Front Burner - Jimmy Kimmel, free speech and big money media

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

After a brief suspension for comments he made in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing, Jimmy Kimmel has made his return to late night.It was just the latest example in a string of cancellations, resignations, lawsuits, settlements and potential mergers that tell the story of a media industry buckling to Trump or consolidating under a wealthy and powerful few, many of whom are friendly with the Trump administration. Eoin Higgins, independent reporter and author of “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left” joins us to talk about the bigger story of what’s happening with American media and the changes still to come.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This is a CBC podcast. Hey, everybody, I'm Jamie Pousson. So Jimmy Kimmel made his return to the air Tuesday night, and while he didn't apologize for anything that he said in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder, he did offer this. And the truth is, I don't think what I have to say is going to make much of a difference. If you like me, you like me. If you don't, you don't.

I have no illusions about changing anyone's mind. But I do want to make something clear because it's important to me as a human. And that is, you understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man. In a 20-minute monologue that got emotional at times, Kimmel went after Trump's chair of the FCC, Brendan Carr, who had suggested that Kim will be suspended.

Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, telling an American company, we can do this the easy way or the hard way and that these companies can find ways to change conduct and take action on Kimmel or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. In addition to being a direct violation of the First Amendment is not a particularly intelligent threat to make in public.

Ted Cruz said he sounded like a mafioso. Then he set his sights on Trump himself. You almost have to feel sorry for him. He tried it as best to cancel me. Instead, he forced millions of people to watch the show. That backfired, Bigley. He might have to release the Epstein files to distract us from this now. Earlier in the evening, Trump responded to Disney and ABC's decision to put Jimmy back on the air

by posting that Kimmel is, quote, yet another arm of the DNC. And to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major illegal campaign contribution. I think we're going to test ABC out on this. let's see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 million. This one sounds even more lucrative. He's referring there to a previous settlement with ABC, which we'll get into. The crackdown on criticism after Charlie Kirk's killing has raised fears of threats to freedom of speech and press freedom in the United States. But this was just the latest in a string of

cancellations, lawsuits, settlements, and mergers. All of which tell the story of a media industry buckling to Trump or consolidating under a wealthy and powerful few, many of whom are friendly with the Trump administration. What comes next could radically change some of the most watch news channels, not just in the U.S. but worldwide, including here in Canada, in a big way. Not to mention one of the most used social media platforms. So to go through all of this, I am talking today with Owen Higgins, independent reporter and author of owned, how tech billionaires on the right, but the loudest voices on the left. Oh, and hey, it's great to have you on Frontburner.

Thank you so much for making the time. Thank you so much for having me. Real pleasure. So we heard a little bit of Jimmy's monologue in the intro there, but I would just be curious to get your thoughts. What did you make of it? Any moments that stood out to you? Yeah, I thought that it was, I mean, from his perspective,

probably a pretty smart monologue to give. It was conciliatory in as much as it needed to be, while kind of still holding the free speech, I guess, aspect of things as kind of the most important. This show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this. And in doing so, he ended up kind of, I think, trying to draw a line between, you know, you know, the Trump and Brendan Carr and maybe like other people on the right, like Ted Cruz and and some others who he pointed out, you know, don't particularly like him or what he believes,

and he doesn't like them or what they believe, but, you know, they can come together on this. Maybe most of all, I want to thank the people who don't support my show and what I believe, but support my right to share those beliefs anyway. or I never would have imagined like Ben Shapiro, Clay Travis, Candice Owens, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, even my old pal Ted Cruz who believe it or not

I thought that for as far as that goes, it was fine. I think that, you know, Kimmel isn't a bit of a tight situation in which he can't address every single free speech threat that there is out there. He kind of kept the focus on Brendan Carr, kept the focus on Trump, and, you know, made it kind of about him and the other late night hosts. But, you know, the one thing I would say is that this is part of a kind of an overarching attack on free speech in the

