The opinion section at The Washington Post may be moving in a positive direction towards an embrace of free markets, but the style section still has a ways to go. A Saturday article that was published in the Tuesday print edition by Elahe Izadi sought to answer the question, “Has Trump’s government made political comedy feel important again?” According to Izadi and her sources, the answer is yes, although the truth is quite different.
Izadi’s one-sided framing was clear from the start, “Government pressure to yank Jimmy Kimmel off the air after an on-air comment after Charlie Kirk’s killing. The cancellation of longtime Donald Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s show after his parent company settled a Trump lawsuit ahead of a merger it needed the administration to approve. The White House denouncing ‘South Park’ episodes that skewer administration figures. Comedians have suddenly turned into the main characters in the debate over free speech and government interference.”
She then asked the question that formed the headline for the article, “Is the second Trump administration making comedy feel important again?”
All of Izadi’s sources were either liberal comedians or current or former staffers for liberal comedy shows.
Izadi claimed, “The government’s umbrage toward certain entertainers, along with corporate moves that some saw as appeasement, ‘really opened the floodgates of discussion’ among comedians and ‘put a spotlight on what we do and how important it is,’ says veteran comic Judy Gold, who wrote a book on comedy and free speech during the first Trump term.”
She writes, “That began to change over the summer. In July, CBS parent company Paramount — which needed the administration to sign off on a merger deal — settled a Trump lawsuit. Colbert called it a ‘big fat bribe’ on his show.”
Yes, Colbert did call it that, but he has never publicly stated that he thinks The Late Show was cancelled because of Trump.
Jimmy Kimmel, by contrast, has argued that the FCC was behind his suspension, which Izadi naturally discussed next.
Of that controversy, Izadi claimed, “Kimmel went on his own show and said, ‘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.’ His commentary came before solid details emerged about the alleged shooter’s politics.”
That’s not true. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, whom Kimmel praised as a “rare voice of reason,” was already talking about the shooter being a leftist at the time of Kimmel’s remarks.
Izadi hyped that, “ABC put Kimmel back on the air about a week later, and the whole affair turned up the spotlight on the late-night host: His return episode brought 6.2 million viewers, which is about four times what he normally gets. That, despite not being aired on nearly a quarter of the stations that usually carry him. (The broadcasters later agreed to air his show with their affiliates.)”
Those numbers have since come back down to Earth.
To appropriately answer Izadi’s question, it might be useful to define “feel.” Certainly, the liberal comedy has not impacted public policy or opinion polls. Even the idea that Kimmel was almost a free speech martyr requires liberals to ignore the fact that he was playing around in Blue Anon territory, but if you’re a liberal who is despondent about having to endure another four years of Trump, then maybe having your echo chamber reinforce your sense of moral superiority can feel important, which is probably what Izadi meant. But, she asked about "political comedy," not "liberal comedy," so it is noticeable she did not write this article when Twitter banned The Babylon Bee for telling Rachel Levine jokes.