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Last month’s suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” by Disney, following pressure from Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr and President Trump himself, starkly illustrates the urgent need for liberals to do everything in their power to fight the Administration’s threats to free speech and the free press. Kimmel’s reinstatement—a rare and welcome victory for defenders of liberal democracy—is a testament to what is possible when people are awakened to the threat posed when control over the news media and the internet is concentrated in the hands of a few immensely powerful corporations. But it would be dangerous for liberals to move past the Kimmel saga without an understanding of how we got into this crisis and a theory of how to rebuild a truly independent and robust system of free speech and free press in America.
Trump has targeted free speech much more directly in his second term than he did in his first. Even before the inauguration, Trump targeted the press through a series of lawsuits aimed at punishing and extorting news publications he perceived as overly critical of his campaign or insufficiently critical of his opponents. Once in power, he launched a series of attacks on universities to force them gut their diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and stifle the speech of students protesting Israel’s devastation of Gaza.
Recently, a new and even more disturbing pattern has emerged, as the administration increasingly exploits regulatory authorities to force news and entertainment corporations to refrain from criticizing the president. The first concerning action came when CBS in July suddenly announced plans to cancel Stephen Colbert’s late-night show next May. Colbert has been a persistent critic of the new administration, and CBS’s parent company Paramount had long sought government approval to merge with Skydance, which is controlled by the far-right family of Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the richest men in the world.
After the announcement, there was widespread speculation that the corporation did so to curry favor with the administration. But there was no smoking gun to prove such a connection.
The administration’s attack on Kimmel and Disney, by contrast, took place fully in public. Following Kimmel’s monologue criticizing the “MAGA gang’s” response to the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, FCC Chair Carr appeared on a right-wing podcast and issued a direct threat to the Disney subsidiary ABC and its broadcast affiliates: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said, warning that if the corporation didn’t take action, there would be “additional work for the FCC ahead.”
The brazen nature of the FCC Chair’s intervention in the Kimmel controversy has, in some ways, proven a boon to the critics who have been sounding the alarm about the threats to freedom of speech posed by a combination of corporate consolidation and an increasingly aggressive campaign by right-wing conservatives to silence liberals. It both reawakened those who had become numb to the administration’s increasingly authoritarian tactics and jolted many who had not fully grasped the magnitude of the threat. And it revitalized interest in how to regulate media and the sprawling technology platforms that dominate communications today to prevent them from becoming tools of suppression.
In the aftermath of the Kimmel saga, it is vital that liberals and centrists recognize how our own actions—and naivety— helped set the stage for today’s information crisis. And further, that liberals rediscover and sharpen the tools we have long used to defend people’s freedom to hear and convey speech without censorship or manipulation. There is no task more fundamental in a liberal democracy than crafting a resilient and diverse information system, and liberal policymakers must begin immediately to use every power and tool at hand to protect people’s right to credible and diverse sources of information in the modern age.
The first step is understanding just how extreme the concentration of power over our communications and news systems has become and the history [ [link removed] ] of how we got to this point.
Carr’s authoritarian power play against Disney, for instance, is less a reflection of traditional television’s importance than it of that industry’s woes. Once a bedrock of American media, broadcast and cable television are today in a steep and likely irreversible decline. The rise of streaming services has led to a mass exodus of viewers and advertisers from traditional television, a phenomenon known as cord-cutting. This has created a vicious cycle: as revenue dwindles, networks are forced to cut costs, leading to a decline in the quality and diversity of programming, which in turn drives more viewers to streaming platforms.
But it’s important to understand that streaming is simply the most recent in a long series of blows to the industry, many of them delivered by Democrats.
The establishment of the FCC in the 1930s came during a similar upheaval in the ways people received information brought about by the increasing dominance of radio and the advent of television. For most of the remainder of the 20th century, the FCC was a robust regulator that worked effectively to limit the threats concentrated power pose to people’s right to hear and convey speech, news, and entertainment. The commission operated under the principle that the airwaves are a public resource and that broadcasters have a responsibility to serve the public interest. This meant promoting a diversity of viewpoints, ensuring access to local news and information, and preventing the concentration of media ownership. Regulations like the Fairness Doctrine, must-carry provisions for news, and rules limiting cross-ownership of media outlets were designed to foster a vibrant and competitive marketplace of ideas.
