Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel didn't deserve what happened to him.

What Kimmel said on his ABC late-night talk show was perfectly accurate.  In lamenting Charlie Kirk's assassination, Kimmel said that MAGA supporters were doing all they could to deflect blame for Kirk's killing to others even as the murderer - who is now believed to have shot Kirk for his transphobic comments at a time when the murderer was falling in love with a woman making a transition from the male sex - came from a pro-gun, pro-MAGA family.   But Kimmel likely wasn't suspended from his show for saying that.  More likely, ABC suspended him for joking about Trump's nonchalant response to Kirk's death, pivoting from that topic to the subject of the obscene White House ballroom, the construction of which is getting underway.

When Kimmel made fun of Trump, Trump and his minions overreacted accordingly.  TV station owners Sinclair and Nexstar, right-wing media companies that own many ABC affiliates between them, demanded that ABC pay for Kimmel's arrogance, and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr let Disney, which owns ABC, know that their ABC affiliates were ready to revolt and hold ABC accountable for Kimmel.  This was because Sinclair and Nexstar were discussing a merger and Carr planned raise the limits on the number of stations a single company can own in so many markets to allow the merger to happen.  And Sinclair and Nexstar didn't want ABC to nix this deal.

Disney chairman Bob Iger could have stood up to the threats from the ABC-affiliate owners and to Carr.  Now in his seventies, Iger doesn't even have to be in charge of Disney.  He has a comfortable life, lots of money, and a beautiful wife - former model Willow Bay, a one-time spokesmodel for Estée Lauder (did I happen to mention that the Lauder family is part of the American conservative establishment?) and a journalist who is now the dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California.  Iger, as one of the most innovative and most respected entertainment moguls of the past fifty years, cemented his legacy when he retired a few years ago but just had to come back to run Disney again because he missed the power.  So, instead of standing up to Uncle Charlie (the old truckers' term for the FCC) and doing the right thing, Iger went ahead and suspended Kimmel.  Kimmel is on indefinite leave and, given that the owners of the ABC affiliates are trying to force him into an apology for what he said about Kirk (he said nothing about Kirk) and making a donation to Kirk's organization (though it would make far more sense for them to make Kimmel donate to Trump's ballroom, which would make him one of several donors, I'm led to understand), he will likely be fired altogether.

If you wondered when the right to free speech would be nullified, we've reached that point - at least in broadcast media, anyway.  The only question now is when all free speech will be curtailed and when Trump will make dissent against his regime a capital crime.

In the meantime, people are already expressing their displeasure with Kimmel's suspension-cum-dismissal with their wallets.  Folks are canceling their subscriptions to Disney-owned Hulu and Disney+.  They've already stopped watching ABC programs like "The View," so even if Whoopi Goldberg says anything critical of Trump, no one will ever hear it because no one will be tuning in.  Me?  I actually found a present-day sitcom I actually like - "Shifting Gears," starring Tim Allen, which, like previous Allen sitcoms, airs on ABC.  Tim Allen is an American comedic icon, not unlike Jimmy Kimmel, but I can't watch his new sitcom now, because it's on ABC, and it kills me to have to do this to Allen.  (Allen himself is reported to be pro-Trump, but I have a feeling that his support for Trump may be lukewarm at best.)   By the way, with Jeff Bezos kissing Trump's' posterior more frequently, I have to cancel my subscription to Amazon Prime, especially when I can't think of anything else I want that I can't find anywhere else.

And then there's CBS, which bent the knee to Trump to allow its parent company Paramount to merge with Skydance.  The network's news division, the TV news department that gave us Murrow, Cronkite, Moyers, Rather and Kuralt, now has an ombudsman to make sure that nothing that offends Trump gets on the airwaves.  Meanwhile, the fifty-eighth season of "60 Minutes" begins soon.  Will I tune in?  If I do, it will be the only CBS show I watch.  I'll keep an open mind about "60 Minutes," the season premiere of which airs a week from tomorrow, but if, after a couple of weeks, it turns out that it's all celebrity interviews and Anderson Cooper travelogues, that will likely be it for me.

P.S.  Please note that I never said anything derogatory about Charlie Kirk in this post.  (Yes, I heard what Vance said about going after people who disparage Kirk's memory.)

P.P.S.  I posted the following comment on Willow Bay's Instagram page: "Your husband is a coward.  There, I said it."

Sex and the University

I'm rolling my eyes over the suspension of Brigham Young University student Brandon Davies from the school's basketball team for violating the Brigham Young University "code of honor" by having premarital sex with his girlfriend. The school has been praised for being true to its commitment to students leading clean, honorable lives by holding a star athlete who broke the rules accountable for his actions, even if it led to BYU's Cougars basketball team, ranked third in the National Collegiate Athletics Association, losing a home game without Davies to an unranked team and denying BYU the top seed.

This is, by a wide margin, the silliest story of the year so far. Here's something to consider as you ponder this story: BYU treats its students like children. The Mormon Church-affiliated university is so concerned with cultivating pure, wholesome individuals that it intervenes in every aspect of a student's development except the intellectual aspect. Many colleges and universities treat students like the adults they are and expect them to live with and understand the responsibilities of an adult . . . and the issue of students engaged in premarital consensual sex is not academically relevant enough to bother with. Such colleges and universities try to develop fine minds - the primary objective for any college or university - and give students a thought process with which to ponder morals and ethics rather than spell out commandments for them. That's certainly the case at Drew, where I went, and that school was founded by Methodists.