U.S. right now. And it's, it's certainly the most, I guess, prominent just because of the fact that Kimmel's, you know, Kimmel is aired into a million, millions of households every night. And, you know, the other people who are the victims of this crackdown are perhaps not. But it is part of a larger hole. Want to emphasize that. Yeah. And this is much of what I'm hoping we can go through today. Just sticking with Kimmel for a little bit longer,

you know, obviously there was a big backlash after he was taken off the air. Lots of people in Hollywood signed petitions. Over 400 Hollywood stars, including Jennifer Aniston, Tom Hanks, and Merrill Streep have signed an open letter by the American Civil Liberties Union, condemning Disney's suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live and supporting free speech. People like Ted Cruz even came out against it. I like Brennan Carr, but we should not be in this business. We should denounce it. It's fine to say what Jimmy Kimmel said was deplorable. It was disgraceful. And he should be off air, but we shouldn't be threatening government power to force him off air. That's a real mistake. People called for a boycott of Disney Plus, which is ABC's parent company. What do you think was really behind Disney's decision to reinstate him?

Why do you think they did that? Well, I don't think that the subscription model that they have for their streaming platform, I mean, I think that probably had something to do with it, right? I think that the general bad press and the possibility of any kind of a boycott as the U.S. economy is starting to contract. and perhaps go into recession, which looks like it may happen. I think that if you're a large company like Disney, you probably want to minimize as much disruption as possible. And that's kind of like the position that they were put in by car and by Trump here

is kind of interesting because they have a lot of pressure from the administration, the White House, which is, you know, the, I mean, the federal government is much more powerful than any company in the U.S. by far. And then they're also seeing pressure from distributors like Nextstar and Sinclair, which have their kind of their own reasons for wanting to ingratiate themselves with Trump. For Sinclair, I think, is kind of a more ideological thing, where Sinclair media tends to be kind of lined up with Trump and Republicans and right-wing politics in the U.S. more broadly. Next Star is as well, but I think that for them, they have emerged. that they're trying to get through with a similar distributor, Tegna, which is, Gannett was a very large media company conglomerate down here in the U.S.

And it split about 10 years ago into Gennett and Tegna. And Tegna is the one that kind of controls the TV distribution. And they are trying to merge with Nextar. And Nextar is going to be purchasing Tegna. So they want to make sure that they are staying on the, the good side with the administration because ultimately Brendan Carr is the one who's going to approve that through the regulatory scheme that we have down here. To approve the merger, right?

And just for people who are listening right next door and Sinclair, these are the companies that own something like 30 ABC affiliates each, right? And they have both announced that they are not going to be playing Jimmy Kimmel moving forward, right? Like they're putting news programming in its place at the moment, right? At the moment, that's what it is. We are still on the air in most of the country, except ironically for Washington, D.C., where we have been preempted. We are off the air in Nashville, New Orleans, Portland, Oregon, Salt Lake City, and St. Louis. I mean, I think that if there was a broad outcry, it's possible that they might change their minds on that.

But, you know, ultimately, it's hard to really know. Can you tell me more about Brendan Carr? So I know that he has a chapter that he's written in Project 2025, which is really this kind of right-wing manifesto or guide from the Heritage Foundation. And in it, he wrote that, quote, the FCC should promote freedom of speech. It was interesting in that monologue, Jimmy's monologue last night. I was found very interesting this quote from him back in 2022, where from when he worked under Joe Biden. And he said that political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people into the discussion. That's why people in

influential positions have always targeted it for censorship. You know who wrote that? FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr. Tell me more about this guy and what he's been doing since becoming the chair earlier this year. Sure. I think, you know, I think the first thing I would say is that the someone saying that free speech and satire are good when a, when they're political adversary is in power and saying that it's bad when the person who they agree with politically is in power is kind of a longstanding right-wing approach to free speech that goes across countries and certainly administration. So I'm not surprised that Carr said that. He, his perspective, since, you know, joined the FCC or before, has been that.

