It wasn't controversial, but this is literally the textbook Manufacturing Consent model. The small number of people in positions of power at the network are either overtly aligned with the president that he just talked bad about, or want to stay or get on the president's good side. He doesn't even need to pick up the phone or post anything on social media, they know what they need to do.
To be fair to the executives. The main regulator that could essentially issue the corporate death penalty, the FCC chairman that can revoke their license to operate, literally said “we can do this the easy way or the hard way”. That’s a Dirty Harry or goodfellas quote. So much for “government shouldn’t pick winners and losers in the economy”.
You really don't have to be fair to the executives. The FCC absolutely can't do shit about Jimmy Kimmel, and would lose the procedure if it ever came to it. Instead, they immediately bent the knee and decided that loyalty to the nascent fascist regime was more important that standing up against the most clear cut and unjustifiable attack to free speech in a long time.
It's more that ABC/Disney is beholden to two right-leaning broadcasters who are colluding with threats to assist in their prohibited merger that will be approved now because they just gave the felon a successful hand job. There is no indication that the ABC execs are anything more than spineless, unprincipled cowards who cave in a light breeze.
Unless everyone at the top has been fired, ABC and Disney are not remotely aligned with the president. A short while ago, they were boycotted by the right for their slanted debate hosting and woke children’s programming.
Those two could be entirely compatible if it turns out they never gave a hoot about the actual politics, and only did all that stuff because they thought it would get them more favor with viewers, and thereby more money.
I would personally not raise an eyebrow to learn this was the case.
I think most commenters are missing that a local broadcaster monopoly used their own freedom of association to drop the show
The FCC and Trump merely dogpiled on this
For Disney, they need to court the broadcaster monopoly as a key stakeholder to their revenue, this is all private sector and not a constitutional issue
But when Disney is getting kicked and then an expensive fight with the government looms while their revenue is already threatened and would be expensive to resolve with the government , they buckled
Thats the calculus here
but because they buckled, now their customers are using their own freedom of association to disassociate, hampering Disney’s revenue more from that angle
I suspect they were looking for an excuse to axe and found one. It was all milquetoast, and that entire format of television is dead and the networks know they need to pivot somewhere.
The FCC chair threatening your broadcast license is a pretty good "excuse". There wasn't a public outcry, it was a government outcry along with threats along multiple lines of leverage.
Yep! And he wrote the whole chapter in Project 2025 outlining that he would do exactly this, in advance of taking the job. Who is going to stop him? The Supreme Court? Not likely.
Not necessarily. Broadcasters have a license from the government to use the airwaves and they are obligated to act in the public interest. So some restrictions apply to them.
1. You can’t take someone’s property with out due process of law. There has been no showing that they violated that obligation. 2. The constitution has supremacy, so you can’t violate someone’s first amendment rights in service of FCC regulations.
In fact there is a more than credible argument that criticizing and mocking politicians is an essential public service.
> Broadcasters have a license from the government to use the airwaves and they are obligated to act in the public interest. So some restrictions apply to them.
Necessarily.
Carr threatened to revoke licenses based on the political speech of ABC. That's clearly unconstitutional. Trump followed up by saying licenses should be revoked for criticism of himself. Unitary President cuts both ways.
If this is okay, the next Democrat who's President needs to shut down Fox News and their ilk or be impeached. (From the perspective of fomenting rebellion and generally posing a threat to our republic, Jimmy Kimmel isn't even on the list.)
Fox News is technically cable, as the other poster under you has noted, which is a favored defense for this sort of discussion.
What they ignore is that local Fox affiliate stations who are also licensed by the FCC have a history of aligning with Fox News misinformation campaigns relating to covid, election integrity, Russia and Ukraine, Palestine, etc.
So no, the FCC licensed world is not left leaning, and these local affiliate stations should absolutely be held to the same standard.
Fox news doesn't have a broadcast license. ABC does.
As with redistricting, democrats are limited because things are already biased in their favor. Broadcast networks are all center-left at this point, if not then show me one major broadcaster that is center right. Democrats basically have nobody to go after.
To your point, The Democrats, when back in power, could extend licensing issues into cableTV, etc... and attempt to fire Fox or Newsmax commentators... I would argue the Biden administration already attempted to do a form of this, as we saw with Facebook, Twitter, et al, the last administration certainly tried influencing the online arena.
I just think both sides do it, although on this forum it seems to trigger mostly the left side.
Fox News doesn’t have a broadcast license but Fox Broadcasting does. If people are doing this sort of extortion, it wouldn’t be a leap to see the whole Fox corporation in the crosshairs. This is all just a terrible precedent for what the future holds.
> would argue the Biden administration already attempted to do a form of this, as we saw with Facebook, Twitter, et al, the last administration certainly tried influencing the online arena
Not comparable. That said, I agree—if this precedent stands, there should be personal liability for Newsmax commenters under a future administration. (And, of course, they should be barred from federal property.)
One would also go after the online streaming companies to delist their content. Google and Meta are constantly under antitrust controlled. TikTok is government owned. And you could start knocking on X with its money-transfer ambitions and Elon’s robotaxi approvals (to say nothing of federal contracts).
That's not what the public interest requirement means. In fact, the FCC's own website says "the public interest is best served by permitting free expression of views."[0] And anyway, there are specific carve outs for late-night programming.
> Hoaxes. The broadcast by a station of false information concerning a crime or catastrophe violates the FCC's rules if:
> The station licensee knew that the information was false
There quite a few other rules, obscenity and violence and such. But they probably got Jimmy on the crime that was just committed + spreading false information.
Nothing he said was false though, the Republicans were trying to paint the shooter as anyone other than one of their own. It might be that he's actually a leftist, but Kimmel described Republican behavior and did not actually make any assertions of fact regarding the alleged shooter.
There was some initial social media reaction portraying this guy as some hard right fascist or whatever, as well. So it wasn't something just Kimmel had come up with. It could be that by the time the show started more evidence came out and he was looking more one way, and Jimmy just had stale info or his staffers were lazy and didn't update him.
> Nothing he said was false though, the Republicans were trying to paint the shooter as anyone other than one of their own.
Yeah, and the show owners could have fought it. There might be a warning, a lawsuit, maybe a period to comply and make changes etc. But they folded immediately. They probably figured technically they could have explained it, but the PR aspect of it was a losing battle. Here is another part of the country flying flags half staff, and what is ABC's doing? Oh right, explaining away Kimmel's news and jokes and defending him. A lot of these corporations and their leaders can smell the way the wind blows and they really hate it when the wind blows away their profits, so they just react accordingly.
What hoax or false info? Also, Kimmel isn't a journalist or news reporter and his show isn't broadcast journalism. As far as obscenity rules, the rules don't necessarily apply between 10pm and 6am; "obscene" material is not allowed at any time of day, but "indecent" material is allowed on late-night television. These are terms that have specific meaning in the context of the law, and what Kimmel said would in no way rise to the level of obscene.
So why did the network fold so quickly? It's a simple enough explanation "we not journalists, these are all made up jokes and parodies, we send our condolences to the family ... etc".
They folded because they knew how the statement was perceived. Here is half the country flying flags half staff and ABC owners are defending Kimmel. They are worried about views and profits and when that is threatened everything goes out of the window.
Paradoxically, I think Kimmel is all of the sudden on top again, just due to the controversy. The younger crowd who don't sit and watch ABC, might have just learned about this Kimmel guy the first time. May be another network will pick him up, it could be a win for him overall.
No, they folded because the United States Federal government threatened them. That fact is the only thing that should matter in this discussion. This is a clear violation of the 1st Amendment by the government against protected speech (no matter how many people find that protected speech distasteful).
> No, they folded because the United States Federal government threatened them.
Yes because they control the FCC and FCC has rules in regards to the content of broadcasts. Kimmel is free to say anything he wants on his own website or platform and such, but as soon as it's on the "air" rules apply.
> This is a clear violation of the 1st Amendment by the government against protected speech (no matter how many people find that protected speech distasteful).
If it's that clear the would have fought it. It wasn't clear at all. Moreover it was just a bad PR look instead of saying something like "condolences for the family blah blah" they would be defending Kimmel's phrasing. That's why they dropped like him a hot potato.
> Perception has nothing to do with it, the mafia-threats did
Mafia threats work precisely because of perception. The perception of the power is the power. If everyone caves, and can't fight back, the mafia gets stronger.
As it turns out the government can dictate how the broadcast frequencies are used, including dictate things about the content. The company could have switched to online only and continued the show. Heck, they should have called uncle sam's bluff maybe and see what happened.
They are not sending Jimmy to gulag or arresting him. Jimmy can still continue his show just maybe on his own youtube channel or his own online platform or something.
> Nevertheless, there are two issues related to broadcast journalism that are subject to Commission regulation: hoaxes and news distortion. Hoaxes. The broadcast by a station of false information concerning a crime or catastrophe violates the FCC's rules if [...] The station licensee knew that the information was false.
All Jimmy had to do, it seems, was to say "this is all a made up joke" and move on, instead of presenting whatever he was saying as information or news.
> If a station airs a disclaimer before the broadcast that clearly characterizes the program as fiction and the disclaimer is presented in a reasonable manner under the circumstances, the program is presumed not to pose foreseeable public harm.
> However, as public trustees, broadcast licensees may not intentionally distort the news. The FCC has stated that “rigging or slanting the news is a most heinous act against the public interest.” The Commission will investigate a station for news distortion if it receives documented evidence of rigging or slanting, such as testimony or other documentation, from individuals with direct personal knowledge that a licensee or its management engaged in the intentional falsification of the news. Of particular concern would be evidence of the direction to employees from station management to falsify the news. However, absent such a compelling showing, the Commission will not intervene.
Again, Jimmy didn't get sent to the gulag and didn't go to jail. He can still run a show on his own platform or a youtube channel or maybe Netflix will sign him up. Heck, after this, I'd say he would easily triple his view numbers if anything.
The US government threatened a private company in an attempt to suppress speech that is protected under the 1st Amendment from government interference. This is a violation of the US Constitution. Full stop.
Yes threatening to pull the FCC license and canceling Kimmel's show is exactly like torturing, killing and imprisoning people in labor and death camps. We should all fell very sorry for poor Jimmy, we don't know how he'll even manage.
And what makes you think we will continue to have elections? This Project 25 is clearly a plan to destroy our Republic and subject us all to minority Christo-Fascist rule. We need to wake up and recognize what we are up against, or it is guaranteed to happen here.
Yeah that is definitely on the table, we'll see what happens.
Here, interestingly, just a threat was enough. I wonder why the owners didn't want to fight it at all? The speed with with they folded was very telling. As others mentioned, I suspect if they decided they just didn't want to keep paying Kimmel for the show. He was making somewhere around $15m/year or something they saw a chance to say "goodbye".
It’s actually a terrible excuse as the backlash is demonstrating. Even if they were about to axe the show all along it would have been a good idea to delay that to avoid the appearance they were caving to government pressure.
> It’s actually a terrible excuse as the backlash is demonstrating. Even if they were about to axe the show all along it would have been a good idea to delay that to avoid the appearance they were caving to government pressure.
But that meant having to defend making up stuff about a murder and comment on the crime even as the others are flying flags half staff. Quickly showing they caved to government's pressure was exactly the look they wanted.
And let's say fought back, who would that be for? They younger viewers are not sitting at home watching TV and cheering Jimmy on. Many don't even know who Jimmy is; they just learned this week because it's on social media. So putting some kind of a defense and turning it into a battle rather than caving would have been the worse of the two choices they had.
I find it hard to take that threat seriously. There would be blood on the street - real blood - americans won't stand for it. (Some will of course but enough would not that the fcc would blink)
FCC chair literally said "We can do this the easy way or the hard way" the easy way being ABC cancelling it, the hard way being pulling the license.
And if you wait for the license to be pulled as your red line, you misunderstand how this works. This is an actual threat, the kind of thing that mobsters get RICO charges for. The threat has done its work and served the purposes of the administration. The crime has already taken place. The mobster says "but he agreed to pay the protection money and nobody ever actually broke his kneecaps"
"These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel,” said Carr, a Trump appointee, “or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Anyone can say anything. Follow through and abc can just ignore the order and tell everyone watching what is happening. They have the power of the pen and will get people running to their congressman.
Saying that they blinked seems to be an admission that it was a threat with impact, no?
What is there to blink about if it was not a threat?
If I walk up to someone with a gun and wave the gun around and demand they give me their money or I'll shoot them, it does not matter if I was "serious" or not about the threat. If I tell a jury that I wouldn't have actually ever have shot the person, and that they just decided to give me their money because they didn't really need it so much, I'm not sure any jury would agree, unless I was a hell of a salesman.
