The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 18 episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch this interview here.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon and this is the Right Now Show, which is a twice-weekly show about politics and government here sponsored by The New Republic. I’m going to be joined by Kathy Roberts Ford, professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And what we’re talking about today is Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension that happened last night. And also there was a lawsuit Trump filed against The New York Times, and we’re going to generally focus on what I’m describing as Trump’s war on the media, because I think that’s what’s happening. So professor, thanks for joining me.
Kathy Roberts Ford: Oh, it’s great to see you again, Perry.
Bacon: So Jimmy Kimmel is a comedian, and he’s not even as focused on the news as Jon Stewart was, you know, back in the Daily Show era. So, I’m really concerned about this, and I think I’m right to be. So explain to people why the series of events that resulted in Jimmy Kimmel being suspended is so concerning.
Ford: So what appears to have happened is Jimmy Kimmel has been suspended, his show has been suspended by ABC, and definitely we’re sad. So, you know, it’s a little unclear, the degree of this suspension. And it, this happened after his monologue in which he mentioned the murder of Charlie Kirk. And in talking about that murder, my understanding is that he said something to the effect of, he was opining or talking about the political ideology of the killer and suggesting that maybe the killer’s political ideology was more MAGA-oriented than it was anything else. And, you know, we know that the facts on the ground are still very much at play regarding the political ideology of the killer, but both Trump and the FCC chairman put pressure on ABC to get rid of The Jimmy Kimmel Show. And you know, the FCC chairman has this incredible power to yank a network’s license. And so this is a real chilling [of] free expression. By the way. The First Amendment forbids the use of regulatory threats and pressure to silence critics and to silence political discussion. And so this is very, very concerning.
Bacon: We should mention the role of like, Nexstar here. Do you understand that pretty well?
Ford: Why don’t you talk about Nexstar?
Bacon: So I guess, uh, part of what’s going on is like, it appears that there was an affiliate, there was a group of affiliates who said, first we are going to take off Jimmy Kimmel’s show, inspired by the FCC chairman sort of hinting you should do this. The affiliate said, we’re gonna move, and Nexstar owns lots of affiliate stations, ABC affiliates. But Nexstar is trying to get a merger done, which requires the FCC’s approval. ’Cause I think part of the—what’s happened throughout the year is like—these regulatory approvals seem to be a great way to sort of force media compliance. We will not approve your merger unless you do what we want. Seems to be a little bit of the story at CBS too.
Ford: That that’s exactly right, and that’s what happened, as we understand it, with the Stephen Colbert show, I mean Stephen Colbert criticized CBS’s settlement with, if I’m remembering correctly, CBS settled over the 60 minutes interview for 16 million [dollars]. I think Trump was suing for something like 10 billion. This was also a moment when Paramount, which owns CBS, was seeking a merger with Skydance. It’s at that very moment. And so it seems as though these mergers by the parent companies of news media institutions are being politicized in order to pressure the parent companies into doing the bidding of government officials.
Bacon: You said the First Amendment is violated by [this], and I think, I mean the literal words of the First Amendment are we have freedom of press and religion and so on. So when you said that, what you meant is the precedent has been that the FCC ... or what do you mean when you said the First Amendment bars this?
Ford: Alright, so you know that the—Hi!
Bacon: Anna Marie Cox has joined us as well, and we’re talking about Jimmy Kimmel. So go ahead, professor.
Ford: So, you know, the plain text of the First Amendment, Congress shall make new law, abridging freedom of speech or the press, the part that we’re concerned about here. It seems straightforward, but it’s really, it’s been elaborated on over the centuries by court precedent. And so it’s not so plain what it means, but one thing that it’s been interpreted to mean over time by the Supreme Court and as recently as 2024, in a case called NRA v. Vullo, is that government regulators cannot pressure banks and insurers, institutions like this, to get them to speak in a particular way or to punish certain kinds of speech, or to not be committed to certain groups that have ... they can’t compel speech. And so, you know, the First Amendment forbids that. The First Amendment, I shouldn’t say forbids, but when we think about the defamation cases that are being used prolifically by President Trump, the First Amendment gives robust protection to errors made by the press or any of us, right, in our public speech. That’s a famous New York Times case called New York Times v. Sullivan. And it’s called the “actual malice standard.” We can talk more about that later, but I think that’s a kind of answer to your question.
