Washington (AP) – President Donald Trump He has reshaped the American media landscape, unleashing his long-standing grievances with the industry that he has been groping, criticizing and corning him for years, using threats, litigation and government pressures.
He extracted millions of dollar settlements, forced businesses to litigate expensively, prompting changes to programming that he found undesirable.
Now Trump is escalating his campaign of condemnation and retaliation, energised by successful efforts Pushing ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel into the air For his commentary on conservative activists Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Speaking to a reporter on Air Force 1 when he returned from the UK on Thursday, he said federal regulators should consider revoking the broadcasting license for the network “only gives me bad publicity.”
“All they do is hit cards,” he said. “They’re approved! They’re not allowed to do that. They’re the Democrats’ arms.”
Brendan Kerra handpicked head of Trump’s Federal Communications Commission issued a similar warning the day before, criticizing Kimmel’s remarks about the political ideology of suspicious assassins.
“We can do this in an easy or difficult way,” Kerr said. “These companies can find ways to change their behavior, frankly, to take action in Kimmel. Otherwise, there will be additional work beyond the FCC.”
ABC stopped Kimmel after a few hours.
It was kind of Brute Force Response Trump and his loyalty have been routinely bent since the Republican president returned to the White House with a pledge to retaliate against critics and political opponents. Trump’s reach is expanding to use federal devices to put pressure on businesses and make changes that allow them to restructure public dialogue.
Critics fear cracking down on freedom of speech
Trump has already reached the village ABC and CBS About their reports. He filed a honour-loss lawsuit Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Congressional Republicans stripped federal funds NPR and PBS. At FCC, Kerr took advantage of his influence It targets diversity, equity and inclusion programs and eradicates what he describes as liberal bias.
In the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, Trump stuck tighter and had a wider influence The future of free speech protection It was the foundation of the American political system.
Attorney General Pam Bondy recently said, “We’re definitely targeting you and if you’re targeting people who have hate speech, we’ll chase you.” Her words can be used to surprise fear of the elastic definition of the term and criminalize dissent.
The First Amendment is widely regarded as protecting even the most light-hearted parochial statements, and the Supreme Court said last year in a unanimous opinion that “governmental officials cannot attempt to force private parties to punish or suppress the government’s imminent views.”
Bondi later said she revised her comments to focus on “hate speech that sets a line on the threat of violence.”
Bondy’s aide Todd Blanche suggested that protesters may have violated the law by screaming at Trump while visiting a restaurant near the White House.
“Is it pure coincidence that the president has dinner in Washington, D.C., and individuals appear at a restaurant trying to sue him with despicable words and scourges rage?” Blanche said. He said authorities could investigate whether it was “part of an organized effort to inflict harm, fear and harm to the United States.”
Politics and comedy clash at a late-night show
The latest story with Kimmel began Monday night with a comedian’s commentary on Kirk’s filming last week at Utah’s university campus.
“We struck a few new lows over the weekend, desperately trying to characterise this child who murdered Charlie Kirk as something other than them, and desperately trying to do everything we could to score political points from there,” Kimmel said. He also compared Trump’s sadness to “the way a four-year-old child grieves goldfish.”
Trump’s allies said Kimmel was falsely suggesting that the shooter was on the right. Although authorities have not formally presented the motive for the murder, the evidence shows that he has liberal beliefs. R-Utah Governor Spencer Cox said “there was clearly a leftist ideology.”
On Wednesday, Kerr appeared on a podcast hosted by conservative commentator Benny Johnson, accusing Kimmel of “as much as possible as possible acts of illness.” “We can make a strong argument that this is a deliberate effort to mislead Americans about very core fundamental facts,” Carr said.
Kerr placed the move against Kimmel in the broader context of Trump’s efforts to undermine the power of legacy media companies.
“He destroyed the facade that allowed them to control what we say, what we think, the stories about events,” Kerr said. “And we see a lot of results from President Trump doing that.”
Please remind affiliates that broadcast licenses have an “obligation to operate in the public interest.”
Kimmel is facing corporate backlash
It didn’t take long for Nexstar Media Group, the largest television station operator, to echo some of Carr’s language.
“To continue to give Kimmel the community broadcasting platform we serve is not just in the public interest at this time,” Andrew Alford, of Nexstar’s broadcasting division, said in a statement.
The controversy landed at a sensitive period for Nexstar. $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna.
ABC announced that Kimmel will be broadcast soon. It is unknown when or when he will return. Kimmel has not publicly commented.
Later in the evening, TV company Sinclair said the station would carry “a special thing in Charlie Kirk’s memory” on Friday in Kimmel’s regular time slot. The company also asked Kimmel to apologise to Kirk’s family and to donate money to Turning Point USA, a conservative group that has become a political powerhouse.
House Democrat leaders in a statement accused Carr of “bullying ABC” and “forcing the company to bend the Trump administration” and described the “war” over Trump and the First Amendment of the GOP “contradicts American values.”
News of Kimmel’s suspension broke after midnight in the UK where Trump was traveling for a state visit. However, the president soon celebrated his social media platform, Truth Social, what he called “a great news in America.”
CBS has already announced Cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s Show Over the summer, Trump said he’s been asking for more dominoes to fall and cancel the show by Jimmy Fallon and Seth Myers.
“Do It NBC!!!” he wrote.
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This story corrects the spelling of Nexstar.
