Disney+ cancellation page crashes as customers rush to quit(creators.yahoo.com) |
Disney+ cancellation page crashes as customers rush to quit(creators.yahoo.com) |
The FCC and Trump merely dogpiled on this
For Disney, they need to court the broadcaster monopoly as a key stakeholder to their revenue, this is all private sector and not a constitutional issue
But when Disney is getting kicked and then an expensive fight with the government looms while their revenue is already threatened and would be expensive to resolve with the government , they buckled
Thats the calculus here
but because they buckled, now their customers are using their own freedom of association to disassociate, hampering Disney’s revenue more from that angle
Press F to Pay Respects
Please don't say the pivot is podcasts.
???
It was a very obvious dig at the president. There's still not good justification for the government to step in, but claiming it's "milquetoast" is baffling.
Nothing Kimmel said was controversial. It was just being used as a false flag to justify other things.
Don’t believe me? Trump literally announced his plans months ago to take down these talk show hosts who were so mean to him
Poor guy :(
The commentary about what Kimmel said was disconnected from what he said, hell the demand he give money seemed more like a criminal shakedown.
I think Trump's statement about going after anyone who has anything negative to say about them, that's the real goal / point. Doesn't even have anything to do with Kirk.
Edit: there's clearly several ways to interpret what he said. I'm not making any kind of argument here, just answering op's question.
>After the assassination Jimmy Kimmel, a comedian on abc, suggested erroneously that Kirk had been killed by a maga fan. Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcasters, threatened consequences: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Within hours abc took Mr Kimmel off the air indefinitely. Mr Carr then said all broadcasters should ease up on the “progressive foie gras”.
You can check the other articles in the same issue and see they're not exactly cheerleaders for the Trump administration.
That said, the FTC shouldn't be in the business of strongarming critics, even if they're wrong.
Not a fan of Trump or Jimmy, and I don’t think this is a proportional or good response. I’m pretty stunned that there was actually momentum enough to take him off the air. I also don’t understand why he left that little dig in his monologue.
Also, even if it were, as you say, "misinformation", that is now somehow taboo on television? A sacred line none must dare cross?
It wasn’t meaningful to the joke he was looking to set up, it was just misinformation for misinformation’s sake. At least it came off that way.
Add to that high emotions from people coping with a murder, and there you have it.
> We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang 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.
> In between the finger pointing there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level you can see how hard the President is taking this.
He then played a clip where a reporter asked Trump how he was doing. Trump said good and immediately started talking about his new ballroom.
What about any of that is misinformation? Given how they were certain the shooter was trans because he used arrows on the bullet - which were helldiver 2 codes - it did seem like people were trying to make it seem like the kid wasn’t MAGA.
Turns out the kid is neither, or both, and was just terminally online, which none of us want to admit is the real problem because we’re all also terminally online.
deleting the hulu account took me effort, had to search for it and log into a special site and only a submit request to yet to be processed.
so actually props to disney for not being user hostile.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45282482
Previous thread, with a better reference.
vpn is all you need to pay for.
Best thing for a copyright holder is if people pay for their stuff. Next best is if people consume it but don't pay for it, as that at least preserves their relevance. Worst is to be ignored and become irrelevant/forgotten.
If nobody watches the shows they can blame the content. If everyone clearly loves the content but refuses to give ABC/Disney/ESPN/FX their business it means the company is the problem (although that wont stop them from falling back on the lie that piracy is all about greedy people who just want everything for free)
1. You can use VPN only when you need to use it.
2. "split tunnening" You can configure VPN to be used only for some programs, like those you use torrenting programs.
3. You can build your own mini-PC/RasPi "TV box" with VPN, storage for programming, connected to television. I wonder if there is not already ready software package for that.
https://auth.hbomax.com/cancel
So, the impact at the end of the day is just lost revenue from antenna users. Cable and satellite would be unaffected. That's got to be a relatively small number in the grand scheme of things.
Disney's internal systems for something like this are a hodgepodge of the Hulu, D+/Bamtech, old corporate disney, and some bits sent out to SaaS. There's been multiple layers of layoffs and service ownership changes since the pandemic. I don't think the org would be able to rate limit by faking crashes if it tried.