Bacon: OK, so Kimmel. So if the FCC chairman had called the head of ABC and said, Jimmy Kimmel’s show must end, that would be one thing. What appears to be happening is a little bit more tricky, only because it appears what happened is the FCC chairman hinted that maybe the affiliates should maybe cancel the show …
Ford: That’s exactly right.
Bacon: and then they did. So it’s a little, so I assume this is not ...
Ford: It’s pressure. It’s not perfect. It’s not, you know, this is not a case, number one. Number two, these are pressure tactics that are being used … and I would not say that these were in the spirit of democracy.
Bacon: Ana, let me start at the beginning here and just ask, OK, so Jimmy Kimmel is not a journalist. Jimmy Kimmel does not break news. Jimmy Kimmel’s show is not even as political as say, The Daily Show was a couple decades ago. I’m still really concerned about this, and what happened. Ana, talk about your feelings about this, your general reaction to what happened. This feels really like a moment to me of sorts.
Ana Marie Cox: I think it is a moment. We have seen just how quickly the entertainment industry, the media industry more broadly, is willing to obey in advance, surrender in advance. I think that the most concerning thing in some ways is this wasn’t an official political action. I think this has shown how fearful these enormous industries that have tons of power, or we think of them as having power, are; [that they are] willing to knuckle under; that they’re willing to knuckle under because they want to grow their power, right? And it’s an interesting tension to me that they think that this is going to satisfy. I think that what we learn in [authoritarian] institutions is that sometimes, like these places, these centers of apparent power mistake the knuckling under as a way to cooperate, or at least that’s been the historical pattern, right? I mean, in this era of global media networks and in how they really do rely on government to—they work in almost partnership, right? In a way that maybe we haven’t seen before, or that’s what they’re aiming at.
Bacon: Let me prompt you a little bit, to ask the question: That’s just like, so you said it’s not government action. This is a little bit different. Jeff Bezos voluntarily, in some ways, got rid of his Opinion section. This is a little bit different in that there was, the FCC chairman was a little bit more actively engaged.
Cox: Right? But they could have fought it. That’s the thing I mean about surrender in advance. Obey in advance, I see that there’s not even like a tension there. Right?
Bacon: Right.
Cox: There wasn’t even like a sense of like, Screw off, right? Like, We are gonna do this—which is something that, in the past, some media entities or at least individual folks have maybe made noise about. To me this was just the threat of government intervention and wasn’t even sort of like, We’re doing this, but, I don’t know, even some kind of admission that this is restrictive. And I think that’s because—this is the scary thing—it’s because they don’t care. They are willing to sacrifice all of this in order to gain whatever little bit more power, or a lot more power, I mean, I worry about the working in concert between these things. I worry that this is a sign that we’re going to see cooperation.
And I think that the Bezos move shows that—and I worry so much; I could actually get emotional about this, which is the future of—of Perrys in our industry, right? I was actually like, I have a—it’s funny because I’ve been planning on this conversation, I’m going to see my dad for the first time in a long time. I’ll be honest, he’s a regular MSNBC viewer. He loves MSNBC. He’s always like, You should have a show in MSNBC. Yeah, and I should, but I kind of want to point out to him, in a way, Dad, you’re missing the crumbling here. OK. Like, you’re missing that all these other—I love him so much, but—the ways that the centers of what we think of as liberal discourse, we—I don’t know how we alert people anymore, right? That we are under threat. The New Republic is under threat. These places where you’re getting little bits of dissent, we are being, I don’t don’t know how else to put it—
Bacon: Let me come back to that in a second. I want to, I do want to come back to that. Let me ask: Did you, I can’t, and ABC’s not quite, nobody’s quite saying what Jimmy Kimmel said. I went through and looked at the comments, and I’m a little bit confused by which one.... He speculates about the killer in a way that is probably not, we should all stop doing that, in a certain way. But I don’t know that, I mean, it’s not, it was not a firing offense. But do we think that’s the issue is, he suggested the killer was conservative? Is that the, that we think the crux of this is?
