Jimmy Kimmel’s Firing Comes As Feckless TV Networks Lobby Trump To Destroy Remaining Media Consolidation Limits
As Mike just got done noting, our major media companies continue to respond to authoritarianism by being pathetic and feckless little shitweasels. First with the ABC and CBS bribery payments to our mad idiot king, and most recently exemplified by ABC's firing of Jimmy Kimmel because he gave Republicans a sad. Who could have imagined the free speech" anti-cancel culture" folks were liars?
Mike mentioned this a bit, but one of the main reasons our major media networks are being extra feckless on free speech is because they're lobbying the Trump administration to approve a massive new wave of harmful media consolidation. Which will lead to even more of the fecklessness we're seeing now.
The Ellison family needed Trump FCC approval for its plan to merge Paramount, Skydance, CNN, Time Warner, CBS, Bari Weiss' Free Press, and TikTok into one giant right wing piece of shit. But ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox have also been lobbying the Trump FCC to eliminate some of the last remaining media consolidation limits Trump hasn't killed yet: rules prohibiting the big four" networks from merging.
Their argument in filings at the agency has generally been that the modern media space is just so gosh-darned competitive, that it makes no sense to worry about media consolidation limits. That's gibberish, in part because as you can see everywhere you look, there are real and very obvious harms in letting giant tech, telecom, and media companies consolidate under the ownership of morally repugnant oligarchs.
It harms the diversity of journalism coverage, it harms competition, and it generally results in a monolithic, shittier culture dominated by white, male, c-tier podcasting comedians. And the consolidated power structure, if you hadn't noticed, is more easily exploited by authoritarian zealots.
At the same time the big four networks are pushing to merge, what's left of our local broadcasters are desperately trying to consolidate as well. The right wing affiliate owner of many ABC networks that was first to fold under threats from FCC boss Brendan Carr, Nexstar (who also owns the feckless DC gossip rag The Hill), is currently looking for FCC approval for their $6.2 billion merger with Tegna.
After that deal gets approved, I strongly suspect Nexstar will look to merge with Sinclair Broadcasting, another right wing company that has spent decades dressing up propaganda as local news, made famous by either this John Oliver segment or this seven-year-old Deadspin video:
Their goal really is to consolidate national media as well as what's left of local broadcast news" under the ownership of one right wing company. These companies get to dominate local and national media, and Republicans get to leverage that power to spread party propaganda and censor critics. It's quite the unholy symbiosis.
And this is just the start. I suspect ultimately, as the AI hype bubble pops, tech, media, and telecom companies will look to unprecedented consolidation across industries to drive tax breaks and additional brief stock bumps. And authoritarians are going to exploit all of it to centralize their information warfare and propaganda efforts in a bid to quell public backlash to shitty, unpopular policies.
Understanding this is central to the public understanding why our already pathetic major media institutions are being even more pathetic than usual. Yet if you pluck pretty much any of the major media stories about Kimmel's firing from the newswires, the consolidation stuff is either buried in a single paragraph halfway down the page or not mentioned at all; itself an indictment of letting major media companies consolidate under the ownership of a handful of rich, right wing billionaires.
I'm beating a dead horse on this but media academics and experts have warned us about this, constantly, for literally the last fifty years. The United States, at every conceivable point, ignored those warnings and did the exact opposite. Now the check is coming due and the folks who could never quite seem to grasp why these sorts of media limits were necessary are getting an ugly crash course on their importance.
And I'm not sure it's not too late.