00:00Oh, so there's been a whole lot of talk about what's happening here and free speech, but could cancelling Kimmel also be cancelling free speech?
00:10And we know Charlie Cook always spoke about debate and free speech, and that was something that he tried to take to the youth and the grassroots of the conservative movement in the US.
00:23I mean, for me, it absolutely is an attack on freedom of speech, which, as we know, America holds in such high regard as the cornerstone of their constitution.
00:35Now, for me personally, I've watched what Kimmel said, and I feel that he wasn't making a joke about Charlie Cook's death, the tragedy around that.
00:44He was talking about reaction to it. So it depends which way you want to see it, to be honest with you.
00:51And it wasn't even that shocking. Maybe I've got a low threshold. I don't get shocked by anything anymore.
00:58But I've seen a lot worse said by other people than what was said in that clip that's going around.
01:06Yeah, I mean, he is one of Trump's most prominent critics, and he does have a demographic, a youthful demographic who watch his show, and he's seen as very influential in that.
01:18So, yeah, Trump, even in the UK, he has taken his time out. He's obviously been on True Social to celebrate this firing.
01:27He said that Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings.
01:30So he has kind of shied away from, you know, the free speech kind of debacle that we're talking about here.
01:38Now, what I found most interesting is that the show has been taken off the air by the network operator Nexstar.
01:47Now, Nexstar and Sinclair, they're two of the biggest TV station owners in the U.S.
01:53Now, they are both currently seeking approval from the Federal Communications Commission, that's the FCC, for upcoming deals.
02:00Now, here's where it gets interesting, because the chair of the FCC is a man called Brendan Carr, who was handpicked by Trump for the position.
02:09Now, unlike his predecessors, he has opened a lot of probes into television station owners that Trump has publicly disliked or fallen out with.
02:19No other chair has gone in as hard or has done as much.
02:23So it does, at the moment, look as if the FCC is being used for the Trump administration.
02:33Yeah, if they've got an axe to grind, they're sending in the FCC in order to control certain aspects of the media.
Comments