Laugh at Trump, Lose Your License
The president is about to control CBS, CNN, HBO and TikTok
The new slogan of the Trump FCC might as well be: “Nice little network you’ve got there. Shame if something happened to it.”
In Trump’s Washington, regulators don’t regulate. They retaliate. They hover, threaten, and clear their throats ominously while executives clutch their merger decks and whisper about “tone.”
Platform a Democrat? We’re watching.
Tell a joke about the president? We’re listening.
Mock a Republican? Careful with that broadcast license.
The threats have run the gamut. The FCC is investigating The View for daring to host James Talarico, a Democratic lawmaker who is young, articulate and, worst of all, climbing in the polls in the Texas senate race. Jimmy Kimmel told a joke and almost lost his show because the FCC threatened Disney. Stephen Colbert mocked Trump — as is literally his job — and CBS executives suddenly found that they could not afford to keep him on air beyond this May. Network executives also warned Colbert this week not to platform Talarico because of the “equal time” rules, which miraculously apply to late-night television but not to talk radio, where MAGA voices dominate.
Then there is 60 Minutes. Since Trump’s re-election, the show has looked less like the gold standard of broadcast journalism and more like a stately old battleship trying to navigate a shark tank full of regulators, billionaires and bruised presidential egos. It began with Paramount’s $16 million bribe — er, settlement — to Trump. Officially, it was about closing a lawsuit. Unofficially, it felt like a corporate curtsy at a moment when merger approvals and FCC scrutiny suddenly mattered very much. Then came the CECOT story — the Salvadoran mega-prison segment that reportedly cleared standards and lawyers before being yanked at the last minute by MAGA’s newest media darling, Bari Weiss. And finally, Anderson Cooper’s piece on Trump’s South Africa refugee policy, subjected to what insiders described as abnormal edits and more hand-wringing by Weiss. Cooper’s subsequent departure — framed politely, as these things always are — landed less like a coincidence and more like the closing scene of a slow-motion drama about what happens when legacy journalism collides with political vengeance and boardroom anxiety.
This is how modern intimidation works. You don’t need to ban speech. You just make it too expensive to exercise freely.
And then we get the velvet hypocrisy. The “free speech absolutists” who once hyperventilated over campus protests suddenly find themselves remarkably understanding when stories critical of Trump’s refugee policies get spiked. Weiss built an empire on the idea that speech must flow freely — until it flows in the wrong direction. An Anderson Cooper report critical of the administration? Suddenly it’s complicated. A story about CECOT and the aesthetics of strongman incarceration? Maybe not today.
Free speech, apparently, is absolute — provided it doesn’t disrupt the acquisition.
The chill is not theoretical. I have personally experienced it in the last month.