Put it on the ash heap of history so no one can misuse it.
T he uproar over ABC’s decision to suspend late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show in the wake of his comments about the Charlie Kirk assassination is understandable.
Kimmel touched off the furor last Monday night by indicating that Kirk’s killer was a Trump supporter, even though his own family said he was a left-winger who had become radicalized over the issue of trans rights.
Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, appeared on a podcast two days later to remind everyone that the FCC controls the broadcasting license that ABC uses and that it comes “with an obligation to operate in the public interest.” (The FCC has no sway over cable broadcasting or social media.) Carr bluntly said, “Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Carr’s threat came at roughly the same time that executives at Nexstar and Sinclair Broadcasting, which together own about a third of ABC affiliates, announced they would preempt Kimmel’s show and demanded an apology from him. But Carr’s words no doubt played some role in ABC’s sudden decision a few hours later to “indefinitely” suspend Kimmel’s show.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz, chairman of the Commerce Committee, warned that Carr’s invoking possible regulatory action against ABC crossed a line. “That’s right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”
Cruz said that no matter how much conservatives disliked Kimmel, it wasn’t possible to invoke the use of government power in a way that would only hurt the left: “What [Carr] said there is dangerous as hell. It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it.”
Many leaders in MAGA world disagree. Christopher Rufo, the activist who has exposed and helped dismantle race-based DEI programs, says, “We cannot accept the idea that history started in 2025 or that only the left can legitimately use state institutions. The only way to get to a good equilibrium is an effective, strategic tit-for-tat.”
It’s highly tempting for many conservatives to point to the extensive evidence that during the Covid pandemic, the Biden administration coerced many social media platforms to engage in censorship under the pretense of combatting “misinformation and disinformation.” Many left-wing groups have used ugly tactics to call for the firing or silencing of media figures they didn’t like, from J. K. Rowling to Dave Chappelle to Joe Rogan.
But the answer is not to wield state power against noxious left-wingers. Charlie Kirk was not one to call for censorship or government retaliation against opponents. He did support a few boycotts, but he mostly championed the building of alternative media outlets and institutions such as his own Turning Point USA, which now has an annual budget of some $100 million.
The problem is that a relic of the New Deal regulatory state — the Federal Communications Commission — still holds such sway over part of the media landscape that the media can be intimidated by it.
The liberal writer Andrew Sullivan agrees with conservatives that the aging legacy broadcast networks have laid themselves open to criticism:
What those networks have done these last few years — especially in late night — has been to become aggressive, partisan opponents of Trump and MAGA and subsequently, much more unforgivably, craven apologists — and even propagandists, in the case of Colbert — for Biden. They decided to cater to only one half of the country, and relentlessly mock, ridicule, and demonize the other half. . . . They kept up a veil of respectability, a wispy fig leaf of balance over their leftist privates. We sighed and kept subscribing and watching. But the full-on neo-Marxist propaganda of 2020? And far-left disinformation at the Kimmel level in the wake of an assassination? Well, the veil slipped, didn’t it, and here we are.
But the answer is not to pick up the cudgel of coercion and swing it at lying broadcast networks. It’s to inject freedom and competition into a spectrum that has lacked it for almost 100 years. As National Review’s Dominic Pino notes: “If you want Brendan Carr to be less powerful, take away his agency’s unjust control over broadcasting by privatizing the airwaves and letting broadcasters buy and sell them like any other commodity.”
That approach is entirely doable. Thomas Hazlett, a former chief economist at the Federal Communications Commission, has documented how the authors of the 1927 Radio Act that presaged the 1934 creation of the FCC “explicitly wanted to keep [broadcasting] authority centralized and political, sidestepping the free speech protections of the First Amendment.”
Hazlett notes that the U.S. has already used spectrum markets and auctions to transform the cellular phone networks that almost every American accesses daily. That model can be used to disassemble the FCC: “Another century for the brainchild of Herbert Hoover seems needlessly inert. Let the invisible hand regulate the invisible resource.”