You seem to be saying that what happened is fine because it never actually got to a truly unconstitutional or get-in-the-streets worthy level of censorship. You seem to be saying if they actually revoked the license, that would be the red line. But because they never did, no harm, no foul.
What we are saying is that just by making the threat, the censorship has full and complete effect. They don't need to revoke the license to use the power of the government to influence constitutionalally protected speech. They just need to threaten.
This is illegal: "Nice business you've got here," the police officer says. "Shame that crime is on the rise. And we don't have as many officers to patrol. But give a donation and we'll take care of you. Don't and we'll stop answering your 911 calls."
Now replace with "We heard what you said about the mayor. Apologize or we'll stop answering your 911 calls."
Based on everything that has gone one that seems to me at least very naive. There was practically a textbook length document outlining what the administrstion planned to do if they got in power and they are going step by step through it.
The president said there are 4 comedians (who make fun of him) that he wants to get off the air. After this event he posted something along the lines of "2 down, 2 to go." Followed by "Why don't you just force the other two out now?".
There was nothing wrong about what was said - they just already have a plan and pick any small item to claim is the cause.
For example they want to defund left leaning non profits and think tanks. They don't have a reason to. But now they are trying to claim they motivated the Kirk killing - not because they think it did, but because it's what is already their plan.
People still thinking they are being objectives or that there are "norms" left, in my opinion haven't been paying attention.
I don't believe you yet that Americans won't stand for it. There have been so many red lines crossed that most Americans don't even know what's going on.
He was last averaging 129K viewers per episode in the 18-49 demographic, I'd say that is a far better "excuse" than a threat from the FCC. As if DIS doesn't have a legion of attorneys. Give me a break.
I really don’t understand this argument that he wasn’t popular as if that’s at all relevant. Aside from the cost of putting the legion of attorneys protecting a show that’s not bringing enough revenue and the fact, there’s a broader risk with the Nexstar merger that requires explicit government approval that the FCC also threatened.
More importantly, his viewership didn’t suddenly change and the cancellation came about pretty clearly as a result of the FCC threat and not any business decision the company would have made otherwise. Not a lawyer but I would think that Kimmel has a 1a lawsuit he could bring against DIS and the government.
It was a very obvious dig at the president. There's still not good justification for the government to step in, but claiming it's "milquetoast" is baffling.
Digs directed at the President or the administration are and always have been well within the Overton window in American journalism, and previous Presidents and administrations have just seen them as a fact of life and brushed them off.
Thus “milquetoast”: an implication that any reaction to this is, objectively, an overreaction.
That the current President is a habitual over-reactor does not change that fact. It just means that you can paradoxically be taking a heterodox / outré stance by saying objectively milquetoast things.
Have you ever seen a late night show? Monologue jokes about the sitting president practically define the format. Every other president going back decades would just man up and take it.
I guess it depends on the sort of media you consume. I’ve seen Destiny saying conservatives need to be afraid of getting shot, and it seems like he’s still alive.
The other people who lost jobs seemed to have said much more direct and offensive remarks than Kimmel as well.
Honestly, I thought it was way more tame than I'd expect for comedy these days, but it's also been a long time since I watched a late night talk show and traditionally the ones on the old networks tended to have much more mild and lighthearted comedy compared to the more biting/edgy stuff you'd get on cable.
The owner of the Sinclair Broadcasting group (the company that owns the ABC stations that started this) is a far-right ideologue that has been trying to drag ABC into News Nation territory for the past decade or so.
Nothing Kimmel said was controversial. It was just being used as a false flag to justify other things.
> What Kimmel Said, and the affiliates broadcasted, was a claim that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was a “maga” supporter.
This is the actual quote:
"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,"
Note that he doesn't say that the shooter was MAGA, only that those within the right wing influencer sphere were desperately trying to characterize the shooter as anything other than one of them. This is unambiguously and factually true.
I swear, media literacy in the united states is in the fucking toilet.
Really, literacy in generally is tanking in the US. In 2024 over half the adults in the country couldn't even read at a sixth grade level! 21% are outright illiterate.
> he doesn't say that the shooter was MAGA, only that those within the right wing influencer sphere were desperately trying to characterize the shooter as anything other than one of them. This is unambiguously and factually true.
I'll put it in the technically true but ambiguously misinformation category. (Which is on every metric better than what goes on at Fox.)
which has been the backbone of satirical and scathing social and political commentary in the western world for 50 years at least.
The Daily Show, The -s30e102- 2025-09-18 Maria Ressa episode with Jon Stewart's monologue and interview went another way, "rolling over" completely into total Trump submission followed by drawing direct comparisons to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte popularist seizing of control of government.
The number of people defending this makes me seriously wonder if we need a two-speed democracy. One class that is given safety. The other who is exposed to dangerous elements like Jimmy Kimmel…
That isn't the same and you know it. Kimmel made no direct comment about what the shooter was aligned with, only about what the right wing sphere was attempting to frame them as being. Anyone with a moderate grasp of English should be able to tell the difference.
> There’s a relatively narrow rule which prohibits fcc licensed stations from knowing broadcasting false information if it has the possibility of creating civil unrest.
Oh wow, I didn't realize Fox News wasn't FCC-licensed.
Well, the subset of stations that pulled the show were the ones owned by a (right-wing) company, Nexstar, that has proposed a merger that is up for FCC review. It wasn’t fear of being punished for allowing a “falsehood” on the air, it was pursuit of favorable treatment from a political appointee.
Sinclair (38 stations) also pulled it and they own more than Nexstar (28 stations).
FWIW The Hollywood Reporter also is reporting that advertisers started threatening to pull their support as well[0] as several smaller stations.
> Meanwhile, the advertiser calls began to roll in and then the big affiliate conglomerates, Nexstar and Sinclair, threatened to preempt the show. The second source says that the blowback was snowballing enough that had ABC not acted, Kimmel’s show would have been dark in a large swath of the country, even beyond the Sinclair and Nexstar territories (including in the Washington, D.C., metro area).
> was a claim that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was a “maga” supporter.
I just watched the video.
What he said was that MAGA supporters were too quick to blame anyone but the right, before there was any evidence about the shooter’s identity or political stance.
It's 100% true that MAGA people were being very vocal all over social media trying to characterize him as not being a trump supporter. What part of that do you think was a lie?
How is it false? It isn't making the claim that the shooter was MAGA, but commenting on the right wing influencer sphere's recurring habit of accusing mass shooters of being associated with any group other than themselves.
> "anything other than one of them" can very easily be interpreted in two ways, one of them leading a person to believe that the adult (not a kid) was somehow "MAGA"
Anything can be interpreted in any way you want as long as you're arguing in bad faith
> at the very least, the situation as tense as it was (is?), Jimmy could have chosen to leave it alone for a bit - why say that MAGA is trying to "score political points" at this time? Why not consider that many people are genuinely grieving and upset?
lmao, no one, right wing influencers nor the government, is doing this.
> ABC fired his butt, not the FCC or anyone else. A sternly worded message from the FCC chairman doesn't make a company like DIS fire someone unless it is convenient for DIS. That's a fact.
It isn't "a fact". If a mob goon threatens action on an employer unless that employer punishes an employee, who the hell do you think is actually responsible?
He never said he was a MAGA supporter but that he was being claimed to be not “one of them”. Given that the shooter came from a conservative family in a conservative town and attended trade school and spent his time gaming, I think it’s reasonable to say that he was a product of the right wing milieu, and not a product of left wing indoctrination as the right alleges.
The fact that you believe this is the exact reasoning behind trying to prevent things like what Jimmy Kimmel did here.
It could not be more cut and dry than this. In fact it is so cut and dry that a conspiracy theory on both the left and the right is that the text messages demonstrating his political motivations aren’t genuine.
Are you asserting that he followed left wing influencers or read left wing books or attended left wing classes or somehow got his indoctrination from left wing sources?
There isn’t any evidence of that - there is only evidence that he hated the right wing (and to the contrary there is obvious evidence he came from a right wing milieu - just take a look at his parents). Simply hating a side doesn’t mean you have been indoctrinated by the other side - just look at people who left fundamentalist religious sects.
He said the guy who shot Charlie Kirk was MAGA, which isn’t true, according to the information that has come out from those actually working on the case in the various press conferences, and from the evidence that’s been made public.
It wasn’t meaningful to the joke he was looking to set up, it was just misinformation for misinformation’s sake. At least it came off that way.
Add to that high emotions from people coping with a murder, and there you have it.
He did not say that the kid was MAGA, or at least not exactly. Here’s all he said about it:
> We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
> In between the finger pointing there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level you can see how hard the President is taking this.
He then played a clip where a reporter asked Trump how he was doing. Trump said good and immediately started talking about his new ballroom.
What about any of that is misinformation? Given how they were certain the shooter was trans because he used arrows on the bullet - which were helldiver 2 codes - it did seem like people were trying to make it seem like the kid wasn’t MAGA.
Turns out the kid is neither, or both, and was just terminally online, which none of us want to admit is the real problem because we’re all also terminally online.
> with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them
Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not? It heavily implies that he is maga, and that’s why the maga gang is trying to deflect.
A lot of conclusions were jumped to early on by everyone. Things are more clear now, but still not 100%. From what I’ve seen so far he was a Trump supporter in his early teens, but did a full 180 in recent years, due to the influence on the internet, as you mentioned, and who knows what else.
If the ultimate joke was to laugh at Trump talking about his ballroom, I don’t see what his maga comments added to that. He stepped into a hornets nest and added nothing to the joke in the process.
Why would someone have to "desperately try to characterize" someone as something that they clearly are? To me, that language is clearly indicating that it is somehow difficult to do. At that time, it was fairly apparent that he was not MAGA, at least not in any remotely common sense of the word.
> At that time, it was fairly apparent that he was not MAGA
The criticism of the "MAGA gang" was _not_ about their actions at the time of the Kimmel broadcast, it was very much about their immediate behavior as soon as the shooting hit the news .. the time when nothing was known, the time when the FBI head was making statements about suspects that were untrue, the time when the US head of state was declaring war on the left .. you know, the time when nothing was known about the political allegiance of the shooter .. or the lack thereof.
I'm an outside observer, from here it's clear that the US has fallen deep into an Us v Them K-hole and that the current administration is all too happy to turn up the heat on the divisions that render the nation asunder .. the chaos makes the heist all the easier.
I could imagine interpreting the statement that way if he had said either before or after that it turned out the shooter was not MAGA. But stating it on its own, the effect in my mind was pretty clear: to communicate that the shooter was MAGA, and that the MAGA gang was doing their best to deny it.
The current president and vice president of the United States said on multiple media channels that an entire racial demographic of people in a city were eating cats and dogs, and those same people are concerned about the minutia of a late night comedian’s informational and semantic accuracy (who they also claim no one watches, which is probably itself mostly true).
Your god-president lies every single time he opens his mouth. Huge lies. The biggest lies. He also ridicules everyone he dislikes. With hurtful language. All the time.
He has never apologized for jack shit.
> Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not? It heavily implies that he is maga, and that’s why the maga gang is trying to deflect.
No one is tuning into Jimmy Kimmell for "news", though I am quite sure that his show is more truthful on a daily basis than your Fox News & Newsmax liars.
> If the ultimate joke was to laugh at Trump talking about his ballroom, I don’t see what his maga comments added to that. He stepped into a hornets nest and added nothing to the joke in the process.
The joke is that Trump probably does not give a flying fuck about Kirk. He cares about himself. That's it. He pivoted right to bragging about his dumb fucking ballroom.
It was a political assassination done by someone who vehemently disagreed with certain viewpoints. The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on. Kimmel's comments were grossly inaccurate and wildly irresponsible.
> The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on.
The only thing clear about the shooter's political positions, is that it'll be presented as whatever will be most convenient to the speaker. He held views that individually map across the spectrum, allowing anyone to point to something and assign him at an arbitrary location.
> Kimmel's comments were grossly inaccurate and wildly irresponsible.
Kimmel’s comments are about the behavior of the MAGA world, and they were true: the MAGA world was trying very hard to push the idea that the shooter was not one of them.
> The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on.
I'm sorry, which details? Why does his opinion about a handful of topics mean that we can infer his entire worldview? Why do we have to assume that his views mapped neatly onto one end of the US political spectrum or the other?
I think the problem no one on either side wants to admit is that these shooters rarely fall into either side. They’re mentally unstable people who are attracted to fringe crazy ideas, regardless of the political stripes.
