One way to gauge the intentions of would-be authoritarians is to see how far they tolerate the jesters. An early sign of Vladimir Putin’s quest to bring Russian media to heel was the 2001 axing of Kukly (Puppets), a TV show that often satirised the thin-skinned president. There were Putinesque echoes in last week’s suspension in the US of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show by Disney-owned ABC — two months after his fellow comic Stephen Colbert, to whom President Donald Trump has a similar aversion, was taken off air. Kimmel’s return this week after a noisy backlash is a notable reversal, even if nearly 70 local TV stations refused to screen his show. But the threats to US media freedom are only growing.
Not just the Kimmel and Colbert affairs but various tactics being used to stifle content that Trump dislikes seem to fit an established strongman-leader playbook. They include the use of lawsuits, law enforcement bodies and regulators to put pressure on media businesses and their owners.
Kimmel appeared to suggest last week that the man accused of killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk was a Maga supporter — an insensitive and inaccurate remark, but hardly a cancellation offence. ABC pulled his show, nonetheless, shortly after Nexstar, a big owner of US local TV stations, said it would stop screening it. Nexstar plans a $6.2bn merger with rival Tegna that needs the go-ahead from Brendan Carr, the pro-Trump chair of the Federal Communications Commission. Carr had earlier told a podcast that TV companies must “take action” over Kimmel’s “sickest conduct possible”. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he warned, hinting at fines or licence revocations for companies that failed to act.