By pressuring broadcast giant ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show—a decision that ABC reversed this week—the Trump administration has taken its assault on the First Amendment to new heights over the past week. Kimmel’s show is back on the air for now, but the whole debacle has revealed just how vulnerable free speech in America is to political and corporate authoritarianism. This is a crisis, and both Democrats and Republicans have set the stage for it. “As corporate media accelerate their censorship of comedians and journalists,” renowned media analyst Jeff Cohen writes, “we must realize that we got to this dire situation because of old-fashioned, bipartisan corruption in Washington, DC.” In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Cohen about how the consolidation of corporate control over the media, mixed with a ravenously censorious Trump administration, has left free speech in America hanging by a thread.Guest:

• Jeff Cohen is a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College and the author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. In 1986, Cohen founded the media watch group FAIR; he is also the co-founder of RootsAction.org.

Additional resources:

• Jeff Cohen, Salon, “Kimmel’s suspension shows media censorship is a structural problem”
• Bobby Allyn, NPR, “Legal experts say pulling Jimmy Kimmel from air may amount to illegal ‘jawboning’”
• Paul Starr, The American Prospect, “Capture the media, control the culture?”

Credits:

• Producer: Rosette Sewali
• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

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