Cox: That’s what I’ve, I guess what I’ve seen. I mean, I think also, didn’t he mock Trump for like, switching the subject when he was asked about Charlie Kirk and he went to like, look at the trucks.
Bacon: He definitely did, but I’m not sure what the offense taken is.… The thing I wanted to come back to—Ana mentioned smaller outlets. Let’s talk about the big outlets first, though. Trump forced or coerced or weakened debate, as you said. Disney and CBS already reached, you know, agreements in these defamation suits with him. The Wall Street Journal and the Times are now facing these defamation suits. These are very big institutions that sort of define the American media in a certain way. So, professor, to start with you, how worried should we be that he’s suing the biggest news organizations in the country, the ones that still at this point deliver a lot of the breaking news and investigations in the country.
Ford: I think it’s worrisome. I think it’s a tactic to silence the press and intimidate the press into some type of pulling back on a kind of robust, uninhibited debate, public debate, and in their coverage of the administration. That’s the goal. The truth of the matter is that in all these defamation lawsuits that we’ve seen, experts say time and time again that these suits—that he’s unlikely to win, right? Very, very unlikely to win. And the reason is because the First Amendment provides robust protection for the press, for all of us, to make errors when we are speaking about matters that involve public officials and public figures. This was set in the New York Times v. Sullivan case in 1964.
It came out of, interestingly, a Civil Rights Era case, in which white elites in the South sued The New York Times for errors in a in a civil rights ad, saying We’ve been defamed, we’ve been defamed. It was hard to defame them, of course, for what they were doing as white supremacists. And yet they were trying to use libel law as a tool to silence the press. And the Supreme Court at that time said, No, you know, if the First Amendment means anything, it means that we have to allow some degree of error in public speech, particularly about people who are public officials. And that went on then to include public figures down the road in further cases. But it’s just such an important principle. So the actual malice standard says you are protected; these institutions are protected for errors, even if they’re defamatory, if these errors are made without knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth. And most professional journalists, journalists and news institutions, don’t go recklessly around making errors, right? And they don’t have reckless disregard for the truth. That’s not true of all news institutions or of all people. But it does tend to be true. And so what we know is that the Supreme Court very recently has turned down an opportunity to revisit the actual malice standard in a case. We think it’s very, very robust protection still. And so, my expectation and hope, profound hope, is that The New York Times is going to see this through. And I hope Murdoch for The Wall Street Journal sees it through.
Ownership matters here. Ownership matters, right? When you’ve got a Paramount that has all these other business interests owning a news institution, they’re going to make deals [and] they have made deals, in order to protect their other interests. Same thing with Bezos. Same thing with the Walt Disney Company, right? I’m hoping The New York Times is going to hold the line for us all.
Bacon: And, somebody like me who’s somewhat critical of some of the mainstream legacy media at times, we, you agree that it’s bad to see them facing these kind of lawsuits still, obviously.
Ford: Yes. Yeah. I mean, I can be critical too. I want The New York Times to create a democracy desk. I want them to have a vertical where they begin covering in this highly framed way democratic erosion in the United States, and the TikTok rising of authoritarianism. I want them to do that. I think other institutions are doing it, but news institutions are doing it better, but we need the agenda-setting institution to do it. That said, it is a very important institution. They do a lot of really important investigative reporting with their incredible resources that other institutions just don’t have the resources to do. I’m sorry, I want to pitch over to my colleague here.
Cox: I worry, in some ways, I worry that the pursuit of profit leads to the smoothing out of news coverage, but not in an overt way, right? Because I don’t think anyone at the Times is like, we have to—or The Washington Post—like, what actually happened in The Washington Post is the scary thing, right? Because there wasn’t a decision to go from bipartisan coverage … at least an acknowledgment that there are critical frames for what’s happening in government—and to just outright be like, Nope, that is not what we’re gonna do. We are just going to forthrightly stop criticism of this administration. And I agree that it’s these huge organizations that own newspapers that feel like the real threat. But part of me is like, that just happens more and more these days.