the media and the media landscape, the FCC skew to liberal, that they kind of hand over indoctrination and propaganda to the left and that the right is being underserved. This right-wing narrative goes back decades. It goes back to the fairness doctrine, which was an FCC policy requiring that differing viewpoints be aired, right? And this was abolished or, yeah, it was abolished in 1987 under Reagan, and after that happened, that's when you start to see, you know, less of an influence by the FCC on how news organizations report out news, and you see things like Fox News kind of come up. Of course, that's, you know, that's like 10 years later, but the stage was set at that point. The reason that they didn't like the Fairness Doctrine

to begin with is that they felt that it kind of uplifted left-wing views and uplifted this kind of like liberal sensibility when, you know, reality would say that, you know, it should be, it should just be on the right. Like that those are the only viewpoints that should be heard. So what Brendan Carr is saying now is like an evolution of that. It's, it's a different perspective on that. But it is part of the same overall, like right wing narrative, right wing opinion on this. The issue that arose here where lots and lots of people were upset was not a joke. It was not, you know, making fun or pilloring me or the administration or the president. It was appearing to directly mislead the American public about a significant fact of probably one of

most significant political events we've had in a long time. It's really the most significant political assassination. make up the G7. It is Canada that imposes the highest taxes on beer. 46% of what Canadians pay for beer is government taxation. When the G7 leaders get together, I bet Canada doesn't brag about that. Enough is enough. Help stop automatic beer tax hikes. Go to hereforbeer.ca and ask yourself, why does the best beer nation have the worst beer taxation? Hey, how's it going?

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I want to go through some other pretty high-profile examples with you. Like we mentioned earlier, Kimmel wasn't the only casualty of the post-Charlie Kirk assassination crackdown. Other journalists have lost their jobs as well. I'm thinking of Matthew Dowd on MSNBC, who talked essentially about how... Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. I think that's the environment we're in, that people just, you can't stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that's the unfortunate environment we're in. But I want to talk specifically about columnist Karen Attia, who ended her 11-year run at the Washington Post after she says the paper was fired for a series of blue sky posts where she was, in her words, speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America's apathy towards guns.

She also quoted Kirk's comments that black women lack brain processing power. Penn America said the firing of journalists in the wake of the Kirk killing should alarm anyone who cares about free speech and a free press. But the Washington Post has gone through a number of changes, largely brought on by its owner, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. And can you remind us of some of the changes that we've seen at the Post and how this recent decision to fire Atea fits in with that? Bezos's approach to the Washington Post for a long time, that was pretty hands-off. He didn't really want to involve himself too much in the newsroom. That was until last year before the election when the endorsement of Kamala Harris was prepared and ready to go out. And Bezos stepped on that. He said, don't do that. We're not doing that.

This is allegedly, allegedly this came from him. David Remnick said, if Jeff Bezos had said two years ago that he thought the editorial page should get rid of endorsements, all of them, you could argue the case one way or another. But he was effectively suggesting that given this scenario with the timing of it... Look, if I had the prescience to think about this topic at all two years before, that would have been better for perception reasons. But in fact, we made this decision, it was the right decision. I'm proud of the decision we made, and it was far from cowardly because we knew there would be blowback. It's interesting because from my perspective, Bezos is probably making the calculation that if Harris comes into office, he is not going to suffer any kind of consequence for blocking the posts endorsement. He's not going to lose any of his contracts.

He's not, you know, Amazon Web Services makes, makes billions of dollars from, from the federal government. Now, Trump, on the other hand, is the type of person who would do that. He would, he would use the power of the U.S. government vindictively, not because, you know, Bezos doesn't deserve those contracts. I'm not, I'm not making a case for that either way, but to say that Trump's, from Trump's view, it would be because Trump would feel insulted by it. Or Trump would just make things harder, I think, for Bezos. So that was the calculation there. Then the opinion page kind of shifted its focus to be more, you know, about free markets and, you know, Americanism. There have been a few other changes there.

But the Karen Adia firing is a whole other level, I think. I think in the letter that they reportedly sent her that she posted, they said that part of the reason was the things that she said about white men, you know, rewind five years ago. this was not the way that these companies were talking. Now they're talking this way. It's hard to think of this as having kind of any, I guess, like, ideological consistency other than they're just trying to kind of, you know, ingratiate themselves to Trump and to the ruling regime. Okay. Let's do CBS, shall we? Because I think when you take all of these examples together, they really start.

to paint a picture here. The Late Show was Stephen Colbert. Another critic of Trump's was canceled. Before we start the show, I want to let you know something that I found out just last night. Next year will be our last season. The network will be ending the late show in May.