What is happening is that routes and systems that normally have little and predictable traffic now are getting exercised... a lot harder (the exact numbers are for management to explain). Most things are going to be very resilient to this, as it's not THAT much traffic: It's still a small fraction vs resubscriptions and logins, but not everything is. Since the unsubscribe flows are never going to be anyone's top priority, this things happen.
You don't have to believe me, but I tell you it's incompetence, not malice.
A fun one lately has been AT&T. We have streaming with DirecTV, and they of course share authentication with the parent AT&T. So whenever I try to login to AT&T's website to manage my wireless or fiber, it redirects and logs me into DirecTV, everytime. The only way I can manage my service is to use AT&T's mobile app.
This in itself makes the situation intentional.
>Disney's internal systems for something like this are a hodgepodge of the Hulu, D+/Bamtech, old corporate disney, and some bits sent out to SaaS. There's been multiple layers of layoffs and service ownership changes since the pandemic. I don't think the org would be able to rate limit by faking crashes if it tried.
Finance bros and execs love M&A because they can hire a consultant to do all the hard work and get a nice paycheck yet they really suck for the little people and those trying to keep the lights on. Good luck out there.
Maybe one day we'll figure out this anti-trust thing.
I believe Disney has been subjected to several.
They better be sure there are no disgruntled or unhappy employees and no layoffs coming up, otherwise that slack or email message will come out and it will just make things worse.
I would personally not raise an eyebrow to learn this was the case.
Logging in to pay AT&T wireless service sometimes takes half an hour of attempts resulting in any number of weird errors until it just works.
There is also a protest of Nexstar’s advertisers to get them to avoid Nexstar for cancelling Jimmy Kimmel on their local broadcasters to begin with
The former is (for some at least) interesting. The latter is actually consequential. I'm concerned about the latter.
The former, whether I agree or not, is about legal, protected political speech.
Thus “milquetoast”: an implication that any reaction to this is, objectively, an overreaction.
That the current President is a habitual over-reactor does not change that fact. It just means that you can paradoxically be taking a heterodox / outré stance by saying objectively milquetoast things.
The other people who lost jobs seemed to have said much more direct and offensive remarks than Kimmel as well.
Had it not been for this event, I'd have probably just let the subscription hang around indefinitely (or until some big price increase caused me to reevaluate it), but as you note, it's going to be a struggle to get me back --- not because of the politics involved, but because the politics got me over the "eh, can't be bothered" hump to evaluate the value I was getting and it came up kinda marginal compared to when I first signed up.
It doesn't stop me from avoiding shopping at them both, but I know they aren't losing any sleep over it and I don't expect they'll suddenly stop putting profit over everything else.
Also because some people don't seem to know this, the government can't murder a man even if he was already dying of cancer.
Funny how they only did that under President Trump, but Biden's FCC never did that.
The second part of what he said is also a true statement, that they're using this tragic event to score political points and go after their political opponents.
>The MAGA Gang 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
Kimmel didn't explicitly make the accusation that the killer was MAGA, but the use of the wording "desperately trying to imply ... as anything other than one of them" definitely gives that impression. I mean, why else would they be "desperately" trying to? If an attempt was made on Bernie or AOC I wouldn't characterize leftists prematurely blaming it on the right as "desperately". It's just the most logical inference. The "killer was right wing" narrative was also being pushed in some left leaning circles, so it's not exactly outlandish either.
He did not. But even if he did, so what?
Does either interpretation make his comment somehow illegal and deserving of government threats to retaliate against folks unless Kimmel was punished?
That's not a rhetorical question.
IMNSHO, you're focusing on the wrong thing here. What difference does it make what legal speech was used? The problem is that the government is trying to silence the critics of those currently in power. And at least in the US, the government isn't allowed to do that -- whether they're critics of the current administration or not.
If you don't decry that, it could be you and yours next. You've been warned.
Let’s just say that the alleged shooter’s political philosophies are likely complex and are yet to be fully understood.
Did you miss the second part of my comment? Even if Kimmel was in the wrong he shouldn't be taken off the air. I'm just pointing out why Trump might be upset. It's a reason, not necessarily a good reason.
