her views freely and criticize particular beliefs, and she can do so forcefully in the hopes of persuading others to follow her lead. In doing so, she can rely on the merits and force of her ideas, the strength of her convictions, and her ability to inspire others.What she cannot do, however, is use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression….
This is the core distinction that bad faith readers of what happened keep ignoring. There is a fundamental difference between using the bully pulpit to persuade and using the power of the government with threats to punish in a manner that is coercive.
The Supreme Court in Vullo and Murthy made it clear that government coercion is not allowed. The people claiming Murthy said otherwise either didn’t read or understand Murthy, or they’re bad faith liars.
While the Murthy ruling rejected the plaintiffs’ claims, at no point did it say it made it okay for government actors to make coercive threats. It said the opposite. Indeed, contrary to the various tweets saying Murthy blessed what Carr was doing, it says that if you can show actual coercion from a specific government actor, then you have standing to make a case. From the majority decision:
But we must confirm that each Government defendant continues to engage in the challenged conduct, which is “coercion” and “significant encouragement,” not mere “communication.”
Carr’s actions provide a textbook example of the coercion that Murthy and Vullo prohibit. He went on a podcast, explicitly threatened a media company with regulatory retaliation (“we can do this the easy way or the hard way”), and hours later that company folded. The “traceability” that the Murthy court said was missing from the Biden administration’s communications? Here it’s a straight line drawn in neon by Carr in public with him yelling to the cameras “I AM ENGAGING IN COERCIVE ACTIVITY.”
This failure to establish traceability for past harms— which can serve as evidence of expected future harm—“substantially undermines [the plaintiffs’] standing theory.”
But here there’s very clear “traceability.” Carr went on a MAGA influencer’s podcast in the morning, said “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” and specifically said that the FCC would investigate both Disney and affiliates if they didn’t take action over Kimmel’s First Amendment protected speech. Under Murthy that very much violates the First Amendment, not the other way around.
And this is only reinforced by the ruling in Vullo, which was more explicit:
The Court explained that the First Amendment prohibits government officials from relying on the “threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion . . . to achieve the suppression” of disfavored speech.
So people trying to argue that Murthy made this okay, or even that people who supported Murthy are now regretting it, are simply ignorant or lying. Neither is a good look for professional commentators.
Murthy (and Vullo) supported the long-held understanding that, under the First Amendment, government actors cannot threaten intermediaries in a coercive manner to get them to suppress or punish protected speech. Carr did threaten intermediaries to punish such speech, and thus it is entirely consistent with the ruling in Murthy that he violated the First Amendment.
