Also, there is quite a bit of money on the line, you can't really blame ABC for acting as a corporation:

https://latenighter.com/news/jimmy-kimmels-removal-comes-ami...

An Australian reporter recently asked Trump how much money he has made since returning to office and if it is ethical for a person in his position. His org got locked out of a press conference in retaliation and we get the mafia boss threats about it not being good for our country to ask those sorts of questions.

Anyone living in the USA should by now have made a decision where their line in the sand lies. Without a free press or opposition things can move quickly so decide now. If I was a member of a minority likely to be a target I would want to know I had an exit strategy.

"Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" wasn't primarily a slogan of Team Trump to remove political opponents.

Perhaps this can have a positive educational effect.

The naked emperor was already a pissy chad over Jimmy; this grudge-holding isn't new at all. Trump, back in July:

> The word is, and it's a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes and, shortly thereafter, Fallon will be gone. These are people with absolutely NO TALENT, who were paid Millions of Dollars for, in all cases, destroying what used to be GREAT Television. It's really good to see them go, and I hope I played a major part in it!

Nexstar owns outright a bunch of broadcast zones in America, with zero conpetition in those broadcast areas. So them folding and everyone else following suit isn't much of a surprise. It's pathetic that media ownership has degraded to such a sorry lame ass state, that there's many markets where almost all broadcast media is via one company. The decayed anti-health of media continues to plague this nation, allow the worst poxes to spread.

Yeah, how did satire fare when Hitler was in power?

Let's perhaps say that if satire doesn't directly prevent authoritarianism, it works as a very effective canary in the mine.

Their mediocre humor relies on punching down and bashing "cancel culture". That's their only trick and what their audience wants to hear. Without it their "comedy" has no edge, and picking on trans people is a lot less funny when the president is already doing it on national news.

AND: you don't have to finish a book. you can skip ahead. you can roll the dice on a better one.

i'm saying: reading is like gambling, it's a lot of fun!

Caves of steel by Asimov my favorite recently. Super easy and enjoyable read.

Cory Doctorow’s “Picks and shovels” got me out of my reading slump. Strong “Halt and catch fire” vibe!

Wow… sounds like you’ve been reading my diary!

If I pick something up and it sucks, I feel bad stopping and force myself to finish it (which will take 8 months because I hate it).

And that stops any reading progress.

It is so true. Pick up any well-regarded book even quick short ones and the depth of information, insight, and connection you get put most online things to shame. Like it’s not even close compared to good blogs, podcasts, and videos…books run circles around them.

Also be sure to get them sooner rather than later, before the government decides they need to start burning books again.

Thank you, I love this reply! I will do this!!

Red Rising caused me a lot of anxiety to help ease me off the media anxiety machine.

First they came for the TV shows… I jest, they came for the books first

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This by the way is an example of construction that confuses is non English natives.

Another one is "he was all but dead" which can be understood as "he was really in a bad shape, almost dead", or "he was absolutely not dead, as opposed to what they say"

There are a few more like these (especially in short titles, where I have to analyze word by word the sentence to make sure I got it right)

Family is staunchly republican, tho the perp himself went indy in the last few elections. Being gay doesn't say anything, Thiel's gay bf killed himself for what seems like political issues too (& might have been Indy like perp-- or, say sama)

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2025/9/15/charlie-kirk-ki...

There is no such implication there.

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Only on cable, iirc.

Watched it last night so we’ll see.

It seems like there is, and will be, a strong reaction from the public (I may, of course, be hoping for something I'd like to see).

This thread is certainly active with those critical of the administration.

Note, the public at large did not know what Kimmel said until now. The Streisand effect is coming into play, because it was so uncontroversial.

The podcast part, I agree, although it's sad in someways, as it demolishes the national conversation, and makes easier to appeal to "your group" rather than "all groups".