And... CBS said that that was a purely financial decision, but there are suspicions that this was another move motivated by political and business interests. Tell me how did canceling Colbert and a $16 million settlement with Trump over an interview with Kamala Harris on the current affairs program 60 Minutes contribute to the sale of Paramount Global CBS's parent company to Skydance Media? First of all, the $16 million settlement with Trump for this spurious defamation lawsuit seems to be what could be called just a straight-up bribe. $16 million to his, to his foundation as, you know, like a way of paying this off and settling and not having to go to court. And I don't mean to interrupt you, but maybe worth noting here, this isn't the only settlement he's extracted.

He also extracted one out of ABC, right, for an interview with George, that George Stephanopoulos did, which, you know, I've heard many, many media experts say was completely defend. under, you know, every American free speech and media law. Yeah, I think that a good way to look at those lawsuits, and I'll return to Paramount CBS in just a second, I think a good way to look at those lawsuits is they're just kind of throwing everything against the wall and just seeing what we'll stick. It's not so much about specifically, you know, getting the media organizations or getting media figures in a particular moment or a particular lawsuit. It's more about just kind of flooding the zone and making things very difficult.

Just to go back to Paramount here, the thing with Colbert is the Colbert wasn't actually technically canceled. What it was they didn't, they announced that they were not going to renew his contract, which is effectively the same thing, but he wasn't like kicked off the

air, but he still has like another year, year and change to go. It's my opinion that this was probably done because they were looking for an excuse not to continue. to produce this expensive show that probably doesn't make them a lot of money. It probably loses them some money. But it's hard to kind of square the announcement with the Paramount Skydance sale as at least

like the announcement was probably made to curry some favor with the Trump administration. Now, I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles. It's big fat bribe. Because this all comes as Paramount's owners are trying to get the Trump administration to approve the sale of our network to a new owner, Skydance. I mean, there have been resignations since this deal went through. There's been a new policy put in place after DHS Secretary Christine Nome complained that her interview was taken out of context.

Now CBS is pledging to air unedited, like their entire interviews with these figures. They are continuing to just be very sycophantic towards. the administration. I think that, you know, part of that is because they are attempting to purchase other, uh, other, you know, media properties. Like David Ellison owns Skydance, uh, which bought Paramount and which, which is the parent company of CBS. His father is Larry Ellison, very, uh, hard right, big Trump backer, founder of, uh, Oracle, the software company. His son, David, is trying to buy Warner Brothers, that's CNN and HBO. Larry himself is trying to buy TikTok.

So there's a lot of, or like, be part of a group that's going to buy TikTok. So they are, they continue to want to control different parts of the media to buy them up. But in order to do that, they need to get regulatory approval from the federal government in order to get that federal regulatory approval rather than, you know, going through the normal channels as they might have in the past to get this approval. They know that what they need to do now

is to make Trump happy. Focusing on CBS News a little bit longer, we've talked about some of the casualties of this rapidly consolidating media industry, but let's talk about some winners here, someone who could see a pretty remarkable rise is someone like Barry Weiss, right? And can you remind us who she is and why Paramount is looking to buy her free press, her substack for over $100 million and make her, according to reports, the editor-in-chief and co-president of CBS News? Yeah, Barry Weiss is a former Wall Street Journal and New York Times editorial page editor.

She famously, or infamously, as opposed, resigned from the New York Times. Her scathing resignation letter reads in part, quote, They have called me a Nazi and a racist. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels. Saying that I am offended is a way of making someone radioactive. It's a way of smearing their reputation, of making them a liability. Because once you tar someone as a racist or a misogynist or a misogynist or a, a fascist or whatever the word of the day is. It's a way of sort of taking them down a peg.

After kind of, you know, a rocky tenure there and started a publication called The Free Press, which is the one that you just mentioned that is going to be sold or maybe sold. It's in the works, it seems. Her, like the Free Press basically is a hyper pro-Israel, hyper right-wing culture war publication. A lot of people on the internet believe that you are my boss. because they believe that I am a member of the Mossad. But this is actually the first time that I'm meeting you or at least as far as I know, any member of the Mossad. So I'm very excited to meet you.

