The late-night TV landscape just got even more fraught.

Earlier this week, the network ABC announced that its show Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and its host, have been taken off the air indefinitely over comments Kimmel made about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Today on Commotion, culture writers Alyssa Mercante and Jackson Weaver join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to discuss Kimmel’s indefinite suspension by ABC/Disney, and how that decision is redefining the rules around freedom of speech in American media.

We’ve included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

WATCH | Today’s episode on YouTube:

Elamin: Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, they all weighed in. Alyssa, there’s a lot to unpack here, but let me just go back to your first initial gut reaction when you heard Jimmy Kimmel is going to be taken off the air indefinitely.

Alyssa: I’d like to say I was surprised, but I wasn’t surprised. We have seen echoes or hints of this happening with Colbert. Trump has historically obsessed over his image on cable news networks. He gets frustrated at SNL, you know. He obsessively watches television, and we’ve seen a huge push from right-wing talking heads and content creators towards trying to get people fired in the wake of the death of Charlie Kirk.

As someone who’s been studying this for a few years now, I know that this is a president with very thin skin attempting to thicken that skin by removing anybody who says anything about him. Now, he has even more control than he did during his first administration, and I think it’s a lot easier for him to pull all of this off. So not surprising, sadly.

Elamin: That’s a useful context, I think, this idea of Trump using the FCC to maybe muzzle networks. That’s not a new idea. This is something that’s been in the air for a minute. The fact that this story is coming out now, that might be why you’re not surprised….

Alyssa, I want to play you a part of an interview that aired on CBC Toronto’s Metro Morning. This is a University of Toronto professor, Jason Stanley. He’s speaking about the big picture of what’s happening in the United States right now:

Metro MorningExpert on authoritarianism reflects on the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel Live!

[CLIP OF JASON STANLEY FROM METRO MORNING]: Really, what has happened in the United States is Trump has taken control of all the independent levers of government — the supposedly independent levers of government, legally they’re supposed to be independent — and he has instructed them to target his opponents. The United States government is on the midway point, or early midway point, towards a one-party state, a dictatorship. And it’s increasingly out in the open. So we’ve got all the democratic institutions under siege. Every apparatus of the state is directed against anyone who would criticize Trump in democratic institutions: media, the courts, the universities. And we in Canada have to not neutralize this. We have to not paper this over. We have to not normalize it.

Elamin: Alyssa, Dr. Stanley is not mincing any words there. He says the idea of the United States is in the midway point to being a one-party state. That’s a significant statement. When you hear that, how does that fit in with what’s going on with the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that regulates TV, and radio and other media in the United States?

Alyssa: Well, we have seen time and time again that Trump’s appointees in various corners of the government are politically kind to him … in many ways, financially motivated by joining the administration, and in a lot of other ways criminally unqualified. You look at Kash Patel, who’s the first FBI director that’s never been in the FBI in any way, shape or form.

And we know [Brendan] Carr and what he was looking to do even before he became the chair of the FCC. He was named to a Republican seat on the Commission back in 2017. He wrote the FCC chapter for Project 2025, the playbook for Trump’s big 2024 campaign. He said that the agency was censoring people, and that the FCC should promote free speech, which is very interesting considering what just happened. We know that he’s close friends with Elon Musk. We know that as soon as he stepped into the role, he started launching investigations into diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and accusing ABC of not using them correctly and that they had political biases. He complained when Trump was fact-checked during a debate. These are all very clear components of a state that is trying to silence critics in every way that it can, by shoving anyone who is amenable to Trump and his ideas into every corner of the government.

You can listen to the full discussion from today’s show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.