>Let’s just say that the alleged shooter’s political philosophies are likely complex and are yet to be fully understood
By most accounts it's safe to say he's left leaning. You don't have to be a card carrying DSA member or have your ideology fully align with the Democrats platform to earn that label.
Robert Hanlon himself doesn't seem to be notable in any area of rationalist or scientific philosophy. The most I could find about him online is that he allegedly wrote a joke book related to Murphy's laws. Over time, it appears this obscure statement from that book was appended with Razor and it gained respectability as some kind of a rationalist axiom. Nowhere is it explained why this Razor needs to be an axiom. It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities. Bayesian reasoning? Priors? What the hell are those? Just say "Hanlon's Razor" and nothing more needs to be said. Nothing needs to be examined.
The FS blog also cops out on this lazy shortcut by saying this:
> The default is to assume no malice and forgive everything. But if malice is confirmed, be ruthless.
No conditions. No examination of data. Just an absolute assumption of no malice. How can malice ever be confirmed in most cases? Malicious people don't explain all their deeds so we can "be ruthless."
We live in a probabilistic world but this Razor blindly says always assume the probability of malice is zero, until using some magical leap of reasoning that must not involve assuming any malice whatsoever anywhere in the chain of reasoning (because Hanlon's Razor!), this probability of malice magically jumps to one, after which we must "become ruthless." I find it all quite silly.
Assuming malice from people you interact with means dividing your community into smaller and smaller groups, each suspicious of the other.
Assuming malice from an out group who have regularly demonstrated their willingness to cause harm doesn’t have that problem.
In this case instead of a possibility of it being a small act of opportunity (like mentioned above of just dragging feet) not premeditated, alternatives are never mentioned but instead just assumed folks are talking about some higher up conspiracy and on top of that that must be what these people are always doing.
Anyway thank you for your point it is an interesting read :)
Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak. To quote CS Lewis, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
It probably is a glitch in this case, but it's hard not to see the dark patterns once you've learned about them.
His father's theory didn't take into account this.
When the actors involved have shown themselves to be self-interested, bad-faith, or otherwise undeserving of the benefit of the doubt, it can be abandoned, and malice assumed where it has been clearly present before.
And I don't know about others, but the one thing that's sure to make me cancel and never return is when a business tries to be a jerk about subscribers. I know one subscription service that when you try to cancel will instead ask you to pause. Except when you pause, the site will make the buttons to complete a sale begin disabled. Then 10 to 15 seconds later, the button enables. It only does this so that they can show you a request to resume your subscription. Nope. I immediately went and fully cancelled, and I haven't been back. I only intended to pause for a short time because I was unable to use the service at all for several weeks. Instead because they wanted to grasp onto every customer too tightly, and they lost me for good. They didn't respect me, so I don't want their product anymore.
This Administration was basically founded on making strident claims on TV which turned out to be lies they couldn't back up in a court of law.
Have you not been paying attention to where rhetoric in this country has gone in the past 8 months? The first amendment is dead, the great leader is publically calling for his critics to lose their broadcast licenses, and the new SOP is for the government to squeeze the shit out of anyone who doesn't toe the line. (Which is an ever-shrinking group of people.)
Be it with SLAPP suits, or by holding merger approvals, or by just threatening witch-hunts.
This is what 48% of the electorate wanted, and, well, it's what they've delivered.
---
Meanwhile, in Fox land, Brian Kilmeade was publically calling for mass-murder of the mentally ill the other day. For some strange reason, neither Trump nor the FCC, nor all the people outraged about political violence are making a peep about that.
Very little was needed. The U.S. president had already ominously threatened Kimmel and other late night hosts the day after Colbert was canceled, weeks before the shooting.
I thought Kimmel was hilarious; but as they say, there’s no accounting for taste.
The most ridiculous thing about this is that the world doesn’t cleave neatly into “radical left lunatics” and the righteous real Americans. I still can’t tell what the murderer was. Whatever that was, he acted on his own impulses - ones that are not broadly celebrated, irrespective of claims to the contrary.
Death by shitpost: Why modern media is so ill-equiped to diagnose Tyler Robinson
https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/09/19/tyler-robinson-alleged-...
https://archive.md/Lil0U#selection-941.0-941.80
Watching the US media struggling to cleave this into either left OR right as if the world is binary is, as you noted, ridiculous.
Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not? It heavily implies that he is maga, and that’s why the maga gang is trying to deflect.
A lot of conclusions were jumped to early on by everyone. Things are more clear now, but still not 100%. From what I’ve seen so far he was a Trump supporter in his early teens, but did a full 180 in recent years, due to the influence on the internet, as you mentioned, and who knows what else.
If the ultimate joke was to laugh at Trump talking about his ballroom, I don’t see what his maga comments added to that. He stepped into a hornets nest and added nothing to the joke in the process.
No.
> It heavily implies that he is maga
No.
That’s a lot of pearl clutching don’t you think
He has never apologized for jack shit.
> Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not? It heavily implies that he is maga, and that’s why the maga gang is trying to deflect.
No one is tuning into Jimmy Kimmell for "news", though I am quite sure that his show is more truthful on a daily basis than your Fox News & Newsmax liars.
> If the ultimate joke was to laugh at Trump talking about his ballroom, I don’t see what his maga comments added to that. He stepped into a hornets nest and added nothing to the joke in the process.
The joke is that Trump probably does not give a flying fuck about Kirk. He cares about himself. That's it. He pivoted right to bragging about his dumb fucking ballroom.
> your Fox News & Newsmax
You’re making a lot of assumptions here. Nowhere do I claim any party affiliation. Someone asked a question about why what Jimmy said was controversial, and I did my best to answer why a person might be upset. Other people who may have said similar things aren’t really relevant and it just gets into a game of whataboutism.
The only thing clear about the shooter's political positions, is that it'll be presented as whatever will be most convenient to the speaker. He held views that individually map across the spectrum, allowing anyone to point to something and assign him at an arbitrary location.
Kimmel’s comments are about the behavior of the MAGA world, and they were true: the MAGA world was trying very hard to push the idea that the shooter was not one of them.
I'm sorry, which details? Why does his opinion about a handful of topics mean that we can infer his entire worldview? Why do we have to assume that his views mapped neatly onto one end of the US political spectrum or the other?
Their behavior indicts all of us Americans.
But of course admitting that and doing something about it means working together, which is a much harder solution than pointing fingers at the other side and doing little else.
> It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities
Parent isn't advocating for assuming malice, or assuming anything really, but to reason about the causes. Basically, that we'd have better discourse if no axiom was used in the first place.
Why do incentives result in perceived malicious actions rather than just malicious actions or minor malicious actions?
On top of this no one has said corporations are filled with evil people.
This rationalization is cope. All US Corporations making "normal" decisions all the time isn't casually obvious. I would say that wherever there is an opportunity to exploit the customer, they usually do at different levels of sophistication. This may mistakenly seem like fair play to someone who thinks a good UI is a good trade for allocated advertisement space, when it's literally social engineering.
Corporations make decisions that more frequently benefit them at the cost of some customer resource. Pair that with decisions rarely being rolled back (without financial incentive), you get a least-fair optimization over time. This is not normal by any stretch, as people expect a somewhat fair value proposition. Corporations aren't geared for that.
Corporations don't have to be filled with evil people for malice to be rampant. All it takes is for one person in a position of power or influence who is highly motivated to screw over other human beings to create a whole lot of malice. We can all think of examples of public officials or powerful individuals who have made it their business to spread misery to countless others. Give them a few like-minded deputies and the havoc they wreak can be incalculable.
As for Hitler, if we can't even agree that orchestrating and facilitating the death of millions of innocent people is malicious, then malice has no meaning.
C. S. Lewis has written a great many excellent things, but his quote there strikes me as self-satisfied sophistry. Ask people being carpet bombed or blockade and starved if they're grateful that at least their adversary isn't trying to help them.
> Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak.
Disgusting take. Don't simp for hitler. How am I having to type this in 2025?
The criticism of the "MAGA gang" was _not_ about their actions at the time of the Kimmel broadcast, it was very much about their immediate behavior as soon as the shooting hit the news .. the time when nothing was known, the time when the FBI head was making statements about suspects that were untrue, the time when the US head of state was declaring war on the left .. you know, the time when nothing was known about the political allegiance of the shooter .. or the lack thereof.