Their behavior indicts all of us Americans.
But of course admitting that and doing something about it means working together, which is a much harder solution than pointing fingers at the other side and doing little else.
So when a talk show host vaguely on the left implies something that might not be true it is ground enough to disregard the fucking first amendment and use the power of the state to censor him. But when the entire GOP, including the president, all fabricate obvious lies about the shooter being successively trans, then antifa and then a radical leftist, it's fine. The double standards are fucking crazy.
Not so much offensive, as utterly puzzling given the information we had on him by Monday night.
Not a fan of Trump or Jimmy, and I don’t think this is a proportional or good response. I’m pretty stunned that there was actually momentum enough to take him off the air. I also don’t understand why he left that little dig in his monologue.
Which information? The completely unverified stuff based on "a reconstruction" or "aggressive interview posture" from the same FBI led by the guy currently contradicting himself and telling lies in front of Congress?
This Administration was basically founded on making strident claims on TV which turned out to be lies they couldn't back up in a court of law.
> I’m pretty stunned that there was actually momentum enough to take him off the air.
Have you not been paying attention to where rhetoric in this country has gone in the past 8 months? The first amendment is dead, the great leader is publically calling for his critics to lose their broadcast licenses, and the new SOP is for the government to squeeze the shit out of anyone who doesn't toe the line. (Which is an ever-shrinking group of people.)
Be it with SLAPP suits, or by holding merger approvals, or by just threatening witch-hunts.
This is what 48% of the electorate wanted, and, well, it's what they've delivered.
---
Meanwhile, in Fox land, Brian Kilmeade was publically calling for mass-murder of the mentally ill the other day. For some strange reason, neither Trump nor the FCC, nor all the people outraged about political violence are making a peep about that.
Kimmels show was expensive, Kimmel has baggage ( a history of racist comedy, including blackface ). This was a convenient opportunity to chop dead wood.
> I’m pretty stunned that there was actually momentum enough to take him off the air.
Very little was needed. The U.S. president had already ominously threatened Kimmel and other late night hosts the day after Colbert was canceled, weeks before the shooting.
I thought Kimmel was hilarious; but as they say, there’s no accounting for taste.
The most ridiculous thing about this is that the world doesn’t cleave neatly into “radical left lunatics” and the righteous real Americans. I still can’t tell what the murderer was. Whatever that was, he acted on his own impulses - ones that are not broadly celebrated, irrespective of claims to the contrary.
ummm First amendment? Its not the first time misinformation has been broadcasted on air, why does the FCC need to get involved in this one. Would they have gotten involved if the implication was that he was a liberal?
I don't see the FCC cancelling news shows on which Trump lies. Double standards driven by politics and why the govt orgs need career staff and not political players. Rule of Law anyone?
Did you miss the second part of my comment? Even if Kimmel was in the wrong he shouldn't be taken off the air. I'm just pointing out why Trump might be upset. It's a reason, not necessarily a good reason.
>Let’s just say that the alleged shooter’s political philosophies are likely complex and are yet to be fully understood
By most accounts it's safe to say he's left leaning. You don't have to be a card carrying DSA member or have your ideology fully align with the Democrats platform to earn that label.
The subject of the sentence was "the MAGA gang" - and it's true that they (and the president himself) were the ones desperately declaring right after the assassination before we had any information that shooter was a radical leftist. So for me it's a fair statement and really only disinformation if you purposely distort the sentence.
The second part of what he said is also a true statement, that they're using this tragic event to score political points and go after their political opponents.
Well, the kid did turn out to have ties to a radical leftist organization. He spent an awful lot of time on Antifa discord servers and, according to his acquaintances and friends, had frequent arguments with his conservative parents over politics. You think they were arguing about who voted Republican harder?
You're ignoring the part of the quote where he implied the killer was MAGA or MAGA affiliated. For reference the full quote is:
>The MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it
Kimmel didn't explicitly make the accusation that the killer was MAGA, but the use of the wording "desperately trying to imply ... as anything other than one of them" definitely gives that impression. I mean, why else would they be "desperately" trying to? If an attempt was made on Bernie or AOC I wouldn't characterize leftists prematurely blaming it on the right as "desperately". It's just the most logical inference. The "killer was right wing" narrative was also being pushed in some left leaning circles, so it's not exactly outlandish either.
He characterized the shooters as some MAGA whatever and he was presenting is a sure thing, which it still wasn't clear and it looked pretty iffy and not in line with any common sense.
FCC has and had for many years restrictions about what can be broadcast.
> The broadcast by a station of false information concerning a crime or catastrophe violates the FCC's rules if:
> The station licensee knew that the information was false;
So we have a 1) a crime that was committed 2) misinformation
The show runners should have fought it and say that they didn't know it was false. But then now the are fighting this uphill battle having to say "hey, Jimmy's show is totally a parody, not news everyone knows that, a staffer fed Jimmy some social media quotes, whatever". At that point it's kind of a bad look anyway, so the owners decided to just shut it down.
I'm sure it's an accident and not intentional! A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually canceling later.
It's possible but I think Hanlon's Razor is more likely. I saw this happen myself and the form submission was successful on the second attempt. I just don't think they had the capacity to handle this surge of traffic to this endpoint/service.
It can be a mixture of both. It's extremely easy to Cover Your Ass while intentionally dragging your feet when a bug works in your favor. The manager simply has to decide that other tasks are higher priority.
Why would any manager prioritize this when it's going to blow over in less than a day, as evidenced by other commentators saying the site is already back up?
Right. I mean, ideally, because regulations have sufficient teeth that the company's existence is jeopardized by having shady business practices. When "it's a bug" is no longer an excuse, they could have avoided such a risk by having customers buy punch cards rather than saving their credit cards, for instance.
The problem with "Hanlon's Razor" is that everything can be explained by incompetence by making suitable assumptions. It outright denies the possibility of malice and pretends as if malice is rare. Basically, a call to always give the benefit of the doubt to every person or participant's moral character without any analysis whatsoever of their track record.
Robert Hanlon himself doesn't seem to be notable in any area of rationalist or scientific philosophy. The most I could find about him online is that he allegedly wrote a joke book related to Murphy's laws. Over time, it appears this obscure statement from that book was appended with Razor and it gained respectability as some kind of a rationalist axiom. Nowhere is it explained why this Razor needs to be an axiom. It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities. Bayesian reasoning? Priors? What the hell are those? Just say "Hanlon's Razor" and nothing more needs to be said. Nothing needs to be examined.
The FS blog also cops out on this lazy shortcut by saying this:
> The default is to assume no malice and forgive everything. But if malice is confirmed, be ruthless.
No conditions. No examination of data. Just an absolute assumption of no malice. How can malice ever be confirmed in most cases? Malicious people don't explain all their deeds so we can "be ruthless."
We live in a probabilistic world but this Razor blindly says always assume the probability of malice is zero, until using some magical leap of reasoning that must not involve assuming any malice whatsoever anywhere in the chain of reasoning (because Hanlon's Razor!), this probability of malice magically jumps to one, after which we must "become ruthless." I find it all quite silly.
> It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities
Parent isn't advocating for assuming malice, or assuming anything really, but to reason about the causes. Basically, that we'd have better discourse if no axiom was used in the first place.
I agree. It seems to be an all too common example of both:
1. lack of nuance in thought (i.e. either assume good intentions or assume malice, not some probability of either, or a scale of malice)
2. the overwhelming prevalence of bad faith arguments, most commonly picking the worst possible argument feasibly with someone's words.
In this case instead of a possibility of it being a small act of opportunity (like mentioned above of just dragging feet) not premeditated, alternatives are never mentioned but instead just assumed folks are talking about some higher up conspiracy and on top of that that must be what these people are always doing.
Anyway thank you for your point it is an interesting read :)
IMHO you're taking it a bit too literally and seriously; I suggest interpreting it more loosely, ie "err on the side of assuming incompetence [given incompetence is rampant] and not malice [which is much rarer]." As a rule of thumb, it's a good one.
To me the more problematic part is anchoring the discussion into rejecting a specific extreme (malice) when there will be a lot of behavior either milder, or neither incompetence nor malice. For instance is greed, opportunism or apathy malice ?
It doesn’t say don’t think about malice as a possibility, it says that if you aren’t going to think about it, you should ignore malice as a possibility.
That's because actual malice IS rare. Corporations are not filled with evil people, but people make perfectly rational, normal decisions based on their incentives that result in the emergent phenomenon of perceived malicious actions.
Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak. To quote CS Lewis, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
> Corporations are not filled with evil people, but people make perfectly rational, normal decisions based on their incentives that result in the emergent phenomenon of perceived malicious actions.
This rationalization is cope. All US Corporations making "normal" decisions all the time isn't casually obvious. I would say that wherever there is an opportunity to exploit the customer, they usually do at different levels of sophistication. This may mistakenly seem like fair play to someone who thinks a good UI is a good trade for allocated advertisement space, when it's literally social engineering.
Corporations make decisions that more frequently benefit them at the cost of some customer resource. Pair that with decisions rarely being rolled back (without financial incentive), you get a least-fair optimization over time. This is not normal by any stretch, as people expect a somewhat fair value proposition. Corporations aren't geared for that.
Agreed that actual malice is relatively rare (at least, relative to incompetence!). But I feel your take on Hitler is questionable. The question of evil is a tricky one, but I don't think there's a good case to be made that he was only trying to do the right thing. He was completely insane. But leaving aside moral culpability or metaphysical notions of judgment, for any definition of "malice", he embodied it to an the absolute maximum degree.
> That's because actual malice IS rare. Corporations are not filled with evil people,
Corporations don't have to be filled with evil people for malice to be rampant. All it takes is for one person in a position of power or influence who is highly motivated to screw over other human beings to create a whole lot of malice. We can all think of examples of public officials or powerful individuals who have made it their business to spread misery to countless others. Give them a few like-minded deputies and the havoc they wreak can be incalculable.
As for Hitler, if we can't even agree that orchestrating and facilitating the death of millions of innocent people is malicious, then malice has no meaning.
C. S. Lewis has written a great many excellent things, but his quote there strikes me as self-satisfied sophistry. Ask people being carpet bombed or blockade and starved if they're grateful that at least their adversary isn't trying to help them.
The "malice" part of the razor is bait. People typically act out of self-interest, not malice. That's why anyone who parrots Hanlon's Razor has already lost; they fell for the false dichotomy between malice and incompetence, when self-interest isn't even offered as an explanation.
> Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak.
Disgusting take. Don't simp for hitler. How am I having to type this in 2025?
Yep, "Hanlon's Razor" is pseudo-intellectual nonsense. It sets up a false dichotomy between two characteristics, neither of which is usually sufficient to explain a bad action.
I recently heard on a podcast where one of the guests recounted what his father used to say about the employees making cash-handling mistakes in the small store he owned. It was something like, "if it was merely incompetence, you'd think half of the errors would be in my favor."
It probably is a glitch in this case, but it's hard not to see the dark patterns once you've learned about them.
If you short charge a customer they will demand correct change if you overpay a customer won't complain. In the cases of customers giving back extra money it becomes neutral.
His father's theory didn't take into account this.
I’m amazed at the prevalence of conspiracy theories on HN in recent years. Even for simple topics like a website crashing under load we get claims that it’s actually a deliberate conspiracy, even though the crashes have turned this from a quiet event into a social media and news phenomenon, likely accelerating the number of cancellations.
my first manager told my as i started my first oncall "we dont think anybody actually cares about this thing, so if it breaks, dont fix it too quickly, so we can see who notices"
That's true, but it's seldom going to be the case that the account cancellation portion of the app is all on it's own. It's going to be built into the rest of the application, including the parts your happy customers are actually paying for. You're taking down a lot of the site.
And I don't know about others, but the one thing that's sure to make me cancel and never return is when a business tries to be a jerk about subscribers. I know one subscription service that when you try to cancel will instead ask you to pause. Except when you pause, the site will make the buttons to complete a sale begin disabled. Then 10 to 15 seconds later, the button enables. It only does this so that they can show you a request to resume your subscription. Nope. I immediately went and fully cancelled, and I haven't been back. I only intended to pause for a short time because I was unable to use the service at all for several weeks. Instead because they wanted to grasp onto every customer too tightly, and they lost me for good. They didn't respect me, so I don't want their product anymore.
That’s the trick with capacity planning around cancellation. You can always deprioritize it because any improvement increases the speed with which revenue decreases (not valuable to the business) and customer satisfaction with this flow generally doesn’t matter since you’re losing their business. The only negative risk factor is CC chargebacks which will cost you some money but at scale most people generally don’t deal with that hassle vs just trying to cancel a few times.
