They Will Come After 'Saturday Night Live' Next

First of all, what Jimmy Kimmel actually said that got him suspended yesterday was benign. “The MAGA Gang is desperately trying to portray this individual who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of their own, and they are doing everything possible to leverage this for political advantage.” Jimmy Kimmel didn’t even call the shooter MAGA; he said that MAGA was more concerned with blaming everyone else — besides themselves — than with grieving Charlie Kirk. But that’s not how the right characterized it, and it’s not how many in the media characterized it.

But it probably didn’t matter what he said. The Trump Administration has been trying to get Jimmy Kimmel (and Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon) fired since the beginning of Trump’s second term. They were looking for any pretext, and a President who is 18 points underwater in the latest polling used the shooting death of someone most average Americans had never heard of before last week to force ABC’s hand by threatening its FCC license and erecting roadblocks to a merger between Nexstar Media Group and Tegna Inc. to create the largest owner of local TV stations in the United States.

This was not “cancel culture.” It was not a mob of online social media users pressuring a network to fire a late-night host. This was a direct violation of the First Amendment. This was the government silencing speech, and a mob of right-wing social media users celebrating it.

I canceled my Disney+ subscription last night, along with hundreds of others — maybe even thousands. It felt good, but I’m not dumb enough to think that it will do any good. I canceled my Amazon Prime subscription when Jeff Bezos dismantled the Washington Post. I cancelled my Spotify subscription years ago over Joe Rogan’s anti-vax comments. It made no difference because these are billionaires making billion-dollar deals, and my monthly subscription is not going to put a dent in it. The federal government has consolidated its power along with a few MAGA-friendly billionaires who, increasingly, now control the airwaves. They basically control CBS News, and ABC News has capitulated. The only upside there is that no one watches them anymore anyway.

The Daily Show and South Park are still on the air because the FCC does not control those airwaves. Make no mistake, however: Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers still have jobs because Comcast — the owner of NBCUniversal — has not yet needed FCC approval for anything. But if and when they do, Comcast will throw Fallon and Meyers directly under the bus, too, because at this point, they make less for the corporation than it would cost them to fight off the federal government. It’s a simple calculation. Legacy media is dying, and these corporations have no compunction about tossing a few late-night hosts off the lifeboat to keep it afloat a little longer.

They will come after Saturday Night Live next. It’s only there where Comcast may put up some resistance, if only because SNL still remains profitable and, let’s be honest, besides sports programming and other live events, it’s the only thing that NBC still has worth a damn. Is it worth more than NBC’s FCC license? Is it worth the lawsuit that Trump will invariably bring against the network?

We’ll probably find out much sooner than we’d like. The show returns on October 4th. Expect Trump to file a lawsuit on October 5th.