I'm an outside observer, from here it's clear that the US has fallen deep into an Us v Them K-hole and that the current administration is all too happy to turn up the heat on the divisions that render the nation asunder .. the chaos makes the heist all the easier.
> COVID years really messed some people up.
You seem to think that you said something different than you did.
If you don't see where your communication broke down, look closely the first word of the quote above. That's you, in case you forgot.
That's a clear violation of the First Amendment.
>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
It doesn't say anything about the FCC not pressuring Disney. They are not congress and are not making a law. I mean I don't agree with it but it's not clear it violates the actual text of the first amendment as written in the constitution. The spirit of it perhaps.
Where does the FCC's authority to do anything come from? Congressional laws. If the FCC is using the laws to abridge free speech it is clearly an unconstitutional action.
It's so weird to see sooooooo many people trying to make up reasons to justify clearly unconstitutional behavior, with extremely motivated reasoning, or perhaps motivated lack of reason. You cited exactly what you are saying doesn't exist! This is baffling behavior.
In fact there is a more than credible argument that criticizing and mocking politicians is an essential public service.
Necessarily.
Carr threatened to revoke licenses based on the political speech of ABC. That's clearly unconstitutional. Trump followed up by saying licenses should be revoked for criticism of himself. Unitary President cuts both ways.
If this is okay, the next Democrat who's President needs to shut down Fox News and their ilk or be impeached. (From the perspective of fomenting rebellion and generally posing a threat to our republic, Jimmy Kimmel isn't even on the list.)
They are not sending Jimmy to gulag or arresting him. Jimmy can still continue his show just maybe on his own youtube channel or his own online platform or something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association_of_...
But that meant having to defend making up stuff about a murder and comment on the crime even as the others are flying flags half staff. Quickly showing they caved to government's pressure was exactly the look they wanted.
And let's say fought back, who would that be for? They younger viewers are not sitting at home watching TV and cheering Jimmy on. Many don't even know who Jimmy is; they just learned this week because it's on social media. So putting some kind of a defense and turning it into a battle rather than caving would have been the worse of the two choices they had.
What was Kimmel making up?
The fact that the shooter was conservative, from a conservative family?
The fact that Kirk openly advocated for gun violence?
Please do tell us exactly what was being "made up," here.
More importantly, his viewership didn’t suddenly change and the cancellation came about pretty clearly as a result of the FCC threat and not any business decision the company would have made otherwise. Not a lawyer but I would think that Kimmel has a 1a lawsuit he could bring against DIS and the government.
https://latenighter.com/news/ratings/late-night-tv-ratings-q...
I'm not sure if you think people are extremely gullible, because one would have to be in order to buy that line.
If there's a threat going on, and an another excuse the threatened can blame, the threat is no less potent.
And if you wait for the license to be pulled as your red line, you misunderstand how this works. This is an actual threat, the kind of thing that mobsters get RICO charges for. The threat has done its work and served the purposes of the administration. The crime has already taken place. The mobster says "but he agreed to pay the protection money and nobody ever actually broke his kneecaps"
"These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel,” said Carr, a Trump appointee, “or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/article/jimmy-kimmel-liv...
they blinked so we will never know.
Based on everything that has gone one that seems to me at least very naive. There was practically a textbook length document outlining what the administrstion planned to do if they got in power and they are going step by step through it.
The president said there are 4 comedians (who make fun of him) that he wants to get off the air. After this event he posted something along the lines of "2 down, 2 to go." Followed by "Why don't you just force the other two out now?".
There was nothing wrong about what was said - they just already have a plan and pick any small item to claim is the cause.
For example they want to defund left leaning non profits and think tanks. They don't have a reason to. But now they are trying to claim they motivated the Kirk killing - not because they think it did, but because it's what is already their plan.
People still thinking they are being objectives or that there are "norms" left, in my opinion haven't been paying attention.
I don't believe you yet that Americans won't stand for it. There have been so many red lines crossed that most Americans don't even know what's going on.
Your comment was 7 words, one of which is literally "COVID". Then you said you're weren't actually talking about COVID, but you actually meant something about how you think others are now prone to dramatic conspiracy theories.
