Jimmy Kimmel was not suspended for poor ratings. He was not suspended because he crossed some moral red lines. He was suspended because the US president decided to use him as an example.
The presumptive reason is at Kimmel’s Monday night show. “We had some new lows over the weekend, and the Margot Gang desperately tried to describe the murder of Charlie Kirk, anything but one of them, and did everything possible to get political points from it.”
There was little evidence at the time that Sagittarius was a supporter of the magazine, and as Kimmel’s comment seemed to suggest, we have learned nothing since then. If so, Evidence points in the opposite direction.
But democracies should absorb careless speech. Bad jokes, bad jokes, and even evil speech are also the price of a free society. The first amendment focuses on getting the government out of what we can hear and cannot hear.
As a colleague of mine Zack Beauchamp Kimmel’s moratorium represents a great attack on freedom of speech, argued. And if it successfully sets a precedent that the president can use regulators to condemn the enemy, we will be in a political emergency. Because free expression is not just democratic values. This is the basis for making all other values possible.
But nothing that happens should surprise us. The same openness that makes dissent and ironic is also what makes democratic societies vulnerable to attacks by the instigators who can exploit them – my co-author Zac Gershberg and I call on the subject in our book.The paradox of democracy. ”
So there will always be moments, a moment that prides itself on the culture of tolerating every speech, and will eventually have to decide whether or not tolerate silent speech as well. This is one of them.
How democratic space gives way to anti-democratic forces
What we see in Kimmel’s case, its precedents continue to return to the dawn of democracy.
In Athens, an open legal forum that allowed Socrates to question authority also gave him his enemies, leaving him to trial for the “corrupt youth.” The openness that makes debate possible also creates space for suppressing power weapons weapons weapons weapons against him weapons weapons.
In Weimar Germany, the explosion of film, radio and print paved the way for new artistic and progressive ideas, but these media quickly became a tool of mass propaganda for Joseph Goebbels, who drowned democratic culture in authoritarian news.
Today, in the United States, a regulatory framework designed to maintain open broadcasts is waving criticism of the president. More broadly, the same open information environment based on free expression has allowed Maga and its allies to increasingly dominate the public squares – expanding conspiracy theories, fact-based news, and eroding the conditions of common reality.
Steve Bannon publicly boasted about “Overwhelm the area with shit“Develop a huge number of open information environments to break the press. President Donald Trump’s continued lie Works the same way. Actors who are hostile to foreign countries – from Troll farm in Russia Wading in the 2016 US election China’s false propaganda activities In today’s Tiktok seed sector, learn to penetrate these same open channels to undermine democracy.
Many of us celebrate the collapse of media gatekeepers and the rise of the digital public square in the free-to-place of the 21st century. In the early days, the Internet was hailed as a democratization force. But the same qualities that make it feel liberated – openness, access, immediacy – also ripens.
There is no easy way to solve this tension. Free expression is both the power of democracy and its weakness.
How much does Americans really value free expression?
In the liberal imagination, freedom of speech is a neutral principle that can guarantee a fair competition for ideas and protect all aspects equally. Liberal rights and Margo Republicans see it as a weapon. Speech is power, and judging by last week’s words and actions, they are happy to go to their police officers while they serve.
From their perspective, it’s all fair game. They say that liberals are not really committed to freedom of speech. They sat on the left, hammering the suppressed hammer of “incorrect” beliefs from the past decade or more. They feel it makes sense to use state power in the same way.
This criticism is true. The left has its own free reflection. Cancel campaigns, replace, evacuate – from Middlebury students Charles Murray New York Times Staff In the column Hamm Line University A professor of art history was refuted because he showed the image of the prophet Muhammad – the left had already enforced orthodoxy.
But the difference is that at present, government agencies do not perform their reflections in any comparable way in democratic governments. We are not talking about Wesley’s sophomore, attacking the Quad for Palestine.
That’s the crucial difference, and how we get to this juncture where institutions that are enough to shape public squares are putting political pressure.
That’s what’s going on here. Nexstar (with about 200 TV stations nationwide), ABC hasn’t even tried to defend its autonomy. They obviously calculated that the battle with the government was too expensive, especially with billions of dollars in merger approvals online. So they surrendered. And, when an institution has so much power folding, it sends a message to everyone else: Don’t push too far, don’t laugh at the wrong people, don’t risk your future.
That’s why you don’t have to care about Jimmy Kimmel for what just happened. The point is not that you think his monologue is interesting, offensive or worse. The key is whether you are satisfied with the U.S. president, using regulatory threats to remove critics from state television. If the government can do this to Kimmel, then it can and will eventually do it to those who accidentally run into the wrong line.
Trump has arrived at his place because he sees the vulnerability in our system. In such a media environment, shamelessness is a superpower. As long as you don’t have customers, you can push the boundaries of polite words and flood the area with nonsense. Now, benefiting from the opening of our public square, he is slamming the door behind him.
