Threats to Free Speech Won’t End with Late-Night Comedians

Jimmy Kimmel was back on ABC last night, but not in many places where people watch broadcast TV. 

Last week, after FCC Chair and Project 2025 coauthor Brendan Carr publicly threatened ABC with “additional work” for the commission if it didn’t “take action” on Kimmel after his commentary on the MAGA movement, two of the biggest owners of ABC affiliates—Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar Media Group—pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! from their local stations. Shortly after, the national network followed suit by announcing the suspension of Kimmel’s show. Disney later announced Kimmel’s reinstatement nationally, yet both Sinclair and Nexstar said yesterday they will continue to preempt the show on their ABC affiliates, affecting roughly a quarter of ABC stations nationwide.

Where broadcasting once reflected the decisions of hundreds of independent and often local owners, a handful of supergroups like Sinclair and Nexstar now dominate. Because network programming reaches viewers through local affiliates, Sinclair and Nexstar wield extraordinary leverage—and both are pursuing regulatory approvals or future merger options, most notably Nexstar’s $6.2 billion proposed acquisition of TEGNA. Against that backdrop, Carr’s threat carried unmistakable weight. The episode shows how concentration in media markets magnifies the danger of state bullying. When a few large owners control access, the pressure of a regulator’s threat ripples faster across the system.

Authoritarians prefer consolidation on a large scale. As former FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a recent interview, “Monopolies and concentrated economic power work hand in hand with authoritarian figures.” If your goal is to consolidate political control and silence your critics, it’s easier to strong-arm 5 companies into submission than 20 or 100. The media industry today is more consolidated than ever, with 5 companies controlling 90 percent of mass media, compared to 50 companies 30 years ago. Of course, this level of consolidation can act as itself a form of censorship, before the state attempts to interfere with or force a company business decision. As the antimonopoly writer Matt Stoller observed, “If you’re editing a newspaper, you’re an editor. If your newspaper is the only media outlet in the country, you become a censor.” This is equally true of broadcast television.

Earlier this year, CBS and parent company Paramount announced that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will end in May 2026, officially citing financial pressures. But the decision came as the Skydance-Paramount merger was underway and shortly after Colbert criticized the company’s settlement with Trump over what appears to be a frivolous accusation of partisan bias on 60 Minutes. That the Colbert affair appears to be tied to merger approval seems obvious, and Colbert’s fate underscored the risk that business deals and regulatory leverage can shape editorial decisions. President Trump himself left no doubt as to which company decisions would please the White House. After the Colbert announcement, he posted on Truth Social: “I absolutely love that Colbert’ [sic] got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. . . .” He later crowed over Kimmel’s suspension, writing, “Great News for America: The ratings-challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for having the courage to do what needed to be done. . . .”

For-profit media conglomerates are accountable first and foremost to their shareholders, not to the tradition of free speech that is the lifeblood of their industry and American democracy.

The Trump administration will not stop at threatening late-night comedians. The FCC has opened proceedings on whether to change (or eliminate) the national TV ownership cap—the rule that, on paper, prevents any one broadcaster from reaching more than 39 percent of US households through its station group. The loosening of this restriction is being lobbied aggressively by the broadcast industry, including Nexstar and Sinclair. The defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting this year is also part of this broad project. Starving the only truly public part of our media system is a way to further enable state-aligned corporate capture.

The tangle of business interests at play also demonstrates how the commercial imperative of mass media companies subjects them to political pressures and censorship. For-profit media conglomerates are accountable first and foremost to their shareholders, not to the tradition of free speech that is the lifeblood of their industry and American democracy. The administration has turned this fiduciary imperative into an extortionate tool, appearing at times to signal that the mega deals sought by these companies would only be approved if the companies do the administration favors.

Nexstar seeks to acquire TEGNA. Disney wants to finalize the purchase of Fubo. Paramount sought to merge with Skydance. Soon, Paramount Skydance is reportedly set to make a majority cash bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of longtime Trump target CNN. As cable TV (and late-night programs especially) become less profitable (and migrate to streaming), these mega companies must merge and rely on scale to grow.

The Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery deal would combine the fourth-largest and fifth-largest streaming networks in America and pull CBS, CNN, major Hollywood studios, and leading sports broadcasting rights into a single family’s control and financial orbit. Crucially, this family, the Ellisons, also holds a major ownership stake in Oracle, which is leading a consortium of buyers in the purchase of TikTok in the US. That would mean influence over digital content in addition to broadcast ownership. The new owners will reportedly reengineer TikTok’s algorithm, and some allege it will be possible to do so in a way that censors or suppresses content based on ideology.

Our media landscape didn’t always look like this. Especially since the 1996 Telecommunications Act, politicians across the political spectrum have embraced a deregulatory approach to media that has allowed for raised ownership caps, loosened cross-ownership rules, and encouraged vertical integration in the name of “efficiency” and “competitiveness.” The result was roll-ups of once-local TV stations into a handful of national chains, and the steady fusion of content, distribution, and data. Breaking this cycle will require restoring structural rules that treat media concentration as the threat to democracy that it so clearly is. For broadcasting, that means reimposing meaningful ownership caps, tightening limits on how many Big Four affiliates any single chain can control, and revisiting cross-ownership restrictions that were gutted in the 1990s. 

The regulatory framework also has to account for the migration of audiences from cable and broadcast to streaming. Just as the Cable Act of 1992 required cable operators to carry local stations, policymakers could establish must-carry rules for major streaming platforms like Netflix. This would ensure that local civic information and emergency alerts remain available even as viewers move to apps. Without such provisions, the collapse of linear TV risks taking local broadcast news—and the communities that depend on it—further down with it, leaving the field entirely to consolidated national conglomerates, who have little incentive to provide civically valuable information that doesn’t turn a profit.

Additionally, public media must be treated as core democratic infrastructure—and one that must be reimagined more boldly in the wake of CPB’s collapse. Even before the CPB was defunded, the US spent roughly $1.60 per person annually on public broadcasting, compared to $100 or more in peer democracies. Stable, multiyear funding for CPB and its local partners would insulate them from partisan budget fights and allow them to expand local reporting. At a moment when commercial broadcasters are increasingly beholden to both Wall Street and Washington, a robust public system is one of the few ways to guarantee space for independent journalism and pluralistic debate.