Big corporations are made of people, some who post here.
Disney's internal systems for something like this are a hodgepodge of the Hulu, D+/Bamtech, old corporate disney, and some bits sent out to SaaS. There's been multiple layers of layoffs and service ownership changes since the pandemic. I don't think the org would be able to rate limit by faking crashes if it tried.
What is happening is that routes and systems that normally have little and predictable traffic now are getting exercised... a lot harder (the exact numbers are for management to explain). Most things are going to be very resilient to this, as it's not THAT much traffic: It's still a small fraction vs resubscriptions and logins, but not everything is. Since the unsubscribe flows are never going to be anyone's top priority, this things happen.
You don't have to believe me, but I tell you it's incompetence, not malice.
As you acquire properties, it's almost never possible to rebuild the systems from scratch, and instead it's becomes layers upon layers of patches and quick fixes.
A fun one lately has been AT&T. We have streaming with DirecTV, and they of course share authentication with the parent AT&T. So whenever I try to login to AT&T's website to manage my wireless or fiber, it redirects and logs me into DirecTV, everytime. The only way I can manage my service is to use AT&T's mobile app.
I appreciate this peek behind the curtain but don't share your cheer that humans being involved in the process somehow means it should get the benefit of the doubt when things like this happen.
In fact, the reverse is actually quite common. The big corporation part often removes too much of the humanity from people. Too many people are comfortable making incredibly callous decisions at work because, hey, it's not their fault, they're just one small cog in the human crushing machine, and we all know what happens to bad cogs...
This way of thinking has excused a lot of evil/malicious actions. I think it's time we actually start shining our collective flashlights at things, especially big companies, when their own systems break in ways that benefit them.
These protest boycotts never last very long. There are many large brand names that have been boycotted over the years and they are all still in business and mostly bigger than ever.
Boycotts are different from unsubscribing. You can boycott Chic-fil-a and then one day return, but cutting off monthly revenue streams all at once is a much different dynamic. It takes a lot to get those customers back, especially for a service that already reaches most Americans.
Maybe. There are lots of people who subscribe to these streaming services for a month or a season and then cancel, and then sign up again later because there's a new show they want to watch.
I cancelled on Wednesday night. We probably haven't watched anything on Disney+for two or three weeks; the value was getting lower over time (possibly because we've watched a lot of what we wanted to).
Had it not been for this event, I'd have probably just let the subscription hang around indefinitely (or until some big price increase caused me to reevaluate it), but as you note, it's going to be a struggle to get me back --- not because of the politics involved, but because the politics got me over the "eh, can't be bothered" hump to evaluate the value I was getting and it came up kinda marginal compared to when I first signed up.
The big conglomerates are more resistant to it. Even of one of their brands becomes damaged, they have 20 others. It's hard for people to even understand all the things they own.
Some people have been boycotting target for a while now, but people have also been boycotting walmart for longer. Both companies are still around and have billions (tens and hundreds of billions) in assets. Enough people will keep shopping there to keep them in business. If either company ever does die off it won't be because of a boycott. Even where boycotts have a measurable impact on their earnings it's not as if it matters. Do you think the CEO of either company would have to meaningfully change their lifestyle one bit if the company makes make a few billion less one year? They wouldn't feel it even if they never got another dime from their company again. They'd still be able to live out the rest of their lives without ever worrying about money. They have no reason to fear a boycott.
It doesn't stop me from avoiding shopping at them both, but I know they aren't losing any sleep over it and I don't expect they'll suddenly stop putting profit over everything else.
It would be hard to keep a secret. Someone would leak it. When i worked a for a social network, we were accused of censorship during a presidential election campaign. People were sharing and posting a clip of text in support of a candidate. It triggered the spam system which categorized it as bot spam and deleted all the posts because all the posts were identical.
> A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually canceling later.
They better be sure there are no disgruntled or unhappy employees and no layoffs coming up, otherwise that slack or email message will come out and it will just make things worse.
I remember the HP website crashing in 2011 when they cancelled the PalmOS device line and slashed the price of the HP Touchpad tablet from $500 to $99. I had to call their 1800 number and wait 45 minutes to place my order with a sales rep. I wonder if Disney+ even has a phone number alternative to cancel with now that call centers are considered cost centers.
Best thing for a copyright holder is if people pay for their stuff. Next best is if people consume it but don't pay for it, as that at least preserves their relevance. Worst is to be ignored and become irrelevant/forgotten.
I think they'd much prefer people not watch than see people enjoying the content without giving them money (often while seeding the shows to other people in the process).
If nobody watches the shows they can blame the content. If everyone clearly loves the content but refuses to give ABC/Disney/ESPN/FX their business it means the company is the problem (although that wont stop them from falling back on the lie that piracy is all about greedy people who just want everything for free)
Have you tried using a VPN? I installed the free ProtonVPN I got with protonmail and half the internet stops working. VPNs look like bots with high exit traffic so they are blocked. Plus countries are cracking down on exit nodes.
I actually have ProtonVPN works fine. But if that's problem for you:
1. You can use VPN only when you need to use it.
2. "split tunnening" You can configure VPN to be used only for some programs, like those you use torrenting programs.
3. You can build your own mini-PC/RasPi "TV box" with VPN, storage for programming, connected to television. I wonder if there is not already ready software package for that.
All The Simpsons episodes are on my YouTube TV DVR, along with a lot of the shows my kids like (although really what they care about is a couple channels on YouTube proper), so even before this I was wondering why I was paying for Disney+ at all.
I wonder how much money Disney is going to lose off the cancellations for all of Disney’s streaming. Let say it’s 10%, that’s $2.4b. Linear revenue which includes cable and broadcast is only $2.7b. So even if Trump pulls their broadcast license, they’ll lose more money from this boycott not including boycotts of their movies and theme parks.
It’s hard to imagine even 1% let alone 10%. Disney is too powerful a brand and when people get bored and move on to the next news cycle they will come back.
The broadcast license is also strictly speaking only necessary for over the air stations, it does not apply to cable. Cable providers get ABC for cheap due to Section 111 compulsory licensing (short version: a cable provider can retransmit an OTA station for only a small royalty), but there's nothing stopping Disney from offering ABC to cable providers for a similar cost if their license is pulled.
So, the impact at the end of the day is just lost revenue from antenna users. Cable and satellite would be unaffected. That's got to be a relatively small number in the grand scheme of things.
ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair (cnn.com)
629 points by VikingCoder 2 days ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 1133 comments
It simply means that operating a business for half the country is impossible for a large company like Disney. Companies were better off when they took the Michael Jordan approach that Republicans buy shoes too. Why as a business you would want to engage in politics is beyond me.
What about what he said was so controversial? It seems entirely in line with everything else I’ve seen happen on these kinds of shows.
It wasn't controversial, but this is literally the textbook Manufacturing Consent model. The small number of people in positions of power at the network are either overtly aligned with the president that he just talked bad about, or want to stay or get on the president's good side. He doesn't even need to pick up the phone or post anything on social media, they know what they need to do.
To be fair to the executives. The main regulator that could essentially issue the corporate death penalty, the FCC chairman that can revoke their license to operate, literally said “we can do this the easy way or the hard way”. That’s a Dirty Harry or goodfellas quote. So much for “government shouldn’t pick winners and losers in the economy”.
You really don't have to be fair to the executives. The FCC absolutely can't do shit about Jimmy Kimmel, and would lose the procedure if it ever came to it. Instead, they immediately bent the knee and decided that loyalty to the nascent fascist regime was more important that standing up against the most clear cut and unjustifiable attack to free speech in a long time.
It's more that ABC/Disney is beholden to two right-leaning broadcasters who are colluding with threats to assist in their prohibited merger that will be approved now because they just gave the felon a successful hand job. There is no indication that the ABC execs are anything more than spineless, unprincipled cowards who cave in a light breeze.
Unless everyone at the top has been fired, ABC and Disney are not remotely aligned with the president. A short while ago, they were boycotted by the right for their slanted debate hosting and woke children’s programming.
Those two could be entirely compatible if it turns out they never gave a hoot about the actual politics, and only did all that stuff because they thought it would get them more favor with viewers, and thereby more money.
I would personally not raise an eyebrow to learn this was the case.
[flagged]
I think most commenters are missing that a local broadcaster monopoly used their own freedom of association to drop the show
The FCC and Trump merely dogpiled on this
For Disney, they need to court the broadcaster monopoly as a key stakeholder to their revenue, this is all private sector and not a constitutional issue
But when Disney is getting kicked and then an expensive fight with the government looms while their revenue is already threatened and would be expensive to resolve with the government , they buckled
Thats the calculus here
but because they buckled, now their customers are using their own freedom of association to disassociate, hampering Disney’s revenue more from that angle
Press F to Pay Respects
The FCC and Trump "merely" dogpiling on is a clear violation of the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution and should be condemned by all.
Ok. “Yes, its scary and authoritarian because it worked.” I said the line guys, happy? Moving on
There is also a protest of Nexstar’s advertisers to get them to avoid Nexstar for cancelling Jimmy Kimmel on their local broadcasters to begin with
I suspect they were looking for an excuse to axe and found one. It was all milquetoast, and that entire format of television is dead and the networks know they need to pivot somewhere.
The FCC chair threatening your broadcast license is a pretty good "excuse". There wasn't a public outcry, it was a government outcry along with threats along multiple lines of leverage.
> The FCC chair threatening your broadcast license
That's a clear violation of the First Amendment.
Yep! And he wrote the whole chapter in Project 2025 outlining that he would do exactly this, in advance of taking the job. Who is going to stop him? The Supreme Court? Not likely.
Not necessarily. Broadcasters have a license from the government to use the airwaves and they are obligated to act in the public interest. So some restrictions apply to them.
1. You can’t take someone’s property with out due process of law. There has been no showing that they violated that obligation. 2. The constitution has supremacy, so you can’t violate someone’s first amendment rights in service of FCC regulations.
In fact there is a more than credible argument that criticizing and mocking politicians is an essential public service.
> Broadcasters have a license from the government to use the airwaves and they are obligated to act in the public interest. So some restrictions apply to them.
Necessarily.
Carr threatened to revoke licenses based on the political speech of ABC. That's clearly unconstitutional. Trump followed up by saying licenses should be revoked for criticism of himself. Unitary President cuts both ways.
If this is okay, the next Democrat who's President needs to shut down Fox News and their ilk or be impeached. (From the perspective of fomenting rebellion and generally posing a threat to our republic, Jimmy Kimmel isn't even on the list.)
Fox News is technically cable, as the other poster under you has noted, which is a favored defense for this sort of discussion.
What they ignore is that local Fox affiliate stations who are also licensed by the FCC have a history of aligning with Fox News misinformation campaigns relating to covid, election integrity, Russia and Ukraine, Palestine, etc.
So no, the FCC licensed world is not left leaning, and these local affiliate stations should absolutely be held to the same standard.
Fox news doesn't have a broadcast license. ABC does. As with redistricting, democrats are limited because things are already biased in their favor. Broadcast networks are all center-left at this point, if not then show me one major broadcaster that is center right. Democrats basically have nobody to go after.
To your point, The Democrats, when back in power, could extend licensing issues into cableTV, etc... and attempt to fire Fox or Newsmax commentators... I would argue the Biden administration already attempted to do a form of this, as we saw with Facebook, Twitter, et al, the last administration certainly tried influencing the online arena.
I just think both sides do it, although on this forum it seems to trigger mostly the left side.
Fox News doesn’t have a broadcast license but Fox Broadcasting does. If people are doing this sort of extortion, it wouldn’t be a leap to see the whole Fox corporation in the crosshairs. This is all just a terrible precedent for what the future holds.
Except non-NewsCorp Fox assets were bought by none other than Disney! It's a gordian knot of monopolistic corruption!
> would argue the Biden administration already attempted to do a form of this, as we saw with Facebook, Twitter, et al, the last administration certainly tried influencing the online arena
Not comparable. That said, I agree—if this precedent stands, there should be personal liability for Newsmax commenters under a future administration. (And, of course, they should be barred from federal property.)
One would also go after the online streaming companies to delist their content. Google and Meta are constantly under antitrust controlled. TikTok is government owned. And you could start knocking on X with its money-transfer ambitions and Elon’s robotaxi approvals (to say nothing of federal contracts).
Which restriction applied here?
That's not what the public interest requirement means. In fact, the FCC's own website says "the public interest is best served by permitting free expression of views."[0] And anyway, there are specific carve outs for late-night programming.
