One of the most indelible political moments of our time took place back in 2006 at the White House Correspondent’s Association annual dinner, fatuously known as “The Nerd Prom.” The yearly ritual, featuring red carpets and celebrity guests, remains one of the most cringe institutions in DC, a relic of a time when the press and the political establishment could pretend that the country wasn’t descending rapidly into total dysfunction. By 2006, the ceremony had already outlived that dubious rationale what with the country still mired in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the people souring on President George W. Bush, so the time was ripe for an epic roast of establishment journalism and DC politics. The comedian who delivered it was one of the master parodists of our time. I speak, of course, of the great Stephen Colbert who appeared in the guise of his alter ego, a right wing pundit modeled on then Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, to zing journalism and the Bush administration as only he could.
Colbert had perfected the character on his nightly Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report” where he often would often skewer Republicans and the right wing press but on this night he did it right to their faces. It caused a stir, with some commentary suggesting that perhaps Colbert had “gone too far” but nobody sued anyone or had a public tantrum.
Colbert would eventually shed his conservative character taking over the CBS Late Night show in 2015 when David Letterman retired. But his political satire remained just as sharp, especially when Donald Trump came on the scene. Trump is not known to have a sense of humor, certainly not about himself, so he was not amused. (In fact, he is said to have been motivated to enter the presidential race when he attended the 2012 White House Correspondents Dinner and was visibly upset when President Obama made fun of him.)
Colbert has been extremely successful in the role, usually winning the time slot. But this past week he was let go by the parent company of CBS, Paramount in the wake of their settlement of Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the company for $16 million. (Apparently, he’s already received it and it’s burning a hole in his pocket.)The suit was based upon the contention that CBS had edited an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris last fall, which Trump absurdly claimed was election interference. No one expected the suit to prevail but Trump essentially extorted Paramount into settling with a promise to obstruct a big merger for which they needed government approval if they didn’t. Within days of the settlement they announced that they would be ending The Late Show altogether, insisting that it was purely a financial decision having nothing to do with the settlement, which no one believes.
It’s hard to know which would be worse: if Trump demanded that Colbert be fired and they agreed to do it or if they fired him as a little gesture of good will to please the president. It’s horrific, either way. But it is par for the course these days ad one institution after another caves to the most serious threat to free speech since the Red Scare in the 1950s.
It’s easy to shrug this off — it’s only a comedian losing a job. Big deal. But as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes put it:
Donald Trump, meanwhile, is ecstatic as you can see in this Truth Social post, and clearly is prepared to go even farther:
Paramount issued a statement saying the agreement “does not include PSAs or anything related to PSAs” but Skydance, the company that’s buying Paramount, didn’t comment fuelling speculation that this “side-deal” may have come from their side. The New York Post and Fox News both reported that the company is happy to set aside the time “in support of conservative causes” in the future.
If that’s true, Skydance has agreed to become a full-fledged propaganda arm of the Trump administration which may seem somewhat quaint considering that Fox News already fills that role. But this takes it to a whole new level, following the playbook of the modern authoritarian states like Russia and Hungary. The question is whether the rest of the media companies will follow.
No one is safe, not even the right wing media. Trump filed $10 billion (with a “b”) defamation lawsuit against Dow Jones and its parent company, News Corp. over the Wall St. Journal’s decision to publish a story about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Chairman Rupert Murdoch was apparently unmoved by entreaties from Trump and Vice President JD Vance who reportedly traveled to Montana last week to meet with him in person to head off the story. So far, the paper stands by its story.
It remains to be seen if they too will find a way to “settle” and make Trump feel like a big winner, therefore buying themselves some good will from the administration. That seems to be how this works. But it’s still startling to realize that Trump’s paeans to free speech and all the pro-Trump free speech warriors who called for the fainting couch over the Biden administration’s requests that the social media companies monitor COVID disinformation are now completely forgotten.
This isn’t the only example of Trump and his henchmen cracking down on free expression. They are arresting and detaining people based upon their writings in student newspapers. They are demanding that private institutions like universities, corporations and law firms ban any discussion of diversity and inclusion or face losing vital funding and civil rights lawsuits from the Department of Justice. Trump even threatened to pull support for a new football stadium in Washington DC unless the team reinstates the racist “Redskins” name.
The U.S. government is openly censoring anyone with whom it disagrees and demanding that others spread its propaganda, all under threat of blocking their ability to do business or removing their funding. It’s blackmail, pure and simple. Unfortunately, it appears that most of our institutions are too craven or too frightened to defend their own freedom. I guess it’s going to be up to the comedians to fight the power if nobody else will.
Salon