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Comment by kcplate | Hacker News Reader

> In this case, it is the FCC, an arm of the government, that is pressuring ABC to do this rather than other private citizens.

Actually it was a couple of big ABC affiliate owners that started the avalanche, and ABC followed…not any government pressure.

You can certainly speculate that the these affiliates had an ulterior motive in their actions to curry favor with the Trump administration, but it’s not unreasonable nor unheard of for station affiliates to make decisions about content and programming to avoid alienating or offending a large portion of the markets they serve or the advertisers that pay their bills.

In the end this is about eyeballs and advertising dollars and it’s no more nefarious than that.

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> Actually it was a couple of big ABC affiliate owners that started the avalanche, and ABC followed…not any government pressure.

This is highly misleading: those affiliates were responding to government pressure. The FCC is currently making key decisions for at least one of them[1], following recent decisions by the same government to attack other media organizations, install government political officers at other companies, or forced other companies to provide money or ownership. There’s absolutely no way those decisions were not made without factoring the current environment in.

1. https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/nexstar-tegna-fcc...

Order of events:

1. FCC Chairman Carr threatens licensed broadcasters (i.e. affiliates that have a license with the FCC) telling them they should stop running Kimmel and tell Disney they're doing it because the FCC may pull their license[1]

2. Nexstar, an affiliate broadcaster, issues a statement in response to Carr’s comments saying they're not going to broadcast Kimmel

3. ABC yanks Kimmel

[1] https://x.com/BulwarkOnline/status/1968392506711613526

> Actually it was a couple of big ABC affiliate owners that started the avalanche, and ABC followed…not any government pressure.

Brah.

Brendan Carr, the current head of the FCC publicly threatened to go after ABC for his speech, then ABC pulled the show.[1] Walks, talks, and acts likes government pressure being used for censorship against views they don’t agree with

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fcc-chair-threatens-jimm...

Something called Nexstar, which owns a subset of ABC whatevers was maybe first? I stopped trying to understand it after a while; notably, the yahoo article which (I skimmed/searched before I came to HN) doesn't mention this I guess?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/fcc-jimmy-kimme...

So yes, seems there was a middle step between Brendan Carr on a podcast, and top level ABC decision making.

The key thing is that Nexstar’s owners are hoping to make a lot of money from a merger which the FCC is currently ruling on. That makes threats from the FCC considerably more real:

https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/nexstar-tegna-fcc...

Cool, so did the FCC apply pressure using government power in the attempt to achieve this situation?

Yes or no?

You don’t need to answer as that’s rhetorical. It’s obvious the answer is yes. Democratic governments try to avoid making public statements like that because the general public cannot tell if it was because of the government or a happy coincidence that the party being pressured just happened to comply. Because it can’t be discerned even the appearance of using government power like that degrades the rule of law

Ok, seems I rubbed the wrong way there; I was not trying to take away from that key point of your post.

Carr is not “the FCC”. He’s the chairman, but he can’t act unilaterally to remove an affiliate broadcast license.

So “the FCC” did not apply pressure, the chairman did. He has a lot of influence and can set the agenda for the commission but he needs a majority of the commissioners to revoke a broadcast license. That is a super rare occurrence and would be unlikely.

So if Trump does the same, that's not the government saying it, because he also can't act unilaterally for the government, right?

And in fact, no individual politician should be capable of acting unilaterally for the government, so I guess they are all off scott free.

Trump is different. He is the executive branch. He has the ability to EO change without anyone else having to agree before the fact. The FCC operates as a commission. The chairman might set the agenda, but the commission has to agree by majority. You could argue that he has great influence within the FCC, but he is not the FCC.

When you make the leap from Carr to “the FCC” it’s roughly like if Sen. John Thune said something and you attributed his words to “the senate”.

Court cases have established that you don't need actual action for a free speech violation to have occurred. The act of using your government position to pressure, coerce, or threaten people who are using speech you don't like is a violation of the Constitution, flat out.

Otherwise the protection of free speech means nothing, because politicians can merely threaten you all day but never pull the trigger on an obviously disallowed act while implying that you'll make trouble for involved actors which has a degree of separation, enough to avoid it being a direct cause and effect. And in this case Carr did exactly that by threatening to make trouble for affiliates like Nexstar -- as long as your threat has a material impact (like causing a company to adhere to the desired action to avoid further red tape in their acquisition approvals), it would be enough to quell constitutionally protected speech.

Isn't this the same FCC where Trump fired all the minority party commissioners?

This is an actual laughable argument.

Yes the individual agents of any organization aren’t the entire organization themselves. However to argue that the agent of an organization acting under the color of their role in said organization doesn’t represent said organization, is some sort of “the card says moops” level of sophistry

In fact, the affiliates are exactly who Brendan Carr threatened:

> “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

> Carr suggested that the FCC could pursue news distortion allegations against local licensees.