[0] https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/fcc-and-speech
However the same website they describes the exceptions and limits:
https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting#JOUR...
> Hoaxes. The broadcast by a station of false information concerning a crime or catastrophe violates the FCC's rules if:
> The station licensee knew that the information was false
There quite a few other rules, obscenity and violence and such. But they probably got Jimmy on the crime that was just committed + spreading false information.
Nothing he said was false though, the Republicans were trying to paint the shooter as anyone other than one of their own. It might be that he's actually a leftist, but Kimmel described Republican behavior and did not actually make any assertions of fact regarding the alleged shooter.
There was some initial social media reaction portraying this guy as some hard right fascist or whatever, as well. So it wasn't something just Kimmel had come up with. It could be that by the time the show started more evidence came out and he was looking more one way, and Jimmy just had stale info or his staffers were lazy and didn't update him.
> Nothing he said was false though, the Republicans were trying to paint the shooter as anyone other than one of their own.
Yeah, and the show owners could have fought it. There might be a warning, a lawsuit, maybe a period to comply and make changes etc. But they folded immediately. They probably figured technically they could have explained it, but the PR aspect of it was a losing battle. Here is another part of the country flying flags half staff, and what is ABC's doing? Oh right, explaining away Kimmel's news and jokes and defending him. A lot of these corporations and their leaders can smell the way the wind blows and they really hate it when the wind blows away their profits, so they just react accordingly.
What hoax or false info? Also, Kimmel isn't a journalist or news reporter and his show isn't broadcast journalism. As far as obscenity rules, the rules don't necessarily apply between 10pm and 6am; "obscene" material is not allowed at any time of day, but "indecent" material is allowed on late-night television. These are terms that have specific meaning in the context of the law, and what Kimmel said would in no way rise to the level of obscene.
So why did the network fold so quickly? It's a simple enough explanation "we not journalists, these are all made up jokes and parodies, we send our condolences to the family ... etc".
They folded because they knew how the statement was perceived. Here is half the country flying flags half staff and ABC owners are defending Kimmel. They are worried about views and profits and when that is threatened everything goes out of the window.
Paradoxically, I think Kimmel is all of the sudden on top again, just due to the controversy. The younger crowd who don't sit and watch ABC, might have just learned about this Kimmel guy the first time. May be another network will pick him up, it could be a win for him overall.
No, they folded because the United States Federal government threatened them. That fact is the only thing that should matter in this discussion. This is a clear violation of the 1st Amendment by the government against protected speech (no matter how many people find that protected speech distasteful).
> No, they folded because the United States Federal government threatened them.
Yes because they control the FCC and FCC has rules in regards to the content of broadcasts. Kimmel is free to say anything he wants on his own website or platform and such, but as soon as it's on the "air" rules apply.
> This is a clear violation of the 1st Amendment by the government against protected speech (no matter how many people find that protected speech distasteful).
If it's that clear the would have fought it. It wasn't clear at all. Moreover it was just a bad PR look instead of saying something like "condolences for the family blah blah" they would be defending Kimmel's phrasing. That's why they dropped like him a hot potato.
Perception has nothing to do with it, the mafia-threats did
> Perception has nothing to do with it, the mafia-threats did
Mafia threats work precisely because of perception. The perception of the power is the power. If everyone caves, and can't fight back, the mafia gets stronger.
As it turns out the government can dictate how the broadcast frequencies are used, including dictate things about the content. The company could have switched to online only and continued the show. Heck, they should have called uncle sam's bluff maybe and see what happened.
They are not sending Jimmy to gulag or arresting him. Jimmy can still continue his show just maybe on his own youtube channel or his own online platform or something.
"[g]overnment officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors"[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association_of_...
The executive branch controls the FCC which controls broadcasting licenses. Specifically broadcast journalism over the air is controlled
https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting#JOUR...
Note:
> Nevertheless, there are two issues related to broadcast journalism that are subject to Commission regulation: hoaxes and news distortion. Hoaxes. The broadcast by a station of false information concerning a crime or catastrophe violates the FCC's rules if [...] The station licensee knew that the information was false.
All Jimmy had to do, it seems, was to say "this is all a made up joke" and move on, instead of presenting whatever he was saying as information or news.
> If a station airs a disclaimer before the broadcast that clearly characterizes the program as fiction and the disclaimer is presented in a reasonable manner under the circumstances, the program is presumed not to pose foreseeable public harm.
> However, as public trustees, broadcast licensees may not intentionally distort the news. The FCC has stated that “rigging or slanting the news is a most heinous act against the public interest.” The Commission will investigate a station for news distortion if it receives documented evidence of rigging or slanting, such as testimony or other documentation, from individuals with direct personal knowledge that a licensee or its management engaged in the intentional falsification of the news. Of particular concern would be evidence of the direction to employees from station management to falsify the news. However, absent such a compelling showing, the Commission will not intervene.
Again, Jimmy didn't get sent to the gulag and didn't go to jail. He can still run a show on his own platform or a youtube channel or maybe Netflix will sign him up. Heck, after this, I'd say he would easily triple his view numbers if anything.
The US government threatened a private company in an attempt to suppress speech that is protected under the 1st Amendment from government interference. This is a violation of the US Constitution. Full stop.
That’s a lotta words to justify complete bs
Today: he's not been sent to jail.
Tomorrow: it's not like they executed him.
> Today: he's not been sent to jail.
> Tomorrow: it's not like they executed him.
Yes threatening to pull the FCC license and canceling Kimmel's show is exactly like torturing, killing and imprisoning people in labor and death camps. We should all fell very sorry for poor Jimmy, we don't know how he'll even manage.
In the sense of both of them being violations of the US Constitution, yes they are exactly the same.
If that's the case, the next Democrat is definitely ending right wing talk radio.
And what makes you think we will continue to have elections? This Project 25 is clearly a plan to destroy our Republic and subject us all to minority Christo-Fascist rule. We need to wake up and recognize what we are up against, or it is guaranteed to happen here.
Yeah that is definitely on the table, we'll see what happens.
Here, interestingly, just a threat was enough. I wonder why the owners didn't want to fight it at all? The speed with with they folded was very telling. As others mentioned, I suspect if they decided they just didn't want to keep paying Kimmel for the show. He was making somewhere around $15m/year or something they saw a chance to say "goodbye".
What on earth makes you think there will be a next Democrat?
It’s actually a terrible excuse as the backlash is demonstrating. Even if they were about to axe the show all along it would have been a good idea to delay that to avoid the appearance they were caving to government pressure.
> It’s actually a terrible excuse as the backlash is demonstrating. Even if they were about to axe the show all along it would have been a good idea to delay that to avoid the appearance they were caving to government pressure.
But that meant having to defend making up stuff about a murder and comment on the crime even as the others are flying flags half staff. Quickly showing they caved to government's pressure was exactly the look they wanted.
And let's say fought back, who would that be for? They younger viewers are not sitting at home watching TV and cheering Jimmy on. Many don't even know who Jimmy is; they just learned this week because it's on social media. So putting some kind of a defense and turning it into a battle rather than caving would have been the worse of the two choices they had.
> But that meant having to defend making up stuff about a murder
What was Kimmel making up?
The fact that the shooter was conservative, from a conservative family?
The fact that Kirk openly advocated for gun violence?
Please do tell us exactly what was being "made up," here.
I find it hard to take that threat seriously. There would be blood on the street - real blood - americans won't stand for it. (Some will of course but enough would not that the fcc would blink)
FCC chair literally said "We can do this the easy way or the hard way" the easy way being ABC cancelling it, the hard way being pulling the license.
And if you wait for the license to be pulled as your red line, you misunderstand how this works. This is an actual threat, the kind of thing that mobsters get RICO charges for. The threat has done its work and served the purposes of the administration. The crime has already taken place. The mobster says "but he agreed to pay the protection money and nobody ever actually broke his kneecaps"
"These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel,” said Carr, a Trump appointee, “or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/article/jimmy-kimmel-liv...
Anyone can say anything. Follow through and abc can just ignore the order and tell everyone watching what is happening. They have the power of the pen and will get people running to their congressman.
they blinked so we will never know.
> Anyone can say anything.
Not as the federal government, because it explicitly lacks the freedom of speech citizens are ensured by the Constitution.
And absent a first amendment claim, the best defense they can come up with would be 'We were joking.'
Which, given the well-cited history of coercion by this administration (both in verbalized plans and actions), would be a hard defense to make.
Saying that they blinked seems to be an admission that it was a threat with impact, no?
What is there to blink about if it was not a threat?
If I walk up to someone with a gun and wave the gun around and demand they give me their money or I'll shoot them, it does not matter if I was "serious" or not about the threat. If I tell a jury that I wouldn't have actually ever have shot the person, and that they just decided to give me their money because they didn't really need it so much, I'm not sure any jury would agree, unless I was a hell of a salesman.
You seem to be saying that what happened is fine because it never actually got to a truly unconstitutional or get-in-the-streets worthy level of censorship. You seem to be saying if they actually revoked the license, that would be the red line. But because they never did, no harm, no foul.
What we are saying is that just by making the threat, the censorship has full and complete effect. They don't need to revoke the license to use the power of the government to influence constitutionalally protected speech. They just need to threaten.
It is not fine. I'm saying they should have had the guts to fight
> It is not fine. I'm saying they should have had the guts to fight
Yes they should have. But ideally we should live in a society that guts aren't necessary because threats are not made, especially from the government.
It's the second part that's the everyone is really worried about.
> Anyone can say anything.
This is illegal: "Nice business you've got here," the police officer says. "Shame that crime is on the rise. And we don't have as many officers to patrol. But give a donation and we'll take care of you. Don't and we'll stop answering your 911 calls."
Now replace with "We heard what you said about the mayor. Apologize or we'll stop answering your 911 calls."
> I find it hard to take that threat seriously.
Based on everything that has gone one that seems to me at least very naive. There was practically a textbook length document outlining what the administrstion planned to do if they got in power and they are going step by step through it.
The president said there are 4 comedians (who make fun of him) that he wants to get off the air. After this event he posted something along the lines of "2 down, 2 to go." Followed by "Why don't you just force the other two out now?".
There was nothing wrong about what was said - they just already have a plan and pick any small item to claim is the cause.
For example they want to defund left leaning non profits and think tanks. They don't have a reason to. But now they are trying to claim they motivated the Kirk killing - not because they think it did, but because it's what is already their plan.
People still thinking they are being objectives or that there are "norms" left, in my opinion haven't been paying attention.
The threat was taken seriously.
I don't believe you yet that Americans won't stand for it. There have been so many red lines crossed that most Americans don't even know what's going on.
Would you have gone to the streets for it?
Americans are standing for it. There's a lot of "I'm a free speech absolutist, but..." coming out of the American right-wing right now.
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He was last averaging 129K viewers per episode in the 18-49 demographic, I'd say that is a far better "excuse" than a threat from the FCC. As if DIS doesn't have a legion of attorneys. Give me a break.
I really don’t understand this argument that he wasn’t popular as if that’s at all relevant. Aside from the cost of putting the legion of attorneys protecting a show that’s not bringing enough revenue and the fact, there’s a broader risk with the Nexstar merger that requires explicit government approval that the FCC also threatened.
More importantly, his viewership didn’t suddenly change and the cancellation came about pretty clearly as a result of the FCC threat and not any business decision the company would have made otherwise. Not a lawyer but I would think that Kimmel has a 1a lawsuit he could bring against DIS and the government.
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He was last averaging 220K in 18-49 demographic. That beat out Colbert (barely) and trounced Fallon.
https://latenighter.com/news/ratings/late-night-tv-ratings-q...
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If he was averaging suppoosedly bad numbers, why wasn't he fired before? Just a pure coincidence?
I'm not sure if you think people are extremely gullible, because one would have to be in order to buy that line.
If there's a threat going on, and an another excuse the threatened can blame, the threat is no less potent.
> networks know they need to pivot somewhere.
Please don't say the pivot is podcasts.
having experience with a dictatorship first hand, all a censor does is veto milquetoast stuff.
>It was all milquetoast,
???
It was a very obvious dig at the president. There's still not good justification for the government to step in, but claiming it's "milquetoast" is baffling.
Digs directed at the President or the administration are and always have been well within the Overton window in American journalism, and previous Presidents and administrations have just seen them as a fact of life and brushed them off.
Thus “milquetoast”: an implication that any reaction to this is, objectively, an overreaction.
That the current President is a habitual over-reactor does not change that fact. It just means that you can paradoxically be taking a heterodox / outré stance by saying objectively milquetoast things.
