Angelo Carusone on MS NOW discusses the administration's attacks on free speech: “The process is the punishment here, and then the downstream effect is to chill and control speech”
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From the May 2, 2026, edition of MS NOW's The Weekend: Primetime
AYMAN MOHYELDIN (CO-HOST): The White House is once again waging war against a late-night comedian. President Trump is calling on ABC to fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel after Kimmel made this joke about Melania Trump prior — important to emphasize here — prior to the White House correspondents' dinner attack.
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MOHYELDIN: Now FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who Trump once praised as a so-called warrior for free speech, has since issued an order demanding Disney's eight owned and operated television stations to file their broadcast license renewals ahead of schedule. Carr is insisting, meanwhile, this isn't related to Kimmel.
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MOHYELDIN: Joining us now is Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters. Angelo, it's good to have you back on the show. We saw how ABC reacted last year when Carr made his threats and they temporarily pulled Kimmel off the air over his monologue after Charlie Kirk's assassination. But they've given no indication, at least for now, that they're going to pull him again. Do you see this as ABC realizing that they might fight back, or how do you explain their willingness right now to have his back?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): Yeah. I think it's a couple of things. One, there's been a lot of lessons learned. Even companies that caved and capitulated last year are starting to at least internalize that it's bad for business to cave, that they'll just keep extracting more demands from you, that there is no mechanism that will get you out of the clutches of, you know, whatever sort of whim the Trump administration wants. That's the whole point of sort of misusing authoritarian power.
So I do think that there's a signal that they're going to have to fight this. I also think there's another difference here is that last time it was all threat, but this time there's action. And so they don't really have a choice. They have to stiffen up, and they're going to have to fight this, because now there's actual regulatory action beyond just words. And so I think those are two big differences here.
It's a real escalation on the part of the FCC and the Trump administration. I think in all the talk and all the bluster, sometimes that gets lost. What Carr did is extremely or nearly unprecedented. It hasn't happened for decades.
CATHERINE RAMPELL (CO-HOST): I just want to read to you and our audience, Angelo, that Donald Trump recently tweeted or posted on Truth Social yet another critical comment about Jimmy Kimmel. In this case, it's a very long post, but it concludes with “Bill Maher is a moron, though slightly more talented than Jimmy Kimmel.”
Most of it is about Bill Maher and how he doesn't like Bill Maher. To your point, Angelo, about how this may be bad for business or it may not be wise to cave, the other thing I wonder about is how audiences will react, because when ABC temporarily pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air last year, a lot of people canceled their Disney+ subscriptions, called and complained. I remember there were even stories about how the ABC in Australia, which is a totally different ABC, was getting complaints, because people were confusing them with the one that had yanked Jimmy Kimmel off of the air.
So it seems like there is some risk to cooperating with the Trump administration, to preemptively capitulating, in fact, with a review like this, not only because it might encourage more bullying from the Trump administration, but because you might alienate some of your audience.
CARUSONE: Yeah. I mean, look what happens right now with CBS. Right? I mean, they didn't just capitulate in a lot of ways. They radically shifted their coverage, their posture. Their orientation just feels so different, that their audiences are rejecting the show on a regular basis. Their ratings are wildly down. The audience is saying no. We don't want this.
And that was the big thing last time, as you noted with Disney+, is that their own audience was rejecting them. They were fighting back. They were saying, we don't want you to do this. This caving is really unsettling. It's so inconsistent with what we'd expect from you. We don't want it. And they punished them.
And I think that's the other big tell here and the thing that's significant. The last time the leverage point was actually these local networks. They were really — what Brendan Carr was pushing on were all the stations that carry Jimmy Kimmel, and there was a really big deal, some merger that was taking place in local media between two really big owners of local media stations. That was the real leverage point is that he was putting that out there, and these companies were tripping over themselves to reward — to sort of praise Trump or show Trump that they'd be loyal. And that's the effect of this moment is that the leverage here again is the licenses. This time, it's not affiliates. It's the actual ones that ABC owns and operates, but it's worth just putting a fine point on that number. It's only eight. There are hundreds of licenses in the country.
So to your question, if you're another broadcaster or if you're a local affiliate or you own a couple stations, you're now beginning to think, gosh, if we go — if we run afoul of this, we're not Disney. We may not have the margins and the resources that Disney has to fight in court.
Do we want to have to go through a legal fight with the administration over our licenses now? So the process is the punishment here, and then the downstream effect is to chill and control speech.
MOHYELDIN: Angelo, let me play for you this sound bite, if I can, of Brendan Carr on Katie Miller's podcast, where I think he basically says the whole ballgame. He says the quiet part out loud. Take a listen.
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MOHYELDIN: I mean, he literally says this is “attributable to Trump running at the fake news media. You got NPR defunded. You've got PBS defunded. You've got CBS having new ownership. CNN is getting new ownership.”
He is not even being subtle about what this administration is doing.
CARUSONE: That's right. I mean, it's — this is part of the larger effort. You sort of, you want to control the narrative and the storyline, and more importantly, you want to crack down on journalism. You want to crack down on a free media because that is one of the levers of accountability. That information is a check on the types of explosive power that they're engaging in, the misuses of power and the abuses of power.
And that's where I think the tie-in comes is that they're not hiding it. They're very transparent. And I think back to what he said on Benny Johnson's show, Brendan Carr, back in September where — about Jimmy Kimmel — where we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way. I mean, this has not been a one-off. This has been part of an escalating series of actions that have a cumulative effect, and they're going to keep going, as has already been discussed. Trump's already setting his sights on other networks and other networks' hosts, because they can do that now, and that's why it's important to have a stiff spine.
I think in this larger context, what I find so unsettling, though, is that, as you noted, he's given away the whole ballgame. And yet, at this very moment, the White House Correspondents' Association is still aggressively trying to reschedule a dinner where Trump is going to be present while they're engaging in this broad-scale attack on free press and free journalism. And that's what I just can't reconcile is that as much as Disney needs to fight back, everybody in the industry needs to fight back. Because, ultimately, that's — it isn't just about one-off individual entities. It is really about whether or not we're going to have free speech and unfettered press. And, as Carr noted, they want control, and they're willing to break or attack or undermine those that they see as oppositional.