While these regulations were not without their flaws—the “public interest” standard, for example, was never adequately defined in law—they were rooted in a fundamentally democratic vision of the media’s role in society, including a belief that local communities be served by locally owned newspapers and broadcasters. Our current regulatory framework has not only failed to adapt these principles to the digital age—it has slowly chipped away at their applicability even to legacy information systems.
Most of this damage was done in the 1980s and 1990s, as Republicans and Democrats alike embraced a libertarian view of economics and power that celebrated efficiency at all costs and discounted the threats of concentrated corporate control. The most devastating blow came during a Democratic administration, when Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That legislation dismantled many of the rules that had historically promoted competition and diversity in the media landscape, such a strict ownership cap that limited conglomerates from owning stations that reached more than 25% of the national audience. (That 25%, which was implemented under Reagan in 1985, was itself a large departure from the FCC’s original approach, which put hard numerical limits on the number of stations one corporation could own.)
More importantly, the 1996 Act enshrined a hands-off approach to governing the digital age by drawing an arbitrary distinction between traditional telecommunications services and a new category of “information services” that included internet providers and digital platforms. It capped that regulatory mishap with Section 230, a provision that in theory protects speech by insulating corporations from liability for content disseminated by their users. In practice, that provision has allowed dominant platforms to exercise total control over online speech with no legal liabilities or democratic oversight.
Following the passage of the 1996 bill, the FCC has generally embraced that hands-off approach to governing online corporations—no matter how big and powerful they have grown. At the same time, the commission completely failed to protect the traditional broadcasters from the power of the new Big Tech monopolists, even as these corporations used their power to unfairly strip ad revenue and viewers from broadcasters. This one-two punch set up a dangerous dynamic that has played out over the last three decades. Tech monopolies like Google have exploited the lack of democratic accountability to systematically monopolize the advertising market, giving them ever more power to starve traditional broadcasters and other publishers of high-quality information of their key source of revenue. Simultaneously, the new monopolists also worked to lock individual customers into their services.
Meanwhile, corporations like Nexstar and Sinclair took advantage of the laxer FCC regulations to slowly accumulate every greater power over the news and entertainment distributed by the legacy broadcast networks, which include NBC and FOX in addition to ABC and CBS. Despite the long-running decline of the broadcasters and of analog television generally, millions of Americans—especially in older and more rural segments of the population—still turn to these outlets for much or most of their news. Importantly, these new broadcasting conglomerates tend to promote far more conservative viewpoints than earlier generations of broadcasters.
To compound the problem, these same powerful station monopolies have in recent years exploited regulatory loopholes to establish de facto control over stations nominally controlled by smaller competitors through quasi-ownership schemes [ [link removed] ] like service agreements. This consolidation has led to a further homogenization [ [link removed] ] of content and a decline in the diversity of viewpoints, leaving the public with fewer and less reliable sources of information.
In recent years, one of the few elements holding this system together has been live sports. Live sporting events consistently dominate television ratings and have been one of the primary reasons for viewers to tune into legacy broadcast stations, which in turn helped keep advertising dollars flowing. In fact, ads served during sporting events in many instances have actually increased in value in recent years.
Further, until recently, live sports programming also provided viewers a big incentive to maintain expensive cable subscriptions, which, in turn, provided local broadcast news with another vital source of revenue, generated from being carried by cable and satellite providers under “must-carry” regulations. In recent years, it has been these retransmission fees, which are mandated by the FCC under law, that have primarily kept the remaining broadcasters afloat.
