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Jimmy Kimmel Enabled Censorship

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Ted Rall

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

No. In this Niemöller 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, a top-rated comedy show, was canceled by CBS at the request of LBJ 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 1990s shows like “Family Ties” and “Home Improvement,” that 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 non-major network broadcast channels like Fox (“The Simpsons,” “The X-Files”) and cable (“The Sopranos,” “Weeds,” “Breaking Bad,” “Shameless”), where an FCC in thrall to an out-of-control president couldn’t brandish license-revocation over broadcasters’ bank accounts.

By the time 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’ 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 acknowledgement 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 multi-billon-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 Niemöller, 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 Niemöller 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 gets assassinated can get the safest of watered-down stand-up 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 António Moreira Antunes, a Portuguese cartoonist, depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a guide dog, wearing a Star of David collar, leading a blindfolded President Donald 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 “anti-Semitic”, 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 LAPD, 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.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)

Freedom of the Press? Not in the U.S.

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Ted Rall

Image result for reporter arrested

            The United States ranks 48th among nations for press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders. Since few other countries have the equivalent of our First Amendment, learning that we rank below Botswana and Slovenia may come as a surprise.

Mostly the organization pins this dismal state of affairs on Trump’s attacks on the news media. They reference the White House’s revocation of CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press card, the president’s “fake news” and “enemy of the people” jibes and his tacit approval of the grisly murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by the government of Saudi Arabia. “At least one White House correspondent has hired private security for fear of their life after receiving death threats, and newsrooms throughout the country have been plagued by bomb threats and were the recipients of other potentially dangerous packages, prompting journalism organizations to reconsider the security of their staffs in a uniquely hostile environment,” reports RWB. (Cry me a river! I’ve received hundreds of death threats.)

Like most other mainstream analyses of the state of press, RWB focuses on how easy it is for large, corporate-owned media conglomerates with establishmentarian political orientations to do their jobs.

Independent journalists, especially those whose politics are left of the Democrats or right of the Republicans, have much bigger problems than deep-pocketed mega-conglomerates like CNN.

No consideration of freedom of the press in the U.S. is complete without a hard look at the case of Julian Assange. The founder and publisher of WikiLeaks is rotting in an English prison, awaiting extradition to the United States for possession and dissemination of classified information—exactly what The New York Times did when it published the Pentagon Papers and the Edward Snowden revelations. He is being “treated worse than a murderer, he is isolated, medicated,” says journalist John Pilger, who recently visited him. Incredibly, corporate media is siding with the Trump Administration, not merely ignoring Assange but mocking him and accusing him of treason (which is impossible, since he’s not American).

Censorship is insidious; readers and viewers can’t know what they’re not told. Almost as sinister as the persecution of Assange is the wholesale erasure of left-wing politics from U.S. news media. 43% of Americans tell pollsters they want the U.S. to become a socialist country. 36% of registered Democrats currently support self-described “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, whose campaign promises closely align to Sanders’.

The nation’s 1,000-plus newspapers employ countless Democrats and Republicans. But there isn’t a single staff columnist or editorial cartoonist who agrees with that 43% of the public that socialism would be better than capitalism. There isn’t a single one who says he or she supports Sanders or Warren.

Watch CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews and the other cable news outlets. Once in a very long while you might catch a token leftist joining a yakfest. You’ll never see socialist get a gig as a regular contributor, much less be asked to host a show. If you don’t think it’s weird that 43% of the country’s population is being censored, I don’t know what to tell you.

Pervasive among both corporate and independent journalists is self-censorship. Apologists say that freedom of the press doesn’t include the right to be published, and that’s true. Because journalists are like everyone else and can’t survive without earning money, however, the real-world practical effect of having to earn a living is that reporters and pundits have to watch what they say lest they become unemployable pariahs like I was after 9/11. “Sorry, man,” an editor I considered a friend told me after I asked him for work at his business magazine, “you’re radioactive.”

The Washington Post and other corporate news companies ridiculed Bernie Sanders’ recent assertion that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ ownership of the Post influences its coverage. As Sanders noted, it’s not like Bezos calls Post editors to tell them what to print and what to censor.

Self-censorship is subtle. Post executive editor Marty Baron is technically correct when he retorts that “Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence.” But he’s dodging the meat of the matter. Baron and other Post editors know who their bosses are: Bezos and, more generally, his allies in the corporate ruling class. No matter how much they protest that they can follow any lead and print anything they want, that knowledge of who butters their bread informs every move they make. It’s why, when the editorial page editor sorts through the day’s nationally syndicated political cartoons, he never ever publishes one from a left-wing political orientation, no matter how well-written or well-drawn it is. It’s why, when they’re hiring new staffers, they never hire a leftie. They’re smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds them. It’s also why the person making that hiring decision is not himself or herself one of the 43%.

I’m more audacious. Yet I too know not to go too far.

I’ve learned that I can draw a cartoon or write a column criticizing “free trade” agreements without fear of getting fired or assassinated. There is also no fear that it will be published by a corporate newspaper—so why bother? Over the long run, I have to give editors material they want to publish; if I send out too much stuff about a verboten topic like free trade I’ll lose clients.

