Jimmy Kimmel Enabled Censorship

First they came for Jimmy Kimmel, but I didn't say anything because I wasn't ... a lameass?

No. In this Niemoller scenario, the deplatforming of the host of "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" comes at the end of the slippery slope, not the beginning. ABC canned Bill Maher 23 years ago for mocking Bush-era propaganda about our sainted Middle East occupation troops. Also at the request of right-wing Bushies after 9/11, MSNBC fired Phil Donahue -- despite having the network's highest ratings -- for being too liberal and not pro-war. CBS News fired Dan Rather on a trumped-up ethical breach, and CBS radio fired Don Imus.

Lenny Bruce died in 1966 while appealing a prison sentence for obscenity. "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," a top-rated show, was canceled by CBS at the request of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1969.

As broadcast television matured and corporatized over the better part of a century, it sanitized itself of content whose politics unabashedly leaned left, replacing Norman Lear's 1970s progressive social-commentary programs like "All in the Family" and "Good Times" with 1980s and '90s shows like "Family Ties" and "Home Improvement," which had a pronounced sociopolitical subtext.

Nobody said much. They didn't notice because the median line of mainstream politics in both parties was sliding right. There was also a pressure-release valve. Viewers who preferred edgier content migrated to nonmajor network broadcast channels like Fox ("The Simpsons," "The X-Files") and cable ("The Sopranos," "Weeds," "Breaking Bad," "Shameless"), where a Federal Communications Commission in thrall to an out-of-control president couldn't brandish license-revocation over broadcasters' bank accounts.

By the time President Donald Trump's censors came for the safe, milquetoast humor and celebrity fluff that has long defined late-night talk shows on broadcast TV, anything smart, edgy and left had long been purged from the legacy broadcast channels. CBS's decision to axe Stephen Colbert, whose not-entirely-lame "Colbert Report" contrasts with his current uninspired dreck, was less of a harbinger of doom than a formal acknowledgment of long-accepted reality.

Media observers shocked by the demise of late-night titans Colbert and Kimmel at the hands of corporations sucking up to Trump to get their multibillon-dollar mergers approved -- with more on the chopping block, if Trump gets his way -- should have seen this coming years ago.

So should Mssrs. Colbert and Kimmel themselves.

As with Martin Niemoller, censorship and suppression of American political humorists has been a lengthy, ongoing process in which Kimmel's ouster is the culmination. This includes both economic censorship -- private employers firing popular purveyors of satire because they annoy the wealthy and powerful elites, and refusing to hire them in the first place -- as well as the medieval-style government suppression currently in the news, supposedly prohibited by the First Amendment, in which a president and his pet regulator order the elites to get rid of comedic wimps like Colbert and Kimmel over the most banal of utterances.

Politics-infused satire has long been systemically eradicated from our media and institutions of mass culture. As I've noted before, at their 20th-century height America's newspapers employed scores of satirical political writers on their opinion pages. A current-day update of H.L. Mencken, Art Buchwald, Mike Royko, Jimmy Breslin, Molly Ivins or Dave Barry would never be interviewed today, much less be allowed to launch a career. Assuming you can get one to call you back, they'll tell you why: Jokes, especially political jokes, especially smart political jokes, especially smart jokes that target rich and powerful individuals, institutions and their adherents, cause trouble. They generate letters to the editor, phone calls to the publisher, even the occasional cancellation of ads and subscriptions. It's easier and safer to do without -- while hypocritically bemoaning the death of the genre.

My profession, political cartooning, has been obliterated by the same censorious forces that decimated political humor columnists. As print media migrated to the internet, we weren't invited along with our hard-news colleagues. When you post them, cartoons generate clicks. Like the print forebears, online editors prefer to play it safe.

Also like the Niemoller trope, resistance to earlier instances of high-profile censorship both public and private might have prevented America from descending to its present bleak state -- in which Trump's random masked goons kidnap random Americans off the street, and raising the possibility that a douchebag may still have been a douchebag even if he got assassinated can get the safest of watered-down standup comics terminated. As one outrage after another hit the news, we said "huh" and did nothing. We shook our heads over Donahue and Ed Schultz (fired by MSNBC for reporting about Bernie Sanders' campaign). If we were editors and producers, we opined over the murder of my Charlie Hebdo colleagues at their drawing tables, bloviating from the offices of media organizations that themselves refuse to hire any cartoonists.

In cases like Kimmel and Colbert, victim-blaming is as appropriate as it is churlish. Both men presided over giant megaphones and enjoyed massive budgets. Night after night, they doled out drivel, never thinking for a moment that they might have used their platforms to defend those who were being deprived of theirs -- and whose canceling were paving the way for their own doom.

In 2019, for example, the international edition of The New York Times published a cartoon by Antonio Moreira Antunes, a Portuguese cartoonist, depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a guide dog, wearing a Star of David collar, leading a blindfolded Trump, who held a yarmulke inscribed with the Twitter logo. (The cartoon would still work today!) After the usual gang of Zionists complained it was "antisemitic", the Times removed the cartoon and apologized. Then the Times fired its two staff cartoonists, Patrick Chappatte and Heng Kim Song -- neither of whom had anything to do with the cartoon -- and permanently banned all cartoons.

As far as I know, neither Kimmel nor Colbert, nor other major late-night hosts (Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah, Conan O'Brien) had anything to say about this outrageous act of censorship by the Times.

During this time period, I was fighting The Los Angeles Times in court. They had fired me as their cartoonist under orders by the Los Angeles Police Department, whose pension fund owned controlling interest in the Times' parent company. Again, the late-night comics had nothing to say. Silence was death when it came to AIDS in the 1980s; it's also death when censorship is running rampant, as it has throughout the post-9/11 era. If they had used their power to stand up for humorists like Chappatte, Heng and me, they might be in a better position to save themselves now.

By the time Hitler came to power, parliamentary democracy had become so weak and ineffectual that Germans didn't mourn its passing. As I watch Colbert and Kimmel and their ilk fade away (or migrate to cable), I can't help but see the parallel.

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Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new "What's Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems." He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.