The pointlessness of censoring Jimmy Kimmel

A power struggle over the final days of the public square.

President Joe Biden on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on June 8, 2022. (Erin Scott / The White House / Wikimedia Commons)

The death of mass media means every cross-partisan debate now starts with accusing your opponent of living in an information bubble, a false reality. Charlie Kirk was one man, but is a martyr or hatemonger depending on who’s speaking. This is life after the end of the public square, and achieving consensus is not one of its strengths.

The rest of America is only now catching up to the fraught media dynamic that first appeared in the conservative movement a while ago, which had built its own information ecosystem over recent decades after feeling frozen out by “the mainstream media” (or, to conservatives, “the liberal media”). As Julian Sanchez, then of the CATO Institute, famously wrote in 2010:

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!) This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile.

Well, it’s 2025, and it wasn’t just a conservative thing: We all live in a state of epistemic closure now. It’s no longer called “mainstream media” but “legacy media,” because it’s YouTube and its Charlie Kirks, not ABC and its Jimmy Kimmels, that dominates living room TV Nielsen ratings. There’s no “mainstream media” anymore because there’s no more American mainstream. The public has broken into a million pieces and media production with it. Which brings me to ask why the U.S. now has a militantly activist FCC at the exact moment there’s less justification for FCC intervention in the “the public interest” than ever.

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There are few words subject to more tormented interpretation in American media theory than the exact meaning of the federal statutory obligation for TV and radio station license holders in the U.S. to operate in the “public interest, convenience and necessity.” This ambiguity, once a source of flexibility over decades of technological change, has now created an opening for threats of authoritarian enforcement by the Trump administration, which seems to have decided that it’s in the public interest to drum liberals like Kimmel out of power.

“The last couple of decades, you’ve seen the FCC really step back from enforcing ‘public interest’ standards, and I don’t think that’s a good thing,” Trump FCC Chair Brendan Carr said on a recent Fox News appearance. “We’re going back to that era where local TV stations, judging the public interest, get to decide what the American people think.” (Italics mine.)

Generously, there are two ways to read this last quote from Carr, though I’ll be ungenerous and say they’re both indefensible. Local broadcast TV is still a significant and trusted news source for a lot of Americans. But the idea that your local CBS affiliate is specially deciding reality for your neighbors more than the slurry of Facebook groups, Nextdoor, the Citizen app, YouTube, WhatsApp and ChatGPT is medieval thinking. Every information source these days is one among many.

By the same token, the idea of a corporate broadcast license-holder like Sinclair or Nextstar having special public-interest insights and obligations that Facebook, Nextdoor, Citizen, YouTube, WhatsApp and ChatGPT don’t seems increasingly absurd. By every metric, digital media annihilates analog distribution in its dominant hold on consumer behavior. Broadcast regulations suppose the existence of a universal public square that American consumers are adamantly refusing to patronize.

In this kind of information environment, asking for the definition of the "public interest” comes dangerously close to begging the question of whether a “public interest” exists at all. It’s a tell when censors seem better at deciding what the public interest isn’t, rather than figuring out ways to get more nonpartisan investigative reporters on TV. “The public,” for its part, is certainly a constituency much larger than the minority of consumers who choose to look at the TV instead of their phone at any given moment. But life online has been blessedly excused from any kind of obligation to assemble a public, let alone act in its welfare. “I’ve been very, very consistent when it comes to the Internet,” Carr said on CNBC. “We want wide open, robust debate. And there’s no public interest standard there.”

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A century ago, there was a parallel to today’s informational chaos during the early days of broadcast, when interference from competing signals required federal intervention to allow the medium to flourish. Many interest groups, like labor unions, were interested in broadcasting, for obvious reasons. But what’s true today was also true then: If everybody tried to speak at the same time, nobody could listen. It’s just that the limitations at the time were technological, not cognitive.

“There is not room in the broadcast band for every school of thought, religious, political, social, and economic, each to have its separate broadcasting station, its mouthpiece of the ether,” the Federal Radio Commission concluded in 1929. So the airwaves were handed to commercial broadcasters, with the “public interest” standard as a regulatory compromise.

Today, the interest groups who once wanted a bit of the airwaves to reach the largest share of the public can create an Instagram account for free and not even bother with the cost and hassle of spectrum space. It was the likes of Charlie Kirk himself, and his rise to prominence over YouTube, who best marked the viability of a new kind of filter-bubble politics as a partisan replacement for the more sober universal public square. Google faced no such questions from the FCC over whether introducing Kirk to audiences via algorithm was in the “public interest.” Online, it’s strictly business. Alternative opinions are “just a click away,” as they say.

Commercial broadcast advocates are among the first to point out this digital hypocrisy (especially compared to actual monopolists like Google), usually to argue for deregulation and lifting ownership caps.

But you only have to watch the borderline-monopsonist leverage that huge TV chains like Nextstar and Sinclair just wielded over Disney, to the enormous offense of many liberal ABC viewers, to observe that massive corporate consolidation doesn’t seem in the interests of consumer welfare or free expression either. It’s not just that Nexstar shielded conservative ABC affiliate viewers in Midland, Texas, from seeing Kimmel’s liberal criticisms of the Trump administration. It’s that Kimmel’s opinions couldn’t be heard by anyone at all, not even in clips on YouTube, because Bob Iger at Disney pulled Kimmel off-camera entirely. That’s the power of corporate consolidation.

The reality is that, in the age of informational superabundance, the public square as we once knew it under mass media can only be reassembled through epic acts of censorship that the average American, whoever that is, would find intolerable. The mass media of the 20th century were products of artificial scarcity, as aided and abetted by regulators: The broadcasters’ exclusive claims on spectrum space, the newspapers’ regional advertising monopolies. But these were the outcome of abstract market oversight more than direct editorial supervision. If there’s anything I suspect is less popular to Americans than a cold-blooded murder in broad daylight, it’s the idea of a nebbish bureaucrat deciding which comedians you aren’t allowed to think are funny. Even in an era of epistemic closure, people tend to be more open-minded than that.