That its reporting has traditionally been dogged with accusations, often well-founded, that it's inaccurate. It is an ideological project, not a straight news organization. But it is backed and supported by a lot of powerful people, especially in Silicon Valley. You know, specifically, Mark Andresen, who is,

you know, like the tech VC, who has money in Facebook, money in substack, his A16Z, Andresen Horowitz, his investment firm with Ben Horowitz, is incredibly powerful.

They have investments in crypto and all kinds of different stuff. So, you know, they're behind it. Reportedly, there have been some rumors that Elon Musk has some, money in it. There was a funding round that was led that valued it at, I think, $100 million.

And now David Ellison is proposing to buy it for that much and put Weiss in charge of at least CBS's editorial direction, which is a meteoric rise for Weiss. And I think that she has pushed her ideological project, and it has kind of dovetailed with the interest in the ideological project of the current Silicon Valley Right, which is a paying offer. Tell me more now about the potential deal to buy TikTok, right? Who are the big players? And what is the sense of what they want to do with this enormous, enormous social media app? Yeah, this is another merger slash buyout.

We have Andreessen Horwitz here. We have Larry Ellison. TikTok was banned or legislation to ban TikTok went through under Biden. It was postponed under Trump. But the desire on the part of the U.S. government through both administrations has been

that this company specifically they don't like and they don't want it to be operating in the U.S. Which raises a lot of questions about free speech and, you know, who is allowed to speak and who is not. TikTok is, of course, a Chinese company. And that's kind of what's behind this, this idea that, you know, that they are spying on people, that they are trying to, you know, shape events within the U.S. To the extent that that's true, I don't know, but that has been kind of the driving force behind this.

Now, it seems like BightDance, which is the parent company to TikTok, has reached an agreement with this consortium, and they are going to kind of turn American TikTok over to this group. There are questions about like the algorithm. There are questions about, you know, how much of the technology that they're going to get. But overall, what they are going to achieve here is to, you know, just effectively take over the. this important website and, yeah, have it under the control of Trump allies, which, you know, is going to, I don't know what that looks like, but, but that's, that's the goal. You mentioned Ellison and Dresen. I think you mentioned Horowitz as well, right? But I also read that Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan also may be part of this deal as well. So

quite a large group of Trump-aligned allies. I know that there have been concerns that there will, for example, be crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech and activism on the app. So you wrote this book, owned, and it looks at the way that right-wing tech billionaires have set their sights on owning and controlling as much of, of online and traditional media as possible today. The media, especially the news industry,

has been struggling to survive and continue to turn a profit for such a long time now. It's why we've seen so much of the landscape atrophy, to the point of all these outlets and companies being merged into just a few conglomerates. And I would just be curious to hear from you, someone who spent so much time thinking about this. Why are we seeing this era where so many of them are jumping into media? um in this way into the attention economy in this way what it really comes down to is these guys don't like being challenged and they don't like uh oversight and for a long time tech you know

they were kind of siloed into tech media which was relatively sycophantic which which relatively just kind of reported out press releases and what they were told and you know over the last like 10 or 15 years that started to change. And especially politically, as these social media companies became more powerful and more important to politics, they started to face a lot of challenges, you know, at the government level. And they were also kind of getting, you know, attacked and looked at and investigated. And I think that, you know, there are a lot of overlapping interests and a lot of overlapping reasons. but if I had to break it down to two, I would say that Silicon Valley has taken a hard right turn.

So that's the ideological reason. And I would say that the material reason is that under Trump, they can really use their influence over him to continue to get big contracts and to continue to like make a lot of money. And it's just easier to do that when you have someone like Trump than it is someone, you know, someone a more traditional. conservative or, you know, centrist politician in the way does. Yeah. And just worth pointing out here, this is all happening at the same time that the government is defunding, NPR, PBS, public broadcasting. All right, Owen, that was really interesting. Thank you so much. By the pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.