It’s very hard for independent institutions, and I don’t know if we’re going to call the Times independent, but you’re right, it’s not part of a global conglomerate at this point, with lots of different like fingers in every pie, but they still need to function in this regulatory environment. And to me it’s the culture of lack of dissent, and also the move toward the view—what has become the dominant way for large institutions to cover politics—which is the view from nowhere, right? The classic James Fallows conception of the myth of objectivity, which the Times is probably tied up in, in a way that is more frustrating to me personally than almost any other institution because I kind of love the Times, I really do. I grew up in Texas and Nebraska, and getting the Sunday Times as special delivery was such a treat for me as a teenager. That and The New Yorker were the epitome of real journalism, and they taught me to care about politics in a big way. And so to see them do this performance of concern about the agenda that’s actually being set by the right, and it filters in, I think, beyond the Op-ed section: Their coverage of trans issues has just been terrible, and it’s outside the Op-ed section even, right? They still do all this great journalism. But they’ve adopted this view that they must take this authoritarianism seriously. They’re not going to have a democracy desk. They’re just not, they’re not gonna do it. And I mean, we can hope that this suit radicalizes them. I feel like that might be the best outcome.
Bacon: Kimmel is suspended temporarily, maybe permanently. Colbert is off too. Talk about, it’s not 1993, where Jay Leno and, you know, Letterman have these huge audiences. Is the silencing of the late-night host important? Ana, I’ll start with you about that.
Cox: That’s a really good question because on the one hand, I feel like I’m not concerned about Jimmy.
Bacon: He’s going to be fine economically, I agree.
Cox: He’s going to be fine. Stephen Colbert is going to be fine. And those of us that enjoy them are also going to be able to continue to enjoy them. In some ways, I worry about his trickle-down effect. Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel both created spaces with their shows that were feeders: The writers that worked on those shows, the guests that they had on those shows; they created a space where you can see good-natured criticism. Not just good-natured—hilarious criticism. Satire is really important, and it sets a model for: This is also a way we can criticize power.
And if we look at Colbert and Kimmel, they also did a lot of action. Like one of the things that really moved me about Jimmy Kimmel—not my favorite late-night show, to be honest—was how he did the casting call for actors that needed just like one or two parts to get their Screen and Actors Guild health insurance, right? What a wonderful mechanic of solidarity.... We could talk more about Disney’s cultural output. Because it’s a little like, I know you can’t say that just because they put on Andor they are anti-fascist. But Jimmy Kimmel had Diego Luna as a guest host, and Diego Luna’s monologue every night was like, “Screw ICE.” And he talked very passionately about it. And to see that on television from an actor, you know, having that platform, seems—I’m not going to say it’s important, but it normalizes criticism.
Bacon: OK. Right.
Cox: It makes it seem like that’s an accepted part of the conversation, that we can do that. And I think in some ways just to say, That’s not normal, that’s not an accepted way to even have a casual conversation, is really chilling.
Ford: I would agree. I just want to say one quick thing. The silencing of anyone, anyone especially, is a terrible thing in a democracy, period. Full stop. And yet the silencing of our comedians, who are often some of our greatest truth tellers, it’s especially—[it] sends a very strong signal across the body politic, and it’s very dangerous.
Bacon: So let me ask a final question. I want two questions. I’ll start with Kathy on this one: Talk about the historic analogies. Because you wrote this book, you co-authored a book about journalism in the Jim Crow era. How about the historical analogies and also the comparative ones between: How do these tactics that Trump is doing—are they similar to what other authoritarians do? So talk about the sort of historical and then the comparative analogies here.
Ford: Yeah. So, I wrote a book, Journalism and Jim Crow, in which—I co-edited and contributed significantly to this book. And what we documented is the role of white newspaper editors and journalists in actively building white supremacist political economies. I mean, it wasn’t just through storytelling, although that was really important, but they were active. They collaborated with political and business elites to do this. And so what we found is, in the Jim Crow South, you know, in building the Jim Crow South, these newspapers helped entrench one-party rule. They used these kinds of selective punishment of critics and they used silencing of critics through all kinds of means. And that was a very powerful tool. Not only that the leaders were involved in this work, but that their newspapers then normalized all of it, or whitewashed all of it and covered up all kinds of things along the way. And we didn’t have a lot of pushback, except for the Black press.