But this pillar too is now crumbling [ [link removed] ] as the dominant tech and streaming platforms have launched an aggressive campaign to acquire premier sports rights. Streamers like Amazon, Netflix, and Apple are now successfully bidding for exclusive rights to NFL, NBA, and NASCAR events. The tech giants’ deep pockets enable them to easily outbid less powerful and less diversified corporations in order to expand their control over digital commerce and information streams.
The overarching consequences of the decline of local television have been dire for the public. Due to the ongoing collapse of local and regional newspapers—which is similarly being fueled by the tech monopolies’ stranglehold on advertising revenue [ [link removed] ]—broadcast television stations are in many regions of the country the only remaining semi-reliable source for local news.
Over the last 50 years, an increasingly illiberal and authoritarian movement on the right in America has refined a strategy to restructure the information environment to promote their particular social and political viewpoints. In addition to their successful, decades-long agenda to destroy the FCC’s original pro-democracy regulatory mandate—which was aided nearly every step of the way by liberals—the right has for years systematically attacked the legitimacy of incumbent news organizations with spurious claims of anti-conservative bias. More recently, they began to build alternative media networks and online platforms, while applying ever stronger political and economic pressure on the dominant digital platforms.
Then over the summer, these groups capped off these efforts by convincing Republicans in Congress to enact an almost gratuitous gutting of the last remaining public supports for television and radio in the U.S., despite the fact that these systems often provide the only real service in much of rural America.
Meanwhile, the center and left—still largely under the sway of the thinking and political influences that led to the disastrous Telecommunications Act of 1996—have remained shockingly oblivious to the extreme concentration of power and control over the news and information systems that have enabled liberal democracy since the earliest days of the nation.
The Kimmel controversy demonstrates just how dangerous this ignorance and passivity has been, and how urgent it is for American liberals to relearn how to regulate and build news and communications systems that protect and promote democracy and true intellectual and political liberty. It is not enough to simply shout in the streets in defense of Jimmy Kimmel’s right to tell the jokes he wants; we must immediately also address the underlying structural problems that have made our media landscape so vulnerable to authoritarian pressure.
Luckily, we can look to our past for solutions—including specifically to how we regulated legacy media. The principles that once guided the regulation of broadcast television can be updated and adapted to the digital age, and we should start to do so immediately.
First and foremost, we must demand aggressive enforcement [ [link removed] ] of the antimonopoly regulations that still govern our legacy broadcast system, which despite its long-term decline remains of great importance to ensuring diversity and plurality to the national news and information system. Practically, this means regulators and lawmakers should preserve and strengthen caps on station ownership and cross-ownership regulations, rather than further increasing the number of stations a conglomerate can control, as the FCC is now doing.
Next, liberals need to translate old principles to the new information gatekeepers. Streaming services operate almost entirely outside of the purview of the FCC, even when they carry live programmed television content that mirrors the content available on broadcast television. Just as broadcasters were once required to serve the public interest in exchange for the use of the public airwaves, so too should these new media giants be held to public interest standards.
This could take many forms. We could, for example, reimagine [ [link removed] ] the “must-carry” provisions the FCC has long imposed on cable providers for today’s streaming platforms by requiring those platforms to carry local news content and create compensation frameworks that encourage quality and diversity. This would provide a much-needed lifeline to local journalism and ensure that all Americans, regardless of where they live or how they watch television, have access to information about their communities.
Third, enforcers and policymakers should move aggressively to force today’s new online platform gatekeepers like Google and Facebook to share revenue with broadcasters and other providers of local journalism in a sustainable manner based on fair-market valuations of the content. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which has enjoyed strong bipartisan support from lawmakers for years, provides one potential path forward.
But even as liberal policymakers move to prevent a final collapse of the legacy broadcast news and entertainment system, they must move simultaneously to master the true challenge of this moment, which is to shape the structures and behaviors of today’s dominant digital platform monopolies to protect and promote American liberty and democracy in the 21st century.
But for a guide to that task, you will have to tune in again next time, for Part II of Liberty & Power’s series on regulating communications in the digital age to protect free speech and press for all Americans.

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