Have you ever seen a late night show? Monologue jokes about the sitting president practically define the format. Every other president going back decades would just man up and take it.
Except Nixon.
For all his flaws, Nixon had a far thicker skin than Trump and infinitely more integrity.
Nixon didn't have a thicker skin, he was just more patient and calculating in his revenge. Have we already forgotten his "enemies list"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon%27s_enemies_list
I guess it depends on the sort of media you consume. I’ve seen Destiny saying conservatives need to be afraid of getting shot, and it seems like he’s still alive.
The other people who lost jobs seemed to have said much more direct and offensive remarks than Kimmel as well.
He dared to ridicule uncle Donald and his gang. That’s more than enough.
It hurt the feelings of the "fuck your feelings" crowd, who started frothing at the mouth before even thinking about what was actually said.
Honestly, I thought it was way more tame than I'd expect for comedy these days, but it's also been a long time since I watched a late night talk show and traditionally the ones on the old networks tended to have much more mild and lighthearted comedy compared to the more biting/edgy stuff you'd get on cable.
nothing of what he said was controversial, Im convinced they were just waiting for the next joke to do it anyways.
Nothing. But wannabe dictator got offended
It criticized the potus, and threat of his ire is enough to scare corporations in 2025. A fairly concerning development
This is their Horst Wessel moment. It doesn’t matter what actually happened, it’s just the minimal cover to do what they always planned on doing.
Don’t believe me? Trump literally announced his plans months ago to take down these talk show hosts who were so mean to him
Poor guy :(
The owner of the Sinclair Broadcasting group (the company that owns the ABC stations that started this) is a far-right ideologue that has been trying to drag ABC into News Nation territory for the past decade or so.
Nothing Kimmel said was controversial. It was just being used as a false flag to justify other things.
And the second wave of subscription cancellations will be from people who are upset with Disney+ decision… Smart move of executive :) /s
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Not a business decision. His contract was renewed in 2022 and he had 1.77 million total viewers per night.
https://www.statista.com/chart/35165/us-late-night-show-rati...
> What Kimmel Said, and the affiliates broadcasted, was a claim that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was a “maga” supporter.
This is the actual quote:
"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,"
Note that he doesn't say that the shooter was MAGA, only that those within the right wing influencer sphere were desperately trying to characterize the shooter as anything other than one of them. This is unambiguously and factually true.
I swear, media literacy in the united states is in the fucking toilet.
> MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them
> Note that he doesn't say that the shooter was MAGA
then who does the "them" refer to?
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Really, literacy in generally is tanking in the US. In 2024 over half the adults in the country couldn't even read at a sixth grade level! 21% are outright illiterate.
> he doesn't say that the shooter was MAGA, only that those within the right wing influencer sphere were desperately trying to characterize the shooter as anything other than one of them. This is unambiguously and factually true.
I'll put it in the technically true but ambiguously misinformation category. (Which is on every metric better than what goes on at Fox.)
> technically true but ambiguous
which has been the backbone of satirical and scathing social and political commentary in the western world for 50 years at least.
The Daily Show, The -s30e102- 2025-09-18 Maria Ressa episode with Jon Stewart's monologue and interview went another way, "rolling over" completely into total Trump submission followed by drawing direct comparisons to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte popularist seizing of control of government.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Ressa
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Duterte
Yup.
The number of people defending this makes me seriously wonder if we need a two-speed democracy. One class that is given safety. The other who is exposed to dangerous elements like Jimmy Kimmel…
"My wife wants to go for dinner but I'd like to eat anything other than fish."
Strongly implies the wife in the sentence wants to eat fish.
Anyone with a moderate grasp of English understands what Kimmel was implying.
"Trying to characterize him as anything other than one of them". <- The implication is definitely that he's "one of them".
That isn't the same and you know it. Kimmel made no direct comment about what the shooter was aligned with, only about what the right wing sphere was attempting to frame them as being. Anyone with a moderate grasp of English should be able to tell the difference.
> There’s a relatively narrow rule which prohibits fcc licensed stations from knowing broadcasting false information if it has the possibility of creating civil unrest.
Oh wow, I didn't realize Fox News wasn't FCC-licensed.
> fcc licensed stations
Think your local K[3 letter] west of the Mississippi, W[3 letter] east of the Mississippi*.
Not "Showtime" or "HBO" or "Cartoon Network" or "CNN" or "Fox News" or "MSNBC".
That's why the affiliates started pulling it, because their license is what's on the line, not ABC/Disney directly.
*: Except for KDKA, KYW, WFAA, WBAP, WOAI, WDAY, and WNAX.
Well, the subset of stations that pulled the show were the ones owned by a (right-wing) company, Nexstar, that has proposed a merger that is up for FCC review. It wasn’t fear of being punished for allowing a “falsehood” on the air, it was pursuit of favorable treatment from a political appointee.
Sinclair (38 stations) also pulled it and they own more than Nexstar (28 stations).
FWIW The Hollywood Reporter also is reporting that advertisers started threatening to pull their support as well[0] as several smaller stations.
> Meanwhile, the advertiser calls began to roll in and then the big affiliate conglomerates, Nexstar and Sinclair, threatened to preempt the show. The second source says that the blowback was snowballing enough that had ABC not acted, Kimmel’s show would have been dark in a large swath of the country, even beyond the Sinclair and Nexstar territories (including in the Washington, D.C., metro area).
[0]: https://archive.is/ADaHT
Do you not think the decision was political?
> was a claim that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was a “maga” supporter.
I just watched the video.
What he said was that MAGA supporters were too quick to blame anyone but the right, before there was any evidence about the shooter’s identity or political stance.
That’s a fact.
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It's 100% true that MAGA people were being very vocal all over social media trying to characterize him as not being a trump supporter. What part of that do you think was a lie?
he’s clearly commenting on how the “maga gang” is characterizing the murderer. There’s no statement directly about the murderer.
How is it false? It isn't making the claim that the shooter was MAGA, but commenting on the right wing influencer sphere's recurring habit of accusing mass shooters of being associated with any group other than themselves.
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> "anything other than one of them" can very easily be interpreted in two ways, one of them leading a person to believe that the adult (not a kid) was somehow "MAGA"
Anything can be interpreted in any way you want as long as you're arguing in bad faith
> at the very least, the situation as tense as it was (is?), Jimmy could have chosen to leave it alone for a bit - why say that MAGA is trying to "score political points" at this time? Why not consider that many people are genuinely grieving and upset?
lmao, no one, right wing influencers nor the government, is doing this.
> ABC fired his butt, not the FCC or anyone else. A sternly worded message from the FCC chairman doesn't make a company like DIS fire someone unless it is convenient for DIS. That's a fact.
It isn't "a fact". If a mob goon threatens action on an employer unless that employer punishes an employee, who the hell do you think is actually responsible?
He never said he was a MAGA supporter but that he was being claimed to be not “one of them”. Given that the shooter came from a conservative family in a conservative town and attended trade school and spent his time gaming, I think it’s reasonable to say that he was a product of the right wing milieu, and not a product of left wing indoctrination as the right alleges.
He also shot the guy with his Dad's Dad's gun. It turns out that if you keep a gun around, it'll eventually be used to shoot someone.
The fact that you believe this is the exact reasoning behind trying to prevent things like what Jimmy Kimmel did here.
It could not be more cut and dry than this. In fact it is so cut and dry that a conspiracy theory on both the left and the right is that the text messages demonstrating his political motivations aren’t genuine.
Are you asserting that he followed left wing influencers or read left wing books or attended left wing classes or somehow got his indoctrination from left wing sources?
There isn’t any evidence of that - there is only evidence that he hated the right wing (and to the contrary there is obvious evidence he came from a right wing milieu - just take a look at his parents). Simply hating a side doesn’t mean you have been indoctrinated by the other side - just look at people who left fundamentalist religious sects.
what a load of bullshit.
He said the guy who shot Charlie Kirk was MAGA, which isn’t true, according to the information that has come out from those actually working on the case in the various press conferences, and from the evidence that’s been made public.
It wasn’t meaningful to the joke he was looking to set up, it was just misinformation for misinformation’s sake. At least it came off that way.
Add to that high emotions from people coping with a murder, and there you have it.
He did not say that the kid was MAGA, or at least not exactly. Here’s all he said about it:
> We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
> In between the finger pointing there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level you can see how hard the President is taking this.
He then played a clip where a reporter asked Trump how he was doing. Trump said good and immediately started talking about his new ballroom.
What about any of that is misinformation? Given how they were certain the shooter was trans because he used arrows on the bullet - which were helldiver 2 codes - it did seem like people were trying to make it seem like the kid wasn’t MAGA.
Turns out the kid is neither, or both, and was just terminally online, which none of us want to admit is the real problem because we’re all also terminally online.
> with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them
Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not? It heavily implies that he is maga, and that’s why the maga gang is trying to deflect.
A lot of conclusions were jumped to early on by everyone. Things are more clear now, but still not 100%. From what I’ve seen so far he was a Trump supporter in his early teens, but did a full 180 in recent years, due to the influence on the internet, as you mentioned, and who knows what else.
If the ultimate joke was to laugh at Trump talking about his ballroom, I don’t see what his maga comments added to that. He stepped into a hornets nest and added nothing to the joke in the process.
> Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not?
No.
> It heavily implies that he is maga
No.
Why would someone have to "desperately try to characterize" someone as something that they clearly are? To me, that language is clearly indicating that it is somehow difficult to do. At that time, it was fairly apparent that he was not MAGA, at least not in any remotely common sense of the word.
> At that time, it was fairly apparent that he was not MAGA
The criticism of the "MAGA gang" was _not_ about their actions at the time of the Kimmel broadcast, it was very much about their immediate behavior as soon as the shooting hit the news .. the time when nothing was known, the time when the FBI head was making statements about suspects that were untrue, the time when the US head of state was declaring war on the left .. you know, the time when nothing was known about the political allegiance of the shooter .. or the lack thereof.
I'm an outside observer, from here it's clear that the US has fallen deep into an Us v Them K-hole and that the current administration is all too happy to turn up the heat on the divisions that render the nation asunder .. the chaos makes the heist all the easier.
I could imagine interpreting the statement that way if he had said either before or after that it turned out the shooter was not MAGA. But stating it on its own, the effect in my mind was pretty clear: to communicate that the shooter was MAGA, and that the MAGA gang was doing their best to deny it.
The current president and vice president of the United States said on multiple media channels that an entire racial demographic of people in a city were eating cats and dogs, and those same people are concerned about the minutia of a late night comedian’s informational and semantic accuracy (who they also claim no one watches, which is probably itself mostly true).
That’s a lot of pearl clutching don’t you think
Your god-president lies every single time he opens his mouth. Huge lies. The biggest lies. He also ridicules everyone he dislikes. With hurtful language. All the time.
He has never apologized for jack shit.
> Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not? It heavily implies that he is maga, and that’s why the maga gang is trying to deflect.
No one is tuning into Jimmy Kimmell for "news", though I am quite sure that his show is more truthful on a daily basis than your Fox News & Newsmax liars.
> If the ultimate joke was to laugh at Trump talking about his ballroom, I don’t see what his maga comments added to that. He stepped into a hornets nest and added nothing to the joke in the process.
The joke is that Trump probably does not give a flying fuck about Kirk. He cares about himself. That's it. He pivoted right to bragging about his dumb fucking ballroom.
It was a political assassination done by someone who vehemently disagreed with certain viewpoints. The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on. Kimmel's comments were grossly inaccurate and wildly irresponsible.
> The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on.
The only thing clear about the shooter's political positions, is that it'll be presented as whatever will be most convenient to the speaker. He held views that individually map across the spectrum, allowing anyone to point to something and assign him at an arbitrary location.
Which is known now, but was absolutely not known at the time. There was so, so much complete BS being spread during those 24-48 hours.
This happened Monday - not last Friday. All of this was known.
> Kimmel's comments were grossly inaccurate and wildly irresponsible.
Kimmel’s comments are about the behavior of the MAGA world, and they were true: the MAGA world was trying very hard to push the idea that the shooter was not one of them.
> The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on.
I'm sorry, which details? Why does his opinion about a handful of topics mean that we can infer his entire worldview? Why do we have to assume that his views mapped neatly onto one end of the US political spectrum or the other?
I think the problem no one on either side wants to admit is that these shooters rarely fall into either side. They’re mentally unstable people who are attracted to fringe crazy ideas, regardless of the political stripes.
Their behavior indicts all of us Americans.
But of course admitting that and doing something about it means working together, which is a much harder solution than pointing fingers at the other side and doing little else.