There was a strong reaction from the public. Unfortunately that’s why this happened.. affiliate networks refusing to air his show probably had a much bigger impact than the FCC

If regulating false information is actually a part of the FCCs job, Fox "News" should have been shut down long ago.

Harambe, for one.

More than that, though, this assassination was particularly counterproductive because it basically played to the worst stereotypes about "the left" not willing to listen to anything they disagree with.

I may disagree with the vast majority of Charlie Kirk's opinions, but he was at a university, inviting others who strongly disagreed with him to debate him, face-to-face. I may not be a particular fan of this style of interaction (I find it to be more about shock value/talking points/getting clips of particular stupid things people will say than actual clarification or education), it was still an open forum that shouldn't be feared in a free society that supposedly values free speech.

Well thousands and thousands of people are being murdered all the time. You (or anyone) couldn’t care less about almost every single one of them.

So why single out this one? I mean who cares about school shootings? One nutjob murdering another nutjob on the other hand…

>Any human with their head screwed on straight innately assigns a very negative value weight to murder.

Murderers walk freely among you, and we're not all bad people. A few good people earn their legal kills.

A healthy society would encourage any speech which could reduce divisiveness (e.g. comments on Mr. Kirk, without retribution) — yet ours thrives on division, getting people to hate better with bigger hearts.

¢¢

"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society..."

I edited my above-comment to better incorporate multiple comedian's POV on off-color humor ("x-isms," to use PG's terminology)

>Where was the joke?

If any comedian's attempt at any "joke," however tactless, led to any two+ people sitting down and having discussion of real-world realities... then I think the jokester has exceled professionally (honestly I haven't seen this Kimmel clip; I always just remember him as black-face-guy from 90s Comedy Central™ — which was as appropriate/funny/accepted as Downey in Tropic Thunder).

So in this particular case, Kimmel continues his professionalism as Jester.

The state doesn't have to censor anything when most people are too afraid to comment publicly (retaliation).

My original argument, above, is that comedians ought to be allowed to "joke" about anything, as long as it generates community discussion. Any discussion will generate better outcomes than 2-party's design of PureHate™.

Who paid Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, or Gavrillo Princip? Assassination is a subset of murder, with political motives. It seems very accurate in this situation

I’ve never seen this interpretation of the word before. Usually that’s a “hit.”

An assassination is a murder if someone notable, often for political reasons.

It is an assassination, look up the definition.

Assassination has nothing to do with murder-for-hire. Never has.

“The Maga Gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said.

Kirk's murder itself made the front page ... so we clearly don't always ignore politically adjacent topics here

Especially with how tech companies and tech billionaires influence politics.

I wouldn't go posting about that under your real name unless you want people pressuring your company to fire you on Twitter..

What a time.

By this precedent, it would be!

Kimmel didn’t just ‘hardly say anything.’ In his monologue he framed the ‘MAGA gang’ as trying to ‘characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,’ and he mocked MAGA supporters while implying the shooter’s politics aligned with the right. That’s an asserted narrative, not a verified fact. ABC/Nexstar are within their editorial rights to pull segments that present speculation as fact, and none of that turns on whether his tone was mild.

Not quite as simple as that. The FCC chief threatened ABC just today:

https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/brendan-carr-abc-fcc-jimmy-...

If Nexstar was acting in reaction to what Carr said there’s a First Amendment argument to be made. They also require FCC approval for a merger right now, it’s not difficult to see the quid pro quo potential.

The argument would at least be heard by a judge.

Can you visualize a Venn diagram that has 'free speech' and 'the First Amendment'?

>>> The ABC late-night host’s remarks constituted “the sickest conduct possible,” FCC chair Brendan Carr told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on Wednesday. Carr suggested his FCC could move to revoke ABC affiliate licenses as a way to force Disney to punish Kimmel

Last I checked, the FCC is part of the government.

Your post deliberately leaves out the statements from the FCC threatening action, which spooked Nexstar who has business with the FCC.