> “Frankly I think it’s past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney, and say ’We are going to preempt — we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out,’” he said. “It’s time for them to step up and say this garbage — to the extent that that’s what comes down the pipe in the future — isn’t something that serves the needs of our local communities.”

(for those that don't know, ABC doesn't have an FCC license, broadcasting stations (affiliates) do, so that's exactly who he's using his unconstitutional leverage over)

https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/brendan-carr-abc-fcc-jimmy-...

The FCC made a direct threat to the affiliate owners that if they kept Jimmy Kimmel on the air, their broadcast licenses would be terminated.

That is absolutely government pressure.

Yes but you're not a mind reader and you don't know how much of his firing was due to government pressure vs a decision he was alienating half the country irreparably - and I'm curious to know why you didn't mention his ratings had been slipping. Surely that has some place in the discussion?

That’s probably why they didn’t put up a fight but it doesn’t cancel out the illegality of the threat. If the local mob boss shows up and says “nice business, it’d be a shame if something happened to it” that’s still extortion even if you decide it was losing money and walk away.

No. "If he were more profitable, his company would have spent money on a legal defense instead" is not a valid counterargument to "It is bad that the government threatened a company into cancelling a show because they criticized a friend of the regime."

> Yes but you're not a mind reader…

Is your position that no one can ever infer the intent behind someone’s actions unless you can read their mind?

Seems that way. Hopefully they hold that consistently and not only to excuse terrible behavior by folks they identify with.

Ratings didn’t help Colbert, though..

If Carr can’t act unilaterally than it’s not “the FCC”.

It’s the FCC as long as he makes important decisions there. There is no way you can honestly say that he wouldn’t influence others there, and the businesses who are currently facing FCC approval would have to take that influence into consideration or ask whether the level of corruption on display isn’t unique to him.

Think about it this way: if a police officer came by your business and suggested that a donation to their annual ball might lead to faster response if you called 911, would you immediately conclude that the rest of the force would strongly condemn that appearance of corruption or would the mere fact that they were comfortable saying it make you worry that the sentiment was shared by other officers?

Part of what the current administration has been doing is normalizing levels of politicization and corruption which would previously have been unthinkable in modern America. Actions like this are considered in light of the broader context where the President is openly shaking down businesses and the AG has made it clear that they’re his personal lawyer first and the nation’s top law enforcement official only to the extent that it serves his goals.

It's completely unreasonable to believe that ABC's decision to cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live! was an independent one, especially given that Trump has publicly criticized Jimmy Kimmel on Truth Social and has a history of threatening people and organizations he dislikes with lawsuits and legal penalties. It's much more likely that ABC canceled him because they feared retaliation from Trump.

What’s not unreasonable is for a company look at the overall political climate of the country annd the markets they need and realize that it’s just not in favor for controversial lefty oriented late night content at this moment. The public outrage at the shooting. Watching poll numbers nose dive for the Democratic Party. Seeing some core political positions that your company embraced become anathematic to the general public. Then couple all that with a comedian with a late night show and an axe to grind with the president whose show was underperforming already…even worse than Colbert.

ABC may have feared retaliation from Trump, but I guarantee they fear retaliation from their viewers and advertisers even more. This was a good excuse to get rid of a loose cannon whose useful shelf life was already up and try to gain some goodwill among a large group of people who are ready to write you off.

https://latenighter.com/news/ratings/here-are-final-late-nig...

That does makes sense considering the profile of the average person who still watches broadcast tv these. There is simply no demand for non-garbage content there.

He literally threatened the entire country of Australia because of an Australian journalist asking how profitable the presidency has been for him.

The number of people in these comments pretending not to see what happened is flabbergasting.

The threat against Australia was fascinating.. I guess Trump figured out "tariffs" is a big appendage like the one he never has, but now can swing around, and "you better be nice, or I'm going to do to your country what I did to the numerous amounts of women in my life...".

Disappoint and disgust them?

> You can certainly speculate that the these affiliates had an ulterior motive in their actions to curry favor with the Trump administration, ...

I don't know what "ulterior motive" would mean. Businesses have no choice but to deal with real threats, that isn't a hidden agenda. And I wouldn't refer to bending to demands, as a means of damage control under duress, as "currying favor".

I would consider "favor curriers" to be those that align themselves with administration excesses, in hope of favors, without duress being a factor.

This is now a business reality: a US administration that loudly broadcasts its successful use of corrupted leverage against law firms, media companies, universities, tech companies, and others it wishes to bow the knee.

Even if we conjecture the same decisions might have been made in healthier times, for whatever reasons, the unlawful pressure still shades the decisions made in this reality.

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