To those that are interpreting his comments in a certain way, the implication that Robinson is maga is highly offensive and textbook "misinformation".
Edit: there's clearly several ways to interpret what he said. I'm not making any kind of argument here, just answering op's question.
So when a talk show host vaguely on the left implies something that might not be true it is ground enough to disregard the fucking first amendment and use the power of the state to censor him. But when the entire GOP, including the president, all fabricate obvious lies about the shooter being successively trans, then antifa and then a radical leftist, it's fine. The double standards are fucking crazy.
Not so much offensive, as utterly puzzling given the information we had on him by Monday night.
Not a fan of Trump or Jimmy, and I don’t think this is a proportional or good response. I’m pretty stunned that there was actually momentum enough to take him off the air. I also don’t understand why he left that little dig in his monologue.
Which information? The completely unverified stuff based on "a reconstruction" or "aggressive interview posture" from the same FBI led by the guy currently contradicting himself and telling lies in front of Congress?
This Administration was basically founded on making strident claims on TV which turned out to be lies they couldn't back up in a court of law.
Doesn't seem that outlandish given the president of the united states said it was a extreme left lunatic before this.
> I’m pretty stunned that there was actually momentum enough to take him off the air.
Have you not been paying attention to where rhetoric in this country has gone in the past 8 months? The first amendment is dead, the great leader is publically calling for his critics to lose their broadcast licenses, and the new SOP is for the government to squeeze the shit out of anyone who doesn't toe the line. (Which is an ever-shrinking group of people.)
Be it with SLAPP suits, or by holding merger approvals, or by just threatening witch-hunts.
This is what 48% of the electorate wanted, and, well, it's what they've delivered.
---
Meanwhile, in Fox land, Brian Kilmeade was publically calling for mass-murder of the mentally ill the other day. For some strange reason, neither Trump nor the FCC, nor all the people outraged about political violence are making a peep about that.
Kimmels show was expensive, Kimmel has baggage ( a history of racist comedy, including blackface ). This was a convenient opportunity to chop dead wood.
After pressure from the federal government which is a clear violation of the Constitution of the United States.
I mean, definitely offensive. Intended to offend.
It's his shtick!
> I’m pretty stunned that there was actually momentum enough to take him off the air.
Very little was needed. The U.S. president had already ominously threatened Kimmel and other late night hosts the day after Colbert was canceled, weeks before the shooting.
I thought Kimmel was hilarious; but as they say, there’s no accounting for taste.
The most ridiculous thing about this is that the world doesn’t cleave neatly into “radical left lunatics” and the righteous real Americans. I still can’t tell what the murderer was. Whatever that was, he acted on his own impulses - ones that are not broadly celebrated, irrespective of claims to the contrary.
Of all the takes on his motivations I've seen the most on point comes from an Australian of Robinson's generation ..
Death by shitpost: Why modern media is so ill-equiped to diagnose Tyler Robinson
https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/09/19/tyler-robinson-alleged-...
https://archive.md/Lil0U#selection-941.0-941.80
Watching the US media struggling to cleave this into either left OR right as if the world is binary is, as you noted, ridiculous.
ummm First amendment? Its not the first time misinformation has been broadcasted on air, why does the FCC need to get involved in this one. Would they have gotten involved if the implication was that he was a liberal?
They asked what was controversial about what he said, not whether the FCC's actions were constitutional.
I don't see the FCC cancelling news shows on which Trump lies. Double standards driven by politics and why the govt orgs need career staff and not political players. Rule of Law anyone?
As opposed to the implication that Robinson is somehow a leftwing activist, confidently claimed by every GOP politician from coast to coast?
Also, even if it were, as you say, "misinformation", that is now somehow taboo on television? A sacred line none must dare cross?
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Now fact-check Fox News.
Let’s just say that the alleged shooter’s political philosophies are likely complex and are yet to be fully understood.
>Now fact-check Fox News.
Did you miss the second part of my comment? Even if Kimmel was in the wrong he shouldn't be taken off the air. I'm just pointing out why Trump might be upset. It's a reason, not necessarily a good reason.
>Let’s just say that the alleged shooter’s political philosophies are likely complex and are yet to be fully understood
By most accounts it's safe to say he's left leaning. You don't have to be a card carrying DSA member or have your ideology fully align with the Democrats platform to earn that label.
You could also just say he was a unaffiliated lunatic who was sick of Kirk's rhetoric and hate speech and took it into his own hands.
The subject of the sentence was "the MAGA gang" - and it's true that they (and the president himself) were the ones desperately declaring right after the assassination before we had any information that shooter was a radical leftist. So for me it's a fair statement and really only disinformation if you purposely distort the sentence.
The second part of what he said is also a true statement, that they're using this tragic event to score political points and go after their political opponents.
Well, the kid did turn out to have ties to a radical leftist organization. He spent an awful lot of time on Antifa discord servers and, according to his acquaintances and friends, had frequent arguments with his conservative parents over politics. You think they were arguing about who voted Republican harder?
The president and co making such claims based on little or no evidence doesn't become OK just because some is turned up later.
Early, and correct, claims were made based on the inscriptions found on the bullets and shell casings, IIRC.
People certainly jumped to conslusions about them and extrapolated from there.
You're ignoring the part of the quote where he implied the killer was MAGA or MAGA affiliated. For reference the full quote is:
>The MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it
Kimmel didn't explicitly make the accusation that the killer was MAGA, but the use of the wording "desperately trying to imply ... as anything other than one of them" definitely gives that impression. I mean, why else would they be "desperately" trying to? If an attempt was made on Bernie or AOC I wouldn't characterize leftists prematurely blaming it on the right as "desperately". It's just the most logical inference. The "killer was right wing" narrative was also being pushed in some left leaning circles, so it's not exactly outlandish either.
I disagree - my read is that he is saying the MAGA gang was trying to exploit the tragedy and desperately point fingers, which I think is accurate.
He characterized the shooters as some MAGA whatever and he was presenting is a sure thing, which it still wasn't clear and it looked pretty iffy and not in line with any common sense.
FCC has and had for many years restrictions about what can be broadcast.
See https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting#JOUR...
> The broadcast by a station of false information concerning a crime or catastrophe violates the FCC's rules if:
> The station licensee knew that the information was false;
So we have a 1) a crime that was committed 2) misinformation
The show runners should have fought it and say that they didn't know it was false. But then now the are fighting this uphill battle having to say "hey, Jimmy's show is totally a parody, not news everyone knows that, a staffer fed Jimmy some social media quotes, whatever". At that point it's kind of a bad look anyway, so the owners decided to just shut it down.
I'm sure it's an accident and not intentional! A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually canceling later.
It's possible but I think Hanlon's Razor is more likely. I saw this happen myself and the form submission was successful on the second attempt. I just don't think they had the capacity to handle this surge of traffic to this endpoint/service.
It can be a mixture of both. It's extremely easy to Cover Your Ass while intentionally dragging your feet when a bug works in your favor. The manager simply has to decide that other tasks are higher priority.
Why would any manager prioritize this when it's going to blow over in less than a day, as evidenced by other commentators saying the site is already back up?
Right. I mean, ideally, because regulations have sufficient teeth that the company's existence is jeopardized by having shady business practices. When "it's a bug" is no longer an excuse, they could have avoided such a risk by having customers buy punch cards rather than saving their credit cards, for instance.
This administration is not going to apply said regulations, especially when the said regulations us punishing what they are favoring
Call it HN’s rule: Never attribute to incompetence what can be attributed to malice
The problem with "Hanlon's Razor" is that everything can be explained by incompetence by making suitable assumptions. It outright denies the possibility of malice and pretends as if malice is rare. Basically, a call to always give the benefit of the doubt to every person or participant's moral character without any analysis whatsoever of their track record.
Robert Hanlon himself doesn't seem to be notable in any area of rationalist or scientific philosophy. The most I could find about him online is that he allegedly wrote a joke book related to Murphy's laws. Over time, it appears this obscure statement from that book was appended with Razor and it gained respectability as some kind of a rationalist axiom. Nowhere is it explained why this Razor needs to be an axiom. It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities. Bayesian reasoning? Priors? What the hell are those? Just say "Hanlon's Razor" and nothing more needs to be said. Nothing needs to be examined.
The FS blog also cops out on this lazy shortcut by saying this:
> The default is to assume no malice and forgive everything. But if malice is confirmed, be ruthless.
No conditions. No examination of data. Just an absolute assumption of no malice. How can malice ever be confirmed in most cases? Malicious people don't explain all their deeds so we can "be ruthless."
We live in a probabilistic world but this Razor blindly says always assume the probability of malice is zero, until using some magical leap of reasoning that must not involve assuming any malice whatsoever anywhere in the chain of reasoning (because Hanlon's Razor!), this probability of malice magically jumps to one, after which we must "become ruthless." I find it all quite silly.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
https://fs.blog/mental-model-hanlons-razor/
Assuming incompetence instead of malice is how you remain collegiate and cordial with others.
Assuming malice from people you interact with means dividing your community into smaller and smaller groups, each suspicious of the other.
Assuming malice from an out group who have regularly demonstrated their willingness to cause harm doesn’t have that problem.
From parent's comment
> It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities
Parent isn't advocating for assuming malice, or assuming anything really, but to reason about the causes. Basically, that we'd have better discourse if no axiom was used in the first place.
I agree. It seems to be an all too common example of both: 1. lack of nuance in thought (i.e. either assume good intentions or assume malice, not some probability of either, or a scale of malice) 2. the overwhelming prevalence of bad faith arguments, most commonly picking the worst possible argument feasibly with someone's words.
In this case instead of a possibility of it being a small act of opportunity (like mentioned above of just dragging feet) not premeditated, alternatives are never mentioned but instead just assumed folks are talking about some higher up conspiracy and on top of that that must be what these people are always doing.
Anyway thank you for your point it is an interesting read :)
IMHO you're taking it a bit too literally and seriously; I suggest interpreting it more loosely, ie "err on the side of assuming incompetence [given incompetence is rampant] and not malice [which is much rarer]." As a rule of thumb, it's a good one.
To me the more problematic part is anchoring the discussion into rejecting a specific extreme (malice) when there will be a lot of behavior either milder, or neither incompetence nor malice. For instance is greed, opportunism or apathy malice ?
Good point. Basic self-interest is also as likely as incompetence. (shrug)
It doesn’t say don’t think about malice as a possibility, it says that if you aren’t going to think about it, you should ignore malice as a possibility.
That's because actual malice IS rare. Corporations are not filled with evil people, but people make perfectly rational, normal decisions based on their incentives that result in the emergent phenomenon of perceived malicious actions.
Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak. To quote CS Lewis, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
That's why scapegoating and demonizing people is so bad, it's a way of telling folks that violence can make the world better instead of worse.
What is rare? How is this measured?
Why do incentives result in perceived malicious actions rather than just malicious actions or minor malicious actions?
On top of this no one has said corporations are filled with evil people.
> Corporations are not filled with evil people, but people make perfectly rational, normal decisions based on their incentives that result in the emergent phenomenon of perceived malicious actions.
This rationalization is cope. All US Corporations making "normal" decisions all the time isn't casually obvious. I would say that wherever there is an opportunity to exploit the customer, they usually do at different levels of sophistication. This may mistakenly seem like fair play to someone who thinks a good UI is a good trade for allocated advertisement space, when it's literally social engineering.
Corporations make decisions that more frequently benefit them at the cost of some customer resource. Pair that with decisions rarely being rolled back (without financial incentive), you get a least-fair optimization over time. This is not normal by any stretch, as people expect a somewhat fair value proposition. Corporations aren't geared for that.
Agreed that actual malice is relatively rare (at least, relative to incompetence!). But I feel your take on Hitler is questionable. The question of evil is a tricky one, but I don't think there's a good case to be made that he was only trying to do the right thing. He was completely insane. But leaving aside moral culpability or metaphysical notions of judgment, for any definition of "malice", he embodied it to an the absolute maximum degree.
> That's because actual malice IS rare. Corporations are not filled with evil people,
Corporations don't have to be filled with evil people for malice to be rampant. All it takes is for one person in a position of power or influence who is highly motivated to screw over other human beings to create a whole lot of malice. We can all think of examples of public officials or powerful individuals who have made it their business to spread misery to countless others. Give them a few like-minded deputies and the havoc they wreak can be incalculable.
As for Hitler, if we can't even agree that orchestrating and facilitating the death of millions of innocent people is malicious, then malice has no meaning.