It seems like you're experiencing some of this yourself or are stuck in some sort of race condition where if someone else doesn't agree with you, it's clearly a them issue. They're the conspiricist.
While explaining that you intended me to get a whole different message from your initial 7 words, you go on to say that while discussing the "COVID years" that...
> I'm not talking about the people who died or the healthcare workers.
Why aren't you focusing on these things? It seems much more important than whatever you are spinning on about the social fabric and cohesion of society as you type into a webform to a stranger about how everyone has conspiracies now.
Here, interestingly, just a threat was enough. I wonder why the owners didn't want to fight it at all? The speed with with they folded was very telling. As others mentioned, I suspect if they decided they just didn't want to keep paying Kimmel for the show. He was making somewhere around $15m/year or something they saw a chance to say "goodbye".
They are submitting to what they view as either an existential threat, or the opportunity to make millions in the merger they want the FCC chair to approve.
Technically I think they could have fought, could have argued he was just describing the behavior of maga people or that his shows is all made up parody and everyone should know it, etc. However it would have been a losing PR battle even if the FCC lost eventually in court.
Not as the federal government, because it explicitly lacks the freedom of speech citizens are ensured by the Constitution.
And absent a first amendment claim, the best defense they can come up with would be 'We were joking.'
Which, given the well-cited history of coercion by this administration (both in verbalized plans and actions), would be a hard defense to make.
What is there to blink about if it was not a threat?
If I walk up to someone with a gun and wave the gun around and demand they give me their money or I'll shoot them, it does not matter if I was "serious" or not about the threat. If I tell a jury that I wouldn't have actually ever have shot the person, and that they just decided to give me their money because they didn't really need it so much, I'm not sure any jury would agree, unless I was a hell of a salesman.
This is illegal: "Nice business you've got here," the police officer says. "Shame that crime is on the rise. And we don't have as many officers to patrol. But give a donation and we'll take care of you. Don't and we'll stop answering your 911 calls."
Now replace with "We heard what you said about the mayor. Apologize or we'll stop answering your 911 calls."
What we are saying is that just by making the threat, the censorship has full and complete effect. They don't need to revoke the license to use the power of the government to influence constitutionalally protected speech. They just need to threaten.
Yes they should have. But ideally we should live in a society that guts aren't necessary because threats are not made, especially from the government.
It's the second part that's the everyone is really worried about.
He implied it was trump maga head or some kind. Not just implied, he made it sound like it's a sure thing. Moreover, it applied to a crime that was just committed. When FCC threatened them ABC knew they couldn't appeal or fight. It wasn't worth it, it would have been a PR disaster.
This guy is nothing like a maga whatever, he as trans girlfriend, leftist views, parents said that much (they are the ones who turned him even), wrote "Bella ciao" on bullets and "catch, fascist" and most importantly heshoots a trump-loving personality like Kirk. How did Kimmel arrive at him being some trump fan, I don't see it. That's the intentionally spreading misinformation related to a crime, good enough for FCC to threaten him and good enough for ABC to realize they'll be in a losing game defending him.
Looking forward to Rep. Mike Lee, Nancy Mace et al also being fired for spreading misinformation about politically-motivated killings. Also waiting for Trump’s public address denouncing political violence against MN Rep. Melissa Hortman.
> Looking forward to Rep. Mike Lee also being fired for spreading misinformation about a politically-motivated killing.
It's going to happen once the democrats are in power and fox or whatever channel broadcast lie and it's related to a crime. I don't see it happening in congress though.
> MN Rep. Melissa Hortman.
Sadly I don't know if anyone there knows who Hortman is.
https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting#JOUR...
Note:
> Nevertheless, there are two issues related to broadcast journalism that are subject to Commission regulation: hoaxes and news distortion. Hoaxes. The broadcast by a station of false information concerning a crime or catastrophe violates the FCC's rules if [...] The station licensee knew that the information was false.
All Jimmy had to do, it seems, was to say "this is all a made up joke" and move on, instead of presenting whatever he was saying as information or news.