Most people who hear about my defamation lawsuit against the Los AngelesTimes support me. But most people don’t hear about it for a simple reason: when one member of the press is besieged—especially when it’s justified—the others circle the wagons. Reporters for The Washington Post, The New York Times and fake-left outfits like The Intercept contacted me eager to write about how the LAPD pension fund bought the Los Angeles Times in 2014 and then ordered the paper to fire me because I criticized the police in my cartoons. (It’s still legal for the the cops to buy a newspaper.) Invariably they went silent after talking to their editors.

Corporate gangsters stick together.

As I said, I’m not that brave. My editor didn’t tell me about the LAPD deal with the Times. I assume she didn’t know. If she had called and said “hey, lay off the police, they own us now, draw about something else,” I would have. I have to make a living.

48th? When it comes to press freedom, the U.S. is benefiting from grade inflation.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Media Censors the Opinions of 37% of Americans. And Now They’re Gloating About It.

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Ted Rall

1-3-18Thirty-seven percent of American citizens are socialist or communist. That’s far more people than voted for either Hillary Clinton (28% of eligible voters) or Donald Trump (27%) in 2016.

The majority is voiceless. A privileged minority rules. The United States is a political apartheid state.

If the Left were allowed on the ballot in this fake democracy, given space in newspapers and on television, invited to join political debates, and if it wasn’t brutally suppressed by the police and FBI, the Left wouldn’t need to wage a revolution in order to take over the country. Leftists could easily win at the ballot box if America were a real democracy.

Media censorship plays a major part in the conspiracy to deny the majority Left its rightful role as the nation’s rulers. Socialist and communist Americans read newspaper editorial pages and draw the false conclusion that they’re members of a lunatic fringe. More than 1,000 papers—yet not one single leftist opinion columnist or editorial cartoonist on staff?!?

Leftist Americans exist by the millions but many are isolated from one another. They watch CNN, MSNBC and FoxNews and figure they’re all alone. None of the three major cable news networks employs a single left-wing commentator. They go to the polls but there’s no left party on the ballot. Or if there is, they’ve never heard of it and don’t want to waste their votes.

To be a Leftist in America today is analogous to how black people felt until recently while watching TV: you don’t see anyone like you. The powers that be want you to feel like the Invisible Man, as though you didn’t exist. You know you exist. But you can’t miss the system’s message that you don’t matter.

American politics is a party to which you have not been invited.

This has been the state of affairs for as long as I can remember. Even as more Americans become disgusted by runaway capitalism, censorship of the Left has become increasingly thorough and ferocious.

There used to be a little space. In the 1990s lefties like me were granted occasional mentions in The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and NPR. Even FoxNews had us on to serve as punching bags. Shortly after 9/11 we disappeared along with the Twin Towers, relegated to a few blogs and alternative weeklies. Now newspapers and cable TV news and corporate news websites never give space or air to representatives of the Left. (Don’t email me about AOC. She’s a Democrat, not a leftist.)

Censorship of the really-existing Left is impressively thorough. You’ll find exactly as much opposition to the government on the media here in the U.S. as you’ll find in North Korea.

Ashamed and afraid, the gatekeepers used to have the decency to keep secret their suppression of people whose political sin is that they really, truly believe that all humans are equal. They didn’t even think they were biased. They thought they were reasonable. Moderate. Middle of the road.

Censorship with a smile is no longer enough for America’s corrupt news media. Now they’re brazenly contemptuous. The bastards even seek to elevate censorship of the Left to a proud American value!

On May 12th the Times ran another in a string of hit pieces on RT America, a television network it described as “the cat’s paw of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.” RT, the Times complained, “amplifies voices of dissent, to sow discord and widen social divides. It gives the marginal a megaphone and traffics in false equivalence.” Imagine that: giving airtime to people we’ve always censored! “Voices of dissent” must never be “amplified.” They must be silenced.

This has become a standard talking point.

“RT America has a modest audience, exploring stories of dissent, injustice and poverty within the U.S. that it says American news outlets ignore,” NPR sneered in 2016, as if dissent, injustice and poverty were standard fare on corporate media outlets. Anyway, if RT’s audience is so small, why is the political establishment so worried about them?

The formerly-liberal Guardian has gotten into the act: “Fringe opinion takes centre stage [on RT],” it wrote in 2017. “Reporting is routinely bolstered by testimony from experts you have never heard of, representing institutions you have never heard of.” It is true that RT rarely interviews “experts” like John Bolton and William Kristol, neocon architects of the Iraq War who despite their evil idiocy pop up everywhere from CNN to the Bill Maher show. Far more often, they interview people who have been right year after year about issue after issue—people like me.

I get interviewed by RT often. (Disclosure: I am a frequent guest on RT’s sister radio network Sputnik News and draw cartoons for them too.) Never once have they told me what to say or not say. I wish I could say the same about many “mainstream” U.S. media outlets.

Many attacks against RT originate with the U.S. government’s national security apparatus. The Times piece blithely cites the RAND Corporation, Molly McKew, a right-wing lobbyist for the anti-Russian government of Georgia, and the Director of National Intelligence to support its allegations. A 2017 report issued by the DNI groused: “RT’s reports often characterize the United States as a ‘surveillance state’ and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use. RT has also focused on criticism of the U.S. economic system, U.S. currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the U.S. national debt.”

Notably, the report did not question the accuracy of those assertions.

It certainly didn’t suggest that the U.S. stop doing all those things that make it look so awful.

To U.S. corporate propagandists the solution is clear: censor more and censor better.

Make censorship good.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

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