Now, what I would say is, you know, this kind of the way in which those papers normalized and used falsehoods to entrench one-party rule and these kind of subnational authoritarian regimes. We don’t want to follow that path today. We don’t want to have any kind of news media ecosystem that is participating in any kind of thing like that. But what’s happening now, as we’ve seen in our country, is what has happened in Hungary and Turkey, which is using regulatory threats and using lawsuits as a way to capture the media, the news media, and to capture some space in the information ecosystem. And, you know, we should be all very, very concerned.
Bacon: Ana, you mentioned at the beginning, or you mentioned a few minutes ago about smaller outlets, and I’m thinking about that myself. If The New York Times has a big legal team or has a lot of money, has a lot of issues of memory, I think they have a legal team. The Post in theory is backed by a billionaire. So I am concerned, and I’ll ask you this personally: Are you worried about the outlets you write for, that they might, [like] Gawker they might, be sued out of existence? How real do you feel about that?
Cox: I think about it when I have to pay my mortgage every month. I mean, these are the institutions, these are the places that I have worked at—I mean, I’ve also written for all the big places, but it’s been harder to find work from there. One of the things I’ve pointed out to my MSNBC dad is, Don’t you notice that there are fewer contributors, that there are just fewer voices on that network? And I think that’s something you’re seeing everywhere. Unfortunately with the smaller and smaller outlets, one issue is we’re just not prepared to be able to take on the work that a place like the Times can do, right? We can do really important stuff, and we can help push the conversation, but where do you go for the really important big investigations? I love ProPublica. I think that’s an interesting model, but it has public support, right? That is, I think, the future.
I was just writing about this; in some ways we need anti-capitalist models of production in order to continue to do the work that we have to do. We need cooperatives, we need some kind of nonprofit funding. We need to have the resources to continue be the voice for criticism and dissent and information. Like, I love 404 Media. I love Defector. Those are the places that we have to support, if people are listening. I can’t tell people to unsubscribe from the Times because I still think we really need it, but if you are interested in the future of journalism and sustaining the kind of really powerful alternatives that can speak back to places like the Times and criticize—I think one of the roles that we can play, you and I personally can play, is to articulate the criticisms of these larger places. And if support can come from larger bases, from people who can like spare—something I tell people all the time: The New Republic subscription is not ... it’s a bargain.
And I just go ahead and say it, if you are enjoying this conversation and you are thinking about unsubscribing from the Times, maybe do that, sure, but add eight bucks a month, you know. We need this base to continue to push back. And hold those institutions responsible. And indeed, in addition to holding the government, holding larger power responsible—because who is the Times going to hear from? Journalists read other journalists—I think that we are a really important voice. And again, I think that to articulate the problems, just to go back to the conversation that we had last week about not necessarily being persuaders but being a voice that gets people to think about, Oh yeah, you know what? Like that view from nowhere issue at the Times, that is kind of weird. That is something that I wish that they would do differently, you know? So I don’t know if that’s a coherent answer, but for some reason, you always ask me on before I’ve had my first cup of coffee. So—
Bacon: And with that, this is a great conversation. Any final thoughts? I’ll let you—any final thoughts you have? I want to conclude any final thoughts.
Cox: Buy her book, I’m pointing. That sounds like a really good way of thinking about what’s happening now; that’s such a wonderful historical example. Her book about Jim Crow, I forgot the name. Kathy’s book about Jim Crow.
Ford: Journalism and Jim Crow.
Cox: I’m sorry, I forgot; we’re moving fast. Yeah. But I’m going to get it. And it sounds like a really, really good model for what, unfortunately, is happening now. And subscribe to The New Republic.
Bacon: All right. On that note, thank you all for joining me. Great conversation. Good to see you.
Cox: Bye-bye.
Ford: Great to see you.