Have you not read the news that abc was pressured by the fcc wrt a pending merger?

Isn’t that the federal govt “abridging the freedom of the press” ?

To play devil's advocate, ABC doesn't have a right to execute a corporate merger and this is what was threatened by the FCC. I don't know what the courts would think of this kind of argument and unfortunately we will probably not find out.

Regardless of that, it certainly seems like some kind of corruption.

Any limitation on their right to merger should be spelled out in a law passed by congress and not from pressure from an executive appointee.

   "this is what was threatened by the FCC"

For clarity, as parent points out, specific comment from FCC exists. The general sense of threat Disney felt is not the same as a specific FCC comment

I think you’re right on Kimmel while being wrong about TFA.

The president does not get to dictate broadcasting licenses on the basis of whether or not they criticize him but ABC is not required to platform Kimmel.

(I think it’s a bad move to deplatform people and bad for democracy but it’s been misconstrued into an issue of constitutional guarantees and it is not one.)

>All of the arguments used to excuse cancel culture ("right to speech not to a platform", "it's a company censoring you, not the government", "freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences") are now being leveraged by the right.

Those arguments are correct though. Free speech doesn't guarantee a platform. Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences. The First Amendment does only apply to the government. None of this was controversial until the right decided shitposting their hot takes on black people and the Holocaust was a fundamental human right.

And they're being leveraged by the same right wing that wanted the government to seize control of social media platforms and force them to allow right-wing content and make moderation illegal. And Jimmy Kimmel's firing was due to pressure by the chair of the FCC, which isn't even the context in which those arguments were made and is an obvious violation of the First Amendment

But zing, I guess..

> because they were being banned for their hot takes on black people and the Holocaust

This was the sales pitch, but it wasn't reality. People were being banned for much less severe speech than this kind of stuff and the window was slowly creeping towards less and less severe disagreements with the dominant narrative. I think bans for COVID stuff were particularly galling for many people[1].

There's a fair argument that the COVID situation was dire and required drastic action, but this can't be papered over in retrospect by saying that only holocaust deniers and racists were being banned.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/2/twitter-to-permanent...

OK, holocaust deniers, racists and anti-vaxxers. The point is, platforms always had a right to ban people, that was always the deal. And it still isn't the same as actual government oppression of free speech, which is clearly what's happening WRT this Charlie Kirk stuff. Even if you take the most cynical, negative interpretation of the COVID misinformation bans and "Twitter Files" to me this still seems categorically worse.

> Was the assumption that the left would own the cultural zeitgeist forever?

Yes, that was clearly the assumption. It's hard to blame them; that had been the case for 50+ years, and the early 2020s suggested that they had the system licked and would be fully in charge until their internal contradictions brought them down.

This is extremely out of touch.

Don’t you remember post 9/11 war mongering? Jingoistic country songs?

Was the Supreme Court not almost fully captured in the early 2020s?

Was the majority of news media on television and radio not extremely right leaning?