Maybe you weren't aware of this fact despite it being literally the headline shown on the very page you are commenting on:

> ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair

Pretty sure it's supposed to prevent the FCC commissioner from threatening to pull your license though unless you fire a particular individual though.

The First Amendment protects people against much more than criminal prosecution. Cases I recommend you read include:

Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46

Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members of New York State Crime Victims Board, 502 U.S. 105

The New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 84 S.Ct. 710, 11 L.Ed.2d. 686 (1964)

Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323, 94 S.Ct. 2997, 41 L.Ed.2d. 789 (1974)

>Stop criticizing large corporations as moral entities. They have no other incentives other than money. Corporations are amoral (not good or bad). Only money matters.

Not just corporations, every institution from the church to every silo in your government to big nonprofits. The latter ones just have less measurable goals than profit, but they sociopathically seek their goals all the same. Beyond a certain scale organizations staffed by humans no longer act human.

Are you seriously suggesting that Utah State University, a school that is often on people's lists of the most conservative colleges in the US, radicalized him to the left? And they managed to do that in the one semester he attended?

Well school shootings are a trend too. The guy who was murdered openly and explicitly supported doing absolutely nothing about it (and gun violence in general).

Regardless of this specific case the “right” ignores, supports or even encourages political violence on a much bigger scale than anyone else.

So why is it only a problem in some specific cases but not in general?

Can you be more specific about how a single semester of an online college, as is the case with the acused, hypothetically would "radicalize to the left" a person like the alleged shooter?

No, he was in a multi-year trade school after a semester of university. He was radicalized on-line...

In his one singular semester in college? Going to need a source for your fact there. Pretty sure no one has all the info yet.

He was raised in a rightwing household with easy access to firearms.

Hating Kirk is nothing unusual. Maybe something in his conservative upbringing led him to believe violence was an acceptable action based on his hate.

That's not a belief shared by the Democratic Party.

How does a semester of a very conservative college radicalize him? You sound like you are just parroting MAGA talking points.

I see nothing wrong with people acquiring a left-wing political lens as a result of their own independent thought process (which, by the way, has nothing to do with universities, regardless of what the right-wing talking points you're referencing say; the shooter went to a trade school).

And in any case, a significant majority of political violence is caused by right-wing extremists. Of course the DOJ just deleted that report because it was inconvenient to their narrative.

https://people.com/department-of-justice-quietly-deletes-stu...

Unlikely they’d want to politicize the canceling of their show. Quiet and uncontroversial is better for ABC.

Why would a broadcaster want to pull a show and need an excuse to do so? Shows get cancelled all the time if the broadcaster decides that they're too expensive etc.

> We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it

Kimmel did not assert Mr. Robinson was anything he wasn't. Kimmel noted how some people are doing everything possible to distance themselves from Mr. Robinson.

AFAIK all information anybody had at the time was that he grew up in a good gun-loving Republican family and he'd written some silly memes on the shell casings.

The discord chats and his relationship with a trans woman were AFAIK not revealed yet, or at least were so new that they maybe hadn't made it to Kimmel's writers room.

That kind of problem gets a demand of a retraction, not a firing.

Contrast that to a Fox News host calling for mass executions of homeless people the other day (and since that day there have been multiple mass killings of homeless people). That guy got off with a thin apology.

People can cancel and boycott all they want, that’s not what this is. This is government censorship of an individual they want to punish which is not okay.

> Sorry but people are entitled to pressure other private citizens when they say disagreable things.

I said

> I'm 100% supportive of disagreeing, debating, peacefully protesting, ignoring and even mocking ideas we don't agree with but I draw a hard line at shouting down, deplatforming or canceling them.

So we agree. What's there to be "Sorry" about?

> What First Amendment is trying to protect

My post doesn't mention the First Amendment or the troubling matter of the FCC chair comments about individual speech. I chose not to post about those because I wanted to focus on the other kind of free speech which doesn't involve the government or the First Amendment and isn't even a matter of law. It's about the morality and ethics of how consistently we as private citizens actively support fellow citizens we disagree with in being heard - even when they're offensive, hateful and wrong. It's about whether we should support or oppose private citizens canceling other citizens.

