On Wednesday evening, ABC indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel, the host of its late-night show, after Kimmel discussed in his opening monologue the Trump Administration and the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was murdered last week. Some viewers accused Kimmel of erroneously suggesting that Kirk’s alleged shooter was MAGA, which Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called “some of the sickest conduct possible.” Hours before the suspension was announced, Carr raised the idea of punishing local television stations that continued to air Kimmel’s show. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said. Kimmel’s suspension was the latest in a string of attacks by the Administration on media outlets, and especially on broadcast television networks. Disney, which owns ABC, and Paramount, which owns CBS, had already settled two frivolous lawsuits (for defamation and deceptive editing, respectively) that Donald Trump brought against them. CBS News, now under new ownership, has taken a number of steps—such as hiring a conservative ombudsman—that were pushed by Carr. On Thursday, Trump explicitly stated that networks employing late-night hosts critical of him should potentially have their broadcast licenses revoked.
To talk about Kimmel’s suspension, and more broadly about authoritarian leaders and their response to comedy, I called Michael Idov, a novelist and filmmaker who ran GQ Russia between 2012 and 2014, and wrote and directed the 2019 film “The Humorist,” about a fictional comedian in the late Soviet era. (Idov’s most recent novel is “The Collaborators.”) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the similarities and differences between Trump’s and Putin’s approaches to cracking down on comedy and culture, the speed of Trump’s attack on institutions in his second term, and Russian comedy under Putin’s rule.
What did you think when you first heard this news about Jimmy Kimmel? What did it recall for you?
Slightly more than a decade ago, there was a spate of firings in the Russian media of more or less independent editors and producers who were one by one replaced by Putin loyalists. And an acquaintance of mine, in reference to several of these firings, coined a phrase that became a Russian meme at the time: “Links in a fucking chain.” Every time somebody would get fired and replaced, somebody would write “links in a fucking chain.” Honestly, that was my reaction. Last month, I saw that the Trump Administration declared that the National Endowment for the Arts’ creative-writing fellowships are going to be cancelled, and grants will now be contingent on writing on such topics as “Make America Healthy Again.” That to me was even more reminiscent of things I’d seen during my time in Russia.
It took more than a decade of Putin’s rule for the Russian Ministry of Culture to even start suggesting preferred themes to filmmakers and TV creators. And when they started suggesting themes, it was a scandal. Vladimir Medinsky, the Minister of Culture at the time, would say things like, “Oh, we want to see more films about heroic cosmonauts or the Olympics and the Second World War,” et cetera. People would say, “How dare he suggest topics like that?”
Can you step back and discuss the time line for the different changes in Russia? It seems like you are saying that they went after journalism before culture, to some degree.
Right. The first attacks on the news media came very early, within a year of Putin coming to power. In 2001, the network that was owned by an oligarch named Vladimir Gusinsky was taken over. And that was part of Putin’s first wave of consolidating power—in this case, getting out from under the oligarchs that helped put him in power. I would argue that the second wave came after 2004, in the wake of the so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Putin and his people realized that they have to start paying attention to the internet and youth culture, and start creating these sort of AstroTurf movements, as well as generally keeping tabs on what’s going on in the online space. It had not occurred to them before.
But the overarching tendency here is that every time this happened, it was a reaction to an external event. Until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, repression of the media was always in response to something, and they took what they felt they needed and left the rest alone. Every time there was something that they wouldn’t touch. For example, glossy magazines were exempted for many years because the thinking went that, Well, the glossy-magazine culture is basically the urban élites talking to themselves, and we don’t really need to get into that space as long as we control TV news and daily newspapers. As time went on, the government felt it needed to control more aspects of the media and just the general informational space in order to stay in power.
Does the idea that these restrictions were often prompted by external factors fit with your answer that the early moves against the media were Putin trying to take power from the oligarchs who helped get him in power?
Well, I think that was the external factor. Putin saw firsthand, in 1996, under Boris Yeltsin, that a media strategy, which back then meant TV ads and skewed reporting, could swing an election. The first move was to close that loophole and to make sure that an independently held TV network with a robust news operation can never create a popular challenger to him. So that was the need. My long-held view on Putin is that he lacks anything resembling a master plan or a strategy. He is, however, a brilliant tactician with the sole purpose of surviving and keeping himself and his friends in power. And, basically, he will espouse any ideology or hold up or hoist any flag in order to make that happen. When, in the two-thousands, for example, it seemed more advantageous to present himself as a liberal reformer, he was a liberal reformer. When, in 2012, it was temporarily expedient to have Russia become almost like a religious state and really, really empower the Patriarch as one of the main decision-makers in the country, he did that.
This is the head of the Russian Orthodox Church?