Why Jimmy Kimmel should matter to all of us

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As even an occasional reader of this column knows, I am no fan of President Trump. But I will give Trump credit where credit is due. Only Donald Trump could make me agree with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). In fact, I wanted to stand up and cheer when I read Cruz’s acid comments on attempts by Trump and his lapdog FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to silence any media critics of the president. 

Cruz was responding to Carr’s statement after ABC suspended late-night’s Jimmy Kimmel, that if other media companies didn’t also shut down such critics the federal government might have to step in and do so. Which President Trump amplified by suggesting that he’d be willing to yank the broadcast license of networks which, in his opinion, didn’t treat him kindly enough. “If they’re 97 percent against, they give me only bad publicity or press,” he told reporters on Air Force One. “I mean, if they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”   

This is “dangerous as hell,” Cruz bellowed last Friday on his podcast. “I’ve got to say, that’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a Mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”  

Cruz is absolutely right. Trump’s threats against networks and newspapers are “dangerous as hell.” But threatening or silencing media critics is not just a scene out of “Goodfellas.” It’s a page right out of every authoritarian’s playbook, from Hitler to Mussolini to Hungary’s Victor Orban to China’s Xi Jinping. In 2000, one of Vladimir Putin’s first acts as president of Russia was to force cancellation of “Kukly,” a popular puppet show which poked fun at government officials. Now it’s Trump’s turn to play authoritarian and, like all those before him, he’s launching an all-out war against the media. 

It started with the White House banning AP from covering presidential events because they refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Next, with help from a Republican-controlled Congress, Trump cut federal funding for PBS and NPR and has all but totally dismantled the once-proud Voice of America. 

Radio and television aren’t Trump’s only targets. In July, he filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal for reporting on a birthday book of bawdy letters written to financier Jeffrey Epstein by his friends, including then-developer Trump. The case suddenly appeared to be meaningless once the birthday book, complete with Trump’s letter, was publicly released by the House Oversight Committee.

Last week, Trump filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times for what he claimed was libelous coverage in 2024 — a case quickly rejected by a federal judge as “decidedly improper and impermissible.”

Trump has also threatened several reporters personally, telling ABC’s Jonathan Karl that Attorney General Pam Bondi will “probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly.” He excluded the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from a joint news conference with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer after Australian reporter John Lyons asked a question Trump didn’t like. And last week the Department of Defense issued new rules requiring journalists to “sign a pledge” not to report on anything that had not first been authorized by the Pentagon.

Again, Cruz is right. It’s not about Kimmel. It’s about freedom of the press. It’s about losing the presence of a free, independent media to hold politicians’ feet to the fire that, as our Founding Fathers understood and enshrined in the First Amendment, is the very essence of democracy. 

Conservatives and liberals alike should speak out strongly against Trump’s attempts to muzzle the media. If not, they will only write the 21st century version of Pastor Martin Niemoller’s chilling warning: “First, they came for the talk show hosts. But I was not a talk show host, so I did not speak out…Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak out for me.” 

Bill Press is host of “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”