Frankly, I can't tell if we agree or not. I suspect it depends on exactly what you mean by the word "pressure". If "pressure" is limited to "disagreeing, debating, peacefully protesting, ignoring and even mocking" then we are in total agreement. If "pressure" includes "shouting down, deplatforming or canceling" then you're a canceler and we disagree. If it includes wiggle room which might lead to silencing viewpoints you oppose, you're a closet canceler - in which case the vagueness of the term "pressure" and being "sorry" make more sense. On the other hand, if "pressure" includes opposing even those you agree with most the moment they want to silence those you disagree with (instead of debating and countering their bad, wrong ideas) - then we're soulmates.

The head of the FCC isn't people. The recent Paramount merger was preceded by Paramount conceding multiple times to unreasonable demands by Trump personally. This is definitely abuse of power and official censorship.

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> In this case, it is the FCC, an arm of the government, that is pressuring ABC to do this rather than other private citizens.

Actually it was a couple of big ABC affiliate owners that started the avalanche, and ABC followed…not any government pressure.

You can certainly speculate that the these affiliates had an ulterior motive in their actions to curry favor with the Trump administration, but it’s not unreasonable nor unheard of for station affiliates to make decisions about content and programming to avoid alienating or offending a large portion of the markets they serve or the advertisers that pay their bills.

In the end this is about eyeballs and advertising dollars and it’s no more nefarious than that.

We need you to avoid posting flame-war style comments to HN. We've had to remind you of this once, years ago, and now it's time to remind you again. The guidelines don't go out the window just because this is a topic people feel strongly about, in fact they become more important. Please heed the guidelines if you want ot participate here, especially these ones:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, after the Tegna deal they will own all three stations in my market. Essentially, the viewpoints we see will be determined by one man.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/fcc-chair-levels-threat-agains...

From https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/brendan-carr-abc-fcc-jimmy-... :

> Appearing on Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday, Carr suggested that the FCC has “remedies we can look at.”

> “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

An absolutely unmistakable direct threat from the chairman of the FCC.

Except that Kimmel's job was speech. He had a microphone -- and depended upon that (supposedly God-given) freedom of speech to perform that job. If he lost that job due to something that right didn't guarantee, then I'd understand. His dismissal's cause had nothing to do with a failure on his part. Instead we now have the government, specifically concerned with his criticisms of it, effectuating this block of Kimmel's speech and thereby ending his job. The government is supposed to guarantee your right to criticize it. What happened here?

Except all indications are the show was pulled because of pressure from the government. The FCC threatening “we can do this the easy way or the hard way” is not constitutional.

The FCC chairman threatened to take action against ABC, only then did ABC take Kimmel off the air. So insteresting and convenient you chose to ignore that.

Heartily agree, but the 1st Amendment is supposed to protect you from FCC commissioners, and presidents and vice presidents restraining your speech, and that certainly looks like what happened here.

The comment you replied to said "free speech" which is different from the First Amendment.

These cases were taken to the courts, and for the covid issue I am aware that the firms were never forced, and were able to ignore government instructions and do their own thing.

The exact opposite of what has happened here.

The same will be the situation with laptops.

I'm not very aware of this subject, but from my understanding "the laptop" is the files that were extracted from a person's laptop by a man who was supposed to repair it. Then the files were released in public and included nude images. I would expect any company to pull those documents down to limit their own liability and for common decency. Again, I'm not very informed on the subject.

So there was that example.

Now the FCC threatened ABC/Disney to pull a show because the orange guy dislikes him. I isolation, just this one incident is the death of the concept of America. If we consider the context :thisisfine:

It's astonishing how bad the US political apparatus is at making progress even on matters that easily fall within that 80%, though— healthcare reform, childcare, higher education, common sense gun laws, infrastructure investments.