> If a station airs a disclaimer before the broadcast that clearly characterizes the program as fiction and the disclaimer is presented in a reasonable manner under the circumstances, the program is presumed not to pose foreseeable public harm.
> However, as public trustees, broadcast licensees may not intentionally distort the news. The FCC has stated that “rigging or slanting the news is a most heinous act against the public interest.” The Commission will investigate a station for news distortion if it receives documented evidence of rigging or slanting, such as testimony or other documentation, from individuals with direct personal knowledge that a licensee or its management engaged in the intentional falsification of the news. Of particular concern would be evidence of the direction to employees from station management to falsify the news. However, absent such a compelling showing, the Commission will not intervene.
Again, Jimmy didn't get sent to the gulag and didn't go to jail. He can still run a show on his own platform or a youtube channel or maybe Netflix will sign him up. Heck, after this, I'd say he would easily triple his view numbers if anything.
I needs a comma, or semicolon at least.
> The US government threatened a private company
Threatened with what, imprisonment, death? They threatened to pull the FCC license. It turns out broadcast content is controlled by the government. It always has been. Kimmel can and should continue saying what he was saying on his own website or platform or whatever.
> This is a violation of the US Constitution.
Ok, let's say it's a clear cut violation, with a full stop, an open and shut case. ABC can file a lawsuit, it's an easy win isn't then? And, plus they get to show how they fought and won over fascism. Why did they fold so quickly then?
What they ignore is that local Fox affiliate stations who are also licensed by the FCC have a history of aligning with Fox News misinformation campaigns relating to covid, election integrity, Russia and Ukraine, Palestine, etc.
So no, the FCC licensed world is not left leaning, and these local affiliate stations should absolutely be held to the same standard.
To your point, The Democrats, when back in power, could extend licensing issues into cableTV, etc... and attempt to fire Fox or Newsmax commentators... I would argue the Biden administration already attempted to do a form of this, as we saw with Facebook, Twitter, et al, the last administration certainly tried influencing the online arena.
I just think both sides do it, although on this forum it seems to trigger mostly the left side.
Not comparable. That said, I agree—if this precedent stands, there should be personal liability for Newsmax commenters under a future administration. (And, of course, they should be barred from federal property.)
One would also go after the online streaming companies to delist their content. Google and Meta are constantly under antitrust controlled. TikTok is government owned. And you could start knocking on X with its money-transfer ambitions and Elon’s robotaxi approvals (to say nothing of federal contracts).
https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting#JOUR...
> Hoaxes. The broadcast by a station of false information concerning a crime or catastrophe violates the FCC's rules if:
> The station licensee knew that the information was false
There quite a few other rules, obscenity and violence and such. But they probably got Jimmy on the crime that was just committed + spreading false information.
> Nothing he said was false though, the Republicans were trying to paint the shooter as anyone other than one of their own.
Yeah, and the show owners could have fought it. There might be a warning, a lawsuit, maybe a period to comply and make changes etc. But they folded immediately. They probably figured technically they could have explained it, but the PR aspect of it was a losing battle. Here is another part of the country flying flags half staff, and what is ABC's doing? Oh right, explaining away Kimmel's news and jokes and defending him. A lot of these corporations and their leaders can smell the way the wind blows and they really hate it when the wind blows away their profits, so they just react accordingly.
They folded because they knew how the statement was perceived. Here is half the country flying flags half staff and ABC owners are defending Kimmel. They are worried about views and profits and when that is threatened everything goes out of the window.
Paradoxically, I think Kimmel is all of the sudden on top again, just due to the controversy. The younger crowd who don't sit and watch ABC, might have just learned about this Kimmel guy the first time. May be another network will pick him up, it could be a win for him overall.
No, it's not.
It's fascism punishing those who don't bend the knee.
FCC licensing is only the specific excuse they're using this time.
> But the PR look was pretty bad. Instead of saying "condolences for the family, etc" now they are defending Kimmel's phrasing.
Boo fucking hoo?
It's a blatant First Amendment violation. They didn't have to "defend Kimmel's phrasing". All they had to do was say "no, it's protected political speech, and you can't do anything about it."
I think that's exactly the look they didn't want.
> They didn't have to "defend Kimmel's phrasing". All they had to do was say "no, it's protected political speech, and you can't do anything about it."