C. S. Lewis has written a great many excellent things, but his quote there strikes me as self-satisfied sophistry. Ask people being carpet bombed or blockade and starved if they're grateful that at least their adversary isn't trying to help them.
The "malice" part of the razor is bait. People typically act out of self-interest, not malice. That's why anyone who parrots Hanlon's Razor has already lost; they fell for the false dichotomy between malice and incompetence, when self-interest isn't even offered as an explanation.
Ferret7446:
> Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak.
Disgusting take. Don't simp for hitler. How am I having to type this in 2025?
Yep, "Hanlon's Razor" is pseudo-intellectual nonsense. It sets up a false dichotomy between two characteristics, neither of which is usually sufficient to explain a bad action.
I recently heard on a podcast where one of the guests recounted what his father used to say about the employees making cash-handling mistakes in the small store he owned. It was something like, "if it was merely incompetence, you'd think half of the errors would be in my favor."
It probably is a glitch in this case, but it's hard not to see the dark patterns once you've learned about them.
If you short charge a customer they will demand correct change if you overpay a customer won't complain. In the cases of customers giving back extra money it becomes neutral.
His father's theory didn't take into account this.
Incompetence, filtered by customers biased to complain when cheated, and ignore mistakes in their favour?
I’m amazed at the prevalence of conspiracy theories on HN in recent years. Even for simple topics like a website crashing under load we get claims that it’s actually a deliberate conspiracy, even though the crashes have turned this from a quiet event into a social media and news phenomenon, likely accelerating the number of cancellations.
COVID years really messed some people up.
You mean like all the people that died? The caretakers in the years after? The medical staff who never got a break? You're right about that.
My comment was not about COVID.
Your comment was:
> COVID years really messed some people up.
You seem to think that you said something different than you did.
If you don't see where your communication broke down, look closely the first word of the quote above. That's you, in case you forgot.
my first manager told my as i started my first oncall "we dont think anybody actually cares about this thing, so if it breaks, dont fix it too quickly, so we can see who notices"
You see this in video games. Game breaking bugs ? Next week. People can’t buy or use a skin(s) for a weapon? Less than 24 hr fix .
That's true, but it's seldom going to be the case that the account cancellation portion of the app is all on it's own. It's going to be built into the rest of the application, including the parts your happy customers are actually paying for. You're taking down a lot of the site.
And I don't know about others, but the one thing that's sure to make me cancel and never return is when a business tries to be a jerk about subscribers. I know one subscription service that when you try to cancel will instead ask you to pause. Except when you pause, the site will make the buttons to complete a sale begin disabled. Then 10 to 15 seconds later, the button enables. It only does this so that they can show you a request to resume your subscription. Nope. I immediately went and fully cancelled, and I haven't been back. I only intended to pause for a short time because I was unable to use the service at all for several weeks. Instead because they wanted to grasp onto every customer too tightly, and they lost me for good. They didn't respect me, so I don't want their product anymore.
I've often advocated for inverting Hanlon's razor whenever money is involved. The more money is at stake, the more likely it is in fact due to malice.
I have to agree. When money is involved I defer to Occam’s Razor.
That’s the trick with capacity planning around cancellation. You can always deprioritize it because any improvement increases the speed with which revenue decreases (not valuable to the business) and customer satisfaction with this flow generally doesn’t matter since you’re losing their business. The only negative risk factor is CC chargebacks which will cost you some money but at scale most people generally don’t deal with that hassle vs just trying to cancel a few times.
Big corporations are made of people, some who post here.
Disney's internal systems for something like this are a hodgepodge of the Hulu, D+/Bamtech, old corporate disney, and some bits sent out to SaaS. There's been multiple layers of layoffs and service ownership changes since the pandemic. I don't think the org would be able to rate limit by faking crashes if it tried.
What is happening is that routes and systems that normally have little and predictable traffic now are getting exercised... a lot harder (the exact numbers are for management to explain). Most things are going to be very resilient to this, as it's not THAT much traffic: It's still a small fraction vs resubscriptions and logins, but not everything is. Since the unsubscribe flows are never going to be anyone's top priority, this things happen.
You don't have to believe me, but I tell you it's incompetence, not malice.
As you acquire properties, it's almost never possible to rebuild the systems from scratch, and instead it's becomes layers upon layers of patches and quick fixes.
A fun one lately has been AT&T. We have streaming with DirecTV, and they of course share authentication with the parent AT&T. So whenever I try to login to AT&T's website to manage my wireless or fiber, it redirects and logs me into DirecTV, everytime. The only way I can manage my service is to use AT&T's mobile app.
AT&T has the worst/buggiest login process I've encountered, and I also have to use Comcast/Xfinity.
Logging in to pay AT&T wireless service sometimes takes half an hour of attempts resulting in any number of weird errors until it just works.
I appreciate this peek behind the curtain but don't share your cheer that humans being involved in the process somehow means it should get the benefit of the doubt when things like this happen.
In fact, the reverse is actually quite common. The big corporation part often removes too much of the humanity from people. Too many people are comfortable making incredibly callous decisions at work because, hey, it's not their fault, they're just one small cog in the human crushing machine, and we all know what happens to bad cogs...
> Since the unsubscribe flows are never going to be anyone's top priority, this things happen.
This in itself makes the situation intentional.
“Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence”
This way of thinking has excused a lot of evil/malicious actions. I think it's time we actually start shining our collective flashlights at things, especially big companies, when their own systems break in ways that benefit them.
Anyone that’s used any of Disneys sites know they break at random on a good day. Just look how many people complain about the DCL site having issues.
I considered that, but there's a very real risk that the bad-press of it crashing will have an even bigger financial effect.
These protest boycotts never last very long. There are many large brand names that have been boycotted over the years and they are all still in business and mostly bigger than ever.
I believe Disney has been subjected to several.
Boycotts are different from unsubscribing. You can boycott Chic-fil-a and then one day return, but cutting off monthly revenue streams all at once is a much different dynamic. It takes a lot to get those customers back, especially for a service that already reaches most Americans.
Maybe. There are lots of people who subscribe to these streaming services for a month or a season and then cancel, and then sign up again later because there's a new show they want to watch.
I cancelled on Wednesday night. We probably haven't watched anything on Disney+for two or three weeks; the value was getting lower over time (possibly because we've watched a lot of what we wanted to).
Had it not been for this event, I'd have probably just let the subscription hang around indefinitely (or until some big price increase caused me to reevaluate it), but as you note, it's going to be a struggle to get me back --- not because of the politics involved, but because the politics got me over the "eh, can't be bothered" hump to evaluate the value I was getting and it came up kinda marginal compared to when I first signed up.
The big conglomerates are more resistant to it. Even of one of their brands becomes damaged, they have 20 others. It's hard for people to even understand all the things they own.
Look at Target’s yearly chart. Then look at Walmart’s to see where it should have been.
Some people have been boycotting target for a while now, but people have also been boycotting walmart for longer. Both companies are still around and have billions (tens and hundreds of billions) in assets. Enough people will keep shopping there to keep them in business. If either company ever does die off it won't be because of a boycott. Even where boycotts have a measurable impact on their earnings it's not as if it matters. Do you think the CEO of either company would have to meaningfully change their lifestyle one bit if the company makes make a few billion less one year? They wouldn't feel it even if they never got another dime from their company again. They'd still be able to live out the rest of their lives without ever worrying about money. They have no reason to fear a boycott.
It doesn't stop me from avoiding shopping at them both, but I know they aren't losing any sleep over it and I don't expect they'll suddenly stop putting profit over everything else.
It would be hard to keep a secret. Someone would leak it. When i worked a for a social network, we were accused of censorship during a presidential election campaign. People were sharing and posting a clip of text in support of a candidate. It triggered the spam system which categorized it as bot spam and deleted all the posts because all the posts were identical.
> A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually canceling later.
They better be sure there are no disgruntled or unhappy employees and no layoffs coming up, otherwise that slack or email message will come out and it will just make things worse.
I've used Disney+ and I think I never used the app without experiencing some kind of issue.
A good webpage should not crash upon mouse over.
Bravo sir, bravo.
this is probably the case, not sarcastically
Load shedding
just cancelled my hulu/disney bundle and requested to delete my disney account which was processed immediately and was very easy to find.
deleting the hulu account took me effort, had to search for it and log into a special site and only a submit request to yet to be processed.
so actually props to disney for not being user hostile.
Im glad people are actually following through and actually canceling, this is how you send a message.
I had to go through a number of "are you sure?!" pages but I was surprised at how easy it was
Cancellation page worked fine for me around 11:30 EST. And here I thought I'd be late to the cancelling wave.
EST or EDT?
Wonder if you or others here are cancelling Apple too? For Tim Cook giving the president a gold icon and bowing before him?
I remember the HP website crashing in 2011 when they cancelled the PalmOS device line and slashed the price of the HP Touchpad tablet from $500 to $99. I had to call their 1800 number and wait 45 minutes to place my order with a sales rep. I wonder if Disney+ even has a phone number alternative to cancel with now that call centers are considered cost centers.
Even if you're not planning to cancel, if you cancel chances are you'll get an "offer" for the next few months.
and the point is not to take that offer right
I hope people realize that paying for streaming is optional.
vpn is all you need to pay for.
Better to just not view it.
Best thing for a copyright holder is if people pay for their stuff. Next best is if people consume it but don't pay for it, as that at least preserves their relevance. Worst is to be ignored and become irrelevant/forgotten.
I think they'd much prefer people not watch than see people enjoying the content without giving them money (often while seeding the shows to other people in the process).
If nobody watches the shows they can blame the content. If everyone clearly loves the content but refuses to give ABC/Disney/ESPN/FX their business it means the company is the problem (although that wont stop them from falling back on the lie that piracy is all about greedy people who just want everything for free)
Have you tried using a VPN? I installed the free ProtonVPN I got with protonmail and half the internet stops working. VPNs look like bots with high exit traffic so they are blocked. Plus countries are cracking down on exit nodes.
I actually have ProtonVPN works fine. But if that's problem for you:
1. You can use VPN only when you need to use it.
2. "split tunnening" You can configure VPN to be used only for some programs, like those you use torrenting programs.
3. You can build your own mini-PC/RasPi "TV box" with VPN, storage for programming, connected to television. I wonder if there is not already ready software package for that.
As long as there’s a tpb mirror in the working half the point stands.
The previous poster said their VPN doesn’t work. How exactly does “the point stand” with actual evidence that it doesn’t?
Because torrent sites aren’t going to be blocking vpns as much as other things probably
What do you use with your vpn? Every since popcorn time stopped existing, I haven’t been able to find something with good ux
Popcorn time still exists and works. Latest commit was two days ago. Torrent sites still exist too.
And VLC...
All The Simpsons episodes are on my YouTube TV DVR, along with a lot of the shows my kids like (although really what they care about is a couple channels on YouTube proper), so even before this I was wondering why I was paying for Disney+ at all.
Can we cancel 2025?
I wonder how much money Disney is going to lose off the cancellations for all of Disney’s streaming. Let say it’s 10%, that’s $2.4b. Linear revenue which includes cable and broadcast is only $2.7b. So even if Trump pulls their broadcast license, they’ll lose more money from this boycott not including boycotts of their movies and theme parks.
It’s hard to imagine even 1% let alone 10%. Disney is too powerful a brand and when people get bored and move on to the next news cycle they will come back.
The broadcast license is also strictly speaking only necessary for over the air stations, it does not apply to cable. Cable providers get ABC for cheap due to Section 111 compulsory licensing (short version: a cable provider can retransmit an OTA station for only a small royalty), but there's nothing stopping Disney from offering ABC to cable providers for a similar cost if their license is pulled.
So, the impact at the end of the day is just lost revenue from antenna users. Cable and satellite would be unaffected. That's got to be a relatively small number in the grand scheme of things.
I cancelled mine and I am not even in the US.
ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair (cnn.com) 629 points by VikingCoder 2 days ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 1133 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45282482
Previous thread, with a better reference.
My daughter is cancelling a one week Disneyworld vacation for 4 (w+h+2children).
“we have yet to prioritize scaling out the cancellation service”
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I hope you realize the phrase “go woke go broke” is crafted to turn your brain off the same way “freedom is slavery” would.
It simply means that operating a business for half the country is impossible for a large company like Disney. Companies were better off when they took the Michael Jordan approach that Republicans buy shoes too. Why as a business you would want to engage in politics is beyond me.
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Or the millions who believe the government should not be leaning on networks to shut down their critics, and the networks should not be cooperating.
Yes.
No one is upset about the free speech assault.
Nothing to see here.
/s