MSNBC’s Chris Hayes responds to the news that ABC has ‘indefinitely’ pulled ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ off the air after Trump’s FCC chair criticized the host’s Charlie Kirk comments;

CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC: Good evening from New York. I’m Chris Hayes. When Stephen Colbert announced that his late night show was being canceled back in July, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, had a chilling reaction. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Fallon has no talent. Kimmel has no talent. They’re next. They’re going to be going. I hear they’re going to be going. I don’t know, but I would imagine because they’d get Colbert has better ratings than Kimmel or Fallon. You know that. HAYES: They’re next. I hear they’re going to be going. Well, tonight an ABC spokesperson confirms that Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show has been preempted indefinitely. Now, it comes just hours after a large set of ABC affiliates announced they would refuse to air Kimmel’s show. They say because of comments the late night host made on Monday night relating to the motives of the man that shot and killed Charlie Kirk, wrongly suggesting the killer was part of the MAGA movement. He was not. Nexstar, the largest owner of local stations in the country, came out and said it, quote, strongly objects to recent comments made by Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC affiliated markets. And if that were the whole story, he said something. It was not correct. The affiliates pushed back. Well, then that would be one story. But that, of course, is not the whole story. OK, because crucially, just hours before that statement, Trump’s handpicked FCC chairman went on a podcast and suggested ABC’s broadcast license or affiliates could be at risk if they did not suspend or fire Kimmel, essentially issuing an order saying, and I quote him here, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Well, hours later, ABC made the announcement Kimmel would indeed be taken off the air indefinitely. And this is just the latest chapter in Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign to crack down on free speech, dominate the media and essentially render the First Amendment meaningless. An extreme campaign that has been an overdrive the past week. I mean, just yesterday, you had the deputy attorney general of these United States, the number two of the Department of Justice and the former criminal lawyer for the president, suggesting using criminal anti racketeering laws, the kind of things used for mobsters, RICO statutes to go after and prosecute protesters who heckled Donald Trump at a restaurant who yelled at him. We’re also getting new reports today. The White House plans to target a variety of left leaning groups and nonprofits in the coming weeks, all part of a larger and more dangerous effort underway. And it follows a playbook we have seen successfully run in recent years by authoritarian strongmen in places like Hungary and Turkey and Russia, because in those places they did just not they didn’t just criminalize speech they didn’t like, though some of them did some of that. Crucially, they made it virtually impossible to see and hear examples of that speech by taking de facto control the media landscape. In Hungary, for example, the country’s oldest newspaper was suddenly shuttered after being bought by a businessman with links to far right President Viktor Orban. According to reporters without borders, Orban has used media buyouts by government connected oligarchs to build a true media empire subject to his party’s orders. The group estimates such buyouts have given Orban’s party control of some 80 percent of Hungary’s media market resources. It is a similar situation in Turkey, where, according to Reuters, the biggest media brands are controlled by companies and people close to longtime leader Recep Erdogan and his AK party following a series of acquisitions starting in 2008. Then, of course, there’s Russia, where oligarchs friendly to President Vladimir Putin control much of the media. Wartime restrictions have shut down the rest. In each of these three countries, they didn’t just arrest protesters or distant journalists or show up knocking on the door of magazines. They used government power and sometimes through legal mechanisms to essentially roll up all the country’s media into a friendly propaganda arm of the regime. So given that context, I want you to look around the U.S. right now and see what’s been happening here right in front of our eyes. In July, the Trump FCC-that’s the entity that Brendan Carr controls-approved the sale of Paramount, with it CBS, to Skydance Media, which is controlled by the family of pro-Trump tech billionaire named Larry Ellison. It was his son, actually, who’s buying it. Now, that approval only came after Paramount paid Trump $ 60 million to settle the president’s obvious, frivolous, ludicrous lawsuit against CBS News and 60 Minutes for editing interviews, and after the Ellisons agreed to eliminate DEI programs, and after they agreed to install an executive, formerly from a conservative think tank, to essentially act as a sort of ideological minder at CBS News for political bias. So they did all those things, then they got the approval for this very, very large merger. After that, CBS canceled Stephen Goldberg’s top-rated late-night show, which was notorious for its criticism of the sitting president. Last week, after Larry Ellison officially leapfrogged another pro-Trump billionaire, Elon Musk, to become the world’s richest man, the new Paramount conglomerate made another media bid, this time for Warner Brothers Discovery, which just so happens to own CNN. So there’s a possibility that they could purchase that and roll that up as well. Then yesterday, we got this news about TikTok. Perhaps you’ve seen it. Do you remember the Chinese-owned app? That was banned as a security risk because of a bipartisan vote in both houses of Congress and signed into law by Joe Biden. And then Donald Trump just literally ignored the law while he searched for a U.S. buyer. Well, yesterday, there was news of a framework of a deal. Interesting. Let’s see what the deal is. Gives Americans an 80 percent stake in TikTok. Which Americans? Well, you’ll never guess. Yes, Larry Ellison is one of them, along with far-right venture capitalist, Trump donor, Doge consultant, MAGA backer Mark Andreessen. As Talking Points Memo noted, if all those deals all go through, that would mean the Murdoch family controlling Fox News, the journal New York Post, its other properties, Twitter, TikTok, CBS, CNN, and more owned by Elon Musk and the Ellison family, the Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos. The Trump administration is threatening to bring the government down on free speech and use it against dissent. It is also facilitating the sale of some of our biggest private media outlets to Trump allies and is a very obvious attempt to consolidate power over free expression.

RealClearPolitics Videos