All of this stuff should be a slam dunk to implement with broad coalitions no matter who holds which branches, and yet it's all been basically gridlocked for decades, and instead it's never-ending turmoil over meaningless nonsense like who uses what bathrooms.

Statistically almost everyone who is a “conservative” supports Trump whatever he does, though? With very little real infighting

The “left” on the other hand seems way more heterogeneous in that sense (which does seem like a significant political disadvantage in practical terms).

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But it’s not just the government even assuming your comment about the first amendment is correct. Sinclair + Nexstar are about 80% of the stations and they both refused to carry it, so there’s a financial component. I believe their affiliates were the first to cancel even before the FCC comments. Why should ABC lose 80% of their income.

https://x.com/WeAreSinclair/status/1968471160359645658

There's a huge difference between top down cancellation and bottom up cancellation.

Do you think the CEO would have fired you for being conservative? Or do you think your career wouldn't have advanced because people wouldn't want to associate with someone who's always saying things they find abhorrent?

There's a difference between criticism of a politician or his policies and espousing bigotry and racism.

Musk, Ellison, Zuck, Bezos and friends would gladly have you. Not sure if you've been noticing all the ring kissing over the last several months.

I was a tech-bro type libertarian dumb ass and my coworkers (even the Pacifica listeners) did not give a fuck. They were all super kind. Celebrated when my kids were born and bought baby clothes. And I was in Santa Cruz with ultra liberal types.

Then I moved to a very red state remote. And none of my co-workers cared until I got a new boss out off Chicago who was excited to have someone on his team that lived in God's country. But for him I wasn't conservative enough (I made a joke about not wanting to use my aerospace degree to make nukes so I switched to software. Guess what he did before software? FML) and I was gone for my wrong think. And I don't think I passed his 'God's country' purity test.

Have you ever lived in a rural community?

Putting useless or malicious animals down is merciful and common place and definitely not the making of serial killers.

> The right is simply good at PR

One of the defining characteristics of the right is not placing any value on logical consistency. Being a hypocrite will not lose you any support with them.

Sorry, I thought you were going to end your line with "McCarthyism".

Freedom Fries, Satanic Panic, Save our Children, Red Scare. If anything the liberals being able to cancel people is a historical anomaly, and now we're seeing things return to their natural order.

> People forget that they invented cancel culture. Dixie Chicks anyone?

You can go a lot further back than that. McCarthyism was a powerful cancel culture and vestiges of that still manifest today. Linguistically, the weird and inexplicable way anything to the left of fascism in America can be described as "communism" if someone is in the mood to be pejorative is a vestige of McCarthy, or something even further back from the First Red Scare, I think.

I had totally forgotten about that!

Video games all through the 90s as well.

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But there is a massive difference here. The left uses social pressure to silence people they don't like, the right uses government power to silence people they don't like.

These are not even close to the same.

The horseshoe is a bit like a boomerang in that regard, both in form and function!

i get what you're saying but "the left" has basically zero political power in the united states. it never has. the closest we ever were was with FDR but i wouldn't consider a leader who operated concentration camps to be leftist by any stretch.

we have a right wing and then a righter wing. bernie sanders is an anomaly, elizabeth warren is just left of center, and i can't think of too many other current politicians at the national level who actually lean left. i guess nominally "the squad" but they mostly present fairly centrist platforms by worldwide standards. no current politicians at the national stage are talking about meaningful economic reform (as in, away from capitalism), police abolition, nationalized health care, or any other typical leftist ideas - not that i'm trying to argue any of these points in this thread - just providing examples of what i mean by "leftist".

whether or not "the left" weaponizes commitment to free expression, "the right" is the only side of that binary who has ever wielded serious political power, and they use it to extremely destructive ends at all times.

maybe someday if we ever have a political party that actually represents leftwing politics we can judge them as harshly. i'll wait.