Not when it comes to broadcasting and FCC. They control the frequencies/channels allocated so they have some control about the speech there.
They should have fought it and called their bluff, it's exactly the "boo fucking hoo" look ABC didn't want. Who would they be grandstanding for? Younger generation doesn't sit at home watching ABC, there is nobody they'd be impressing with their fight. They should have done it on principle, but their money and ratings would be going down and these companies are not ideological unless they can profit from it. So the folded faster than a broken lawn chair.
Where did you get your law degree? Email your ConLaw professor and ask them about it.
Because there's hundreds of years of precedent protecting political speech, whether true or not, regardless of the platform (including broadcast media). This is a blatant attempt to silence political speech the current regime doesn't like -- it was literally "cancel this guy or we'll make things hard on you."
They didn't even try to couch it in the terms you're using to defend this entirely authoritarian attempt to chill free speech. Why are you being an apologist for these folks? Or do you support having a lawless government?
I feel like the executives have a civic duty to have resisted, at least for a few days. Caving so quickly weakened the de facto press freedoms. Maybe Kimmel would be willing to soften it or at least not dig in. New evidence was coming out daily, changing the narrative, and he could use that as an excuse. I think the PR hit of caving is worse than you give it credit. I can believe they want very valuable near-term favors from the FCC or their MAGA-aligned affiliates, more than I can believe they thought there was no better PR way out.
> Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. It's specific corner case of FCC licensing.
I'm not saying the FCC should take action against Mike Lee and Nancy Mace. I'm saying Congress should expel or censure them, if this was really about how public figures shouldn't be "spreading misinformation related to a crime" to the public, if it was about using all available legal weight to hold them accountable if they do. (If anyone's wondering, shortly after MN Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed, Mike Lee tweeted an implication that the killer was "Marxist" and a pun about the governor of the state. Of course he had no evidence, and now, we know it's unlikely given that suspect is a Trump supporter. Nancy Mace made anti-trans allegations about Kirk's killer when virtually nothing was known.)
Congress won't, both because of partisan hypocrisy, and like you noted, sadly, hardly anyone cares about a state-level elected official compared to a famous podcaster.
(Admittedly their comments are very tame compared to the acts that have previously resulted in congressional expulsion. And so were Kimmel’s. But if “protecting the public” angle is all they have on Kimmel, I’m pointing out the other logical conclusions of their argument.)
It's nice to see a few, such as Ted Cruz, calling out the FCC acting like Trump's mafia.
Exactly, at least some kind of public rebuff or just saying Kimmel's show is not news and journalism, he is just reflecting the social media trends as parodies and jokes. Now it just looks like FCC can come shut down anyone they want.
> If anyone's wondering, shortly after MN Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed, Mike Lee tweeted an implication that the killer was "Marxist" and a pun about the governor of the state. Of course he had no evidence, and now, we know it's unlikely given that suspect is a Trump supporter.
Yeah, it's rules for some but not others.
> It's nice to see a few, such as Ted Cruz, calling out the FCC acting like Trump's mafia.
Yeah, I mean, this is supposed to be a classic conservative talking point so it's nice to see some dissent, even from Cruz.
Yes because they control the FCC and FCC has rules in regards to the content of broadcasts. Kimmel is free to say anything he wants on his own website or platform and such, but as soon as it's on the "air" rules apply.
> This is a clear violation of the 1st Amendment by the government against protected speech (no matter how many people find that protected speech distasteful).
If it's that clear the would have fought it. It wasn't clear at all. Moreover it was just a bad PR look instead of saying something like "condolences for the family blah blah" they would be defending Kimmel's phrasing. That's why they dropped like him a hot potato.
Mafia threats work precisely because of perception. The perception of the power is the power. If everyone caves, and can't fight back, the mafia gets stronger.
The US government is constrained by the Constitution. It is legally barred from acting like a mafia.
Don't try to normalize that. While you may think you're safe, Mr. Niemoller would like a word.
If they thought it was so easy to defend and so obvious why did they buckle so quickly?
> They didn't even try to couch it in the terms you're using to defend this entirely authoritarian attempt to chill free speech
What did they couch it as?