Brigham Young University, as a school associated with a church not known for encouraging free thinking, should at least encourage some kind of mature thought process in the context of the Mormon faith, if such an academic mission is even possible. But BYU is too busy banning caffeinated beverages on its campus. And besides, the fact that BYU even values its basketball team so much that it's a great sacrifice for the team to lose a game due to an adherence to principle only shows how ridiculous the importance of intercollegiate athletics has become. Maybe commentators should pay less attention to the athletic standing of the Mormon Church's equivalent to Notre Dame and focus on the more pertinent issue of its academic standing.

Davies, a Mormon himself, is also black, and the church has a history of racism. Brigham Young himself said that blacks were cursed with dark skin for challenging God's authority in pre-existence. Mormons have been pretty good at assimilating blacks - albeit with a little difficulty here and there - since the church dropped its racist beliefs in 1978, so I don't know how much of an issue race is in this situation. I'm sure a white student athlete would have been suspended from a team sport for the same infraction, and the possibility of Davies's race having something to do his suspension seems to be a rather unlikely scenario. But when you get right down to it, there is still the issue of whether or not Davies and other BYU students are getting a rigorous higher education they can apply the school's equally rigorous moral code to.

Judge for yourself: The school is named after a man who was a talented administrator but had only two days of formal education.

Olbermann Overload

Yesterday I reported courtesy of boldprogressives.org that Rachel Maddow brought up the issue of her partner Keith Olbermann and his suspension from MSNBC for making campaign donations. What boldprogressives.org didn't tell us, though, is what Maddow actually said. In a story where Olbermann is drawing a lot of support for his principled actions, Maddow was, how shall we say, more admonitory. She pointed out that Fox News is notorious for donating money to politicians as Olbermann had done but that Fox News has different rules than MSNBC. Fox, she said, is a political outlet, while MSNBC is a news outlet with different standards and thus has different rules.

If so, that doesn't make Olbermann's infraction all that serious. All he did is what he does in his commentary on "Countdown" - support liberal causes. At the crux of the onion ring in this issue, though, is MSNBC's identity. However much the network positions itself as a liberal alternative to Fox, they also try to adhere to standards of impartial journalism. They have to. They share resources and on-air talent with its sibling broadcast news organization, NBC's obviously nonpartisan news department. And msnbc.com, a separate company altogether, wants to maintain an impartial bent as well. That MSNBC could go ahead with a politically liberal ad campaign and yet try to maintain a sense of impartiality makes a lot of people at the cable news operation uncomfortable. But then, as MSNBC has more viewers and initials in its name than CNN has, it's a problem CNN would gladly take on. (Anyone watching "Parker/Spitzer?" Anyone?)

The one thing that hurts Olbermann in all this is that he rails against Fox News's owner Rupert Murdoch doing what he himself just did, giving money to politicians. But $7200 in campaign donations from a private citizen working for the press compared to the millions given by someone who owns the damn press seems to be an unfair comparison. Some have said that MSNBC can only be hurt by all of this incoherent brand positioning and the fact that its most highly rated on-air talent has been benched. Actually, I think it could help them, because this is all generating controversy, and controversy is what drives ratings and interest. As the Rolling Stones proved forty-five years ago, any press - even bad press - is good press.

I hope Keith comes back on. Because, quite frankly, I don't want to watch "Parker/Spitzer."

Tears Of a Clown

Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's resident clown, committed an infraction that proved to be no laughing matter. When it was discovered that he contributed money to two Democratic House candidates in Arizona and the (alas, failed) Senate campaign of Jack Conway in Kentucky - $2400 each, for a total of $7200 - MSNBC suspended him indefinitely for doing so. Although the channel's two most visible conservative commentators, former congressman Joe Scarborough and veteran political operative Pat Buchanan, have contributed money to Republican candidates, Olbermann's apparent crime is that he donated the money without prior permission from his bosses. As he gave the money about five days before Election Day, it seems he couldn't wait that long.

Needless to say, MSNBC's viewers - yes, there are some! - see this punitive action as the equivalent of swatting a mosquito with a baseball bat, and they are demanding that Olbermann be re-instated on his show "Countdown" immediately. A petition being circulated by BoldProgressives.org, having been signed by 200,000 people (including me, in full disclosure) received coverage from the New York Times, and Rachel Maddow declared on her show that MSNBC was feeling the public's outrage.

This is a positive sign for those who appreciate Olbermann's passionate and incisive commentary and all of those who believe that such punishment hardly fits something that barely constitutes a crime. Who do you think would Olbermann, as a private citizen, have given money to? It's not as if he ever pretended to be a nonpartisan reporter. He's a commentator, for Pete's sake! Why does he need "permission" to help candidates he believes in?

If MSNBC president Phil Griffin doesn't bring Keith Olbermann back soon, than he's the worst . . . person . . . in the world!