Trump Administration Wields Its Full Toolbox to Bring Media to Heel

President Trump received thunderous applause during his second inaugural address in January when he vowed to “immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.”

It was in keeping with the popular free-speech refrain of his long march out of the political wilderness and his first-term broadsides against “cancel culture,” which he had called “the very definition of totalitarianism.” His message had particular resonance with his supporters. After all, major social media companies banished him and others from their services in the days and weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, riots.

Yet he is now conducting the most punishing government crackdown against major American media institutions in modern times, using what seems like every tool at his disposal to eradicate reporting and commentary with which he disagrees.

ABC’s decision on Wednesday to “indefinitely” suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show, for comments the host made about the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, illuminates the administration’s efficacy so far. Far from decrying the silencing of a comedian, Mr. Trump celebrated what he termed a “cancellation” by declaring it “Great News for America” on Truth Social.

The decision comes after multimillion-dollar legal settlements from CBS and ABC in lawsuits filed by Mr. Trump that legal experts had viewed as long shots; after CBS News’s agreement to change the way it presents political interviews under administration pressure; and after an agreement by CBS’s newly merged parent company, Paramount Skydance, to appoint an “ombudsman” to hear complaints about its coverage. (The company named for the job a conservative policy veteran.)

“Taken together, the attacks on all of our media institutions is certainly unprecedented in modern American history,’’ said Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “I can’t think of any parallel.”

The Kimmel suspension was particularly striking, Professor Pickard said, because it came so quickly after the Federal Communications Commission’s chairman, Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, suggested in unambiguous terms that he could consider punishing the local stations that carried Mr. Kimmel’s shows.

Speaking with the right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson, Mr. Carr said the F.C.C. was going to need to look into “remedies,’’ pointedly saying that the “licensed broadcasters” who carry ABC’s programming needed to push back against the parent network.

In putting the onus on ABC’s stations, Mr. Carr appeared to be borrowing a page from the playbook of the Nixon administration. It had pioneered the practice of floating potential action against station licenses to pressure the major networks to toe the administration’s line.

The networks rely on independent stations and station groups to carry their programs nationally.

Mr. Nixon saw the managers of those stations, particularly in Republican-led areas, as potential allies against their affiliated networks in New York. He was consumed by the Watergate scandal before the plan bore much fruit, but he was onto something.

Some 30 years later, it was pressure from affiliates that helped force the last major cancellation of a late-night show in the wake of a political uproar. In 2002, ABC ended Bill Maher’s show, “Politically Incorrect,” after criticism from the White House of comments he had made related to the Sept. 11 attacks.

The difference this time was that Mr. Carr’s comments explicitly referred to the fact that stations are licensed by the government. And they were swiftly followed by announcements by a major station group with ABC affiliates, Nexstar, that it would independently pre-empt Mr. Kimmel’s show. ABC followed with an announcement that it would do so nationally, “indefinitely,” though it did not say why. As it happens, Nexstar is pursuing a station merger that will require F.C.C. approval. (Sinclair, another major owner of local stations, then said it would pre-empt Mr. Kimmel’s show, as well.)

Speaking on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show after the cancellation, Mr. Carr sharpened his focus on station licenses, noting that broadcast license holders are expected to operate in the “public interest, convenience and necessity.”

Conservative orthodoxy had long disfavored such government content dictates, which helped bring an end to the related Fairness Doctrine — which, among other things, required broadcasters to present all sides of disputed issues — in the Reagan era, and succeeded in bringing a more laissez-faire sensibility to the F.C.C.

Mr. Carr noted that his agency had “walked away from enforcing that public interest obligation,” but told Mr. Hannity that was now changing. “We at the F.C.C. are going to enforce the public interest obligation,” he said. “If there’s broadcasters out there that don’t like it, they can turn their license in.”

Mr. Carr had been an ardent critic of the Biden administration when it sought to pressure social media platforms over the circulation of health and election misinformation.

“We have been living through a surge in censorship,’’ he said in a speech in the spring of 2024. “Any time you have an increase in government control, you necessarily have a decrease in free speech because free speech is the counterweight; free speech is the check on government control.”

Then again, Mr. Trump made the same shift. Even now, he and his administration inveigh against any hint of so-called content moderation on social media — which tended to, for instance, affect him and his supporters when they falsely said that the 2020 election was stolen — as they pursue efforts to punish journalists, comedians and commentators who displease Mr. Trump.

Even before the assassination of Mr. Kirk, Mr. Trump was gaining steam in his campaign against traditional media companies. Now, it has picked up even more.

In a suit Mr. Trump filed against The New York Times this week, the president pointed to the settlements from ABC and CBS as vindication that his suits were “highly meritorious.”

Vice President JD Vance said those who celebrated Mr. Kirk’s death might be protected on free-speech grounds, but they should not be protected from being fired or, in the case of college professors, losing federal funding. Attorney General Pam Bondi told a podcaster: “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”

She amended her comments later to say she would not prosecute speech but incitements to violence.

Mr. Trump wasn’t as nuanced on Tuesday when Jonathan Karl, a news correspondent from Mr. Kimmel’s network, pressed him on Ms. Bondi’s comments and the implications for free speech.

“She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly,” Mr. Trump said. “You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they will come after ABC.”