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A few months ago, Ross Douthat, a columnist and podcaster at the New York Times, interviewed Tony Gilroy, the creator of Andor, the outstanding Disney+ series—set in the Star Wars universe and portraying, in tense, often granular detail, the tightening chokehold of the fascistic Galactic Empire and coalescence of the rebellion against it—that had just wrapped its second and final season. Many of the show’s themes had clear contemporary resonance—The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka observed that a chilling plotline involving an Imperial massacre evoked (albeit imprecisely) the war in Gaza, going “further in its denunciation of violent occupation than most news coverage dares to”—and the premise of Douthat’s conversation with Gilroy was that the latter had made an explicitly left-wing work of art that the former, a conservative, thought didn’t suck. Gilroy pushed back on the “left wing” part of this premise, asking Douthat, incredulously, “Do you identify with the Empire?” “No, I don’t,” Douthat responded. “But I don’t think that you have to be left-wing to resist authoritarianism.” 

Last week, ABC, the broadcast network that Disney owns, indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after he made (deeply unhelpful, if not technically inaccurate) remarks about the politicization of the recent murder of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk; Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, leveled a thinly veiled threat of regulatory consequences (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way”); and Nexstar and Sinclair, two local broadcast chains (the former of which has a merger pending before the FCC) that own ABC-affiliated stations, preempted Kimmel’s show. (For more on how this all went down, read this piece by my new colleague Amos Barshad.) Nexstar, for one, denied caving to government pressure, but the timeline warranted no benefit of the doubt, and liberal critics did not offer it. Unionized writers protested outside Disney’s HQ in California, waving placards with slogans that included “Did you even watch Andor?” and “This is literally what your show Andor is about.” Dan Gilroy—a writer on the show (and Tony’s brother), who recently won an Emmy for his work on an episode in which the liberal senator Mon Mothma chastises the aforementioned Imperial massacre as a “genocide” and its ultimate perpetrator, Emperor Palpatine, as a “monster”—wrote an op-ed for Deadline decrying the treatment of Kimmel as “jack-booted” and reminiscent of Putin’s Russia. “Many people saw parallels between Andor and the real world. I see them as well, particularly in the events of the last week,” Gilroy wrote. The entertainment industry, he added, “faces the most sophisticated, venomous, creeping evil in America’s history. There’s no standing above this conflict. No impartial observers. If you’re on the sidelines you’ve made a choice and must live with it.”

Of course, you don’t have to be left-wing to resist authoritarianism, and at least some right-wing (or right-leaning) voices in the mainstream media firmament compared Carr’s threats to the behavior of a Mob boss; so, too, on his podcast, did the Republican US senator Ted Cruz (stepping—unexpectedly and, surely, for a limited run—into the Mothma role). And yet such commentary was hardly Manichaean in its flavor: Cruz sounded most concerned that Carr was setting a precedent for Democrats to “ruthlessly” “silence” conservatives the next time they hold power; others claimed that liberals have already done as much, citing, by way of example, the Biden administration’s campaign against misinformation on social media during the pandemic, and the “cancel culture” of the “woke era” (including in the Star Wars universe). The “woke era” comparison was drawn by none other than Douthat, who wrote a Times column attempting to articulate a principled conservative case for Kimmel’s suspension and, after Barack Obama posted on X warning against “government coercion,” replied that it would be “healthy for a figure like Obama to acknowledge what became obvious in 2019–2021—that a distributed, public-private form of speech policing can actually feel as oppressive as any FCC warning.”

Numerous observers pointed out that Obama did, in fact, object to “call-out culture” and “wokeness” at the time. And Douthat acknowledged the much bigger problem with his argument in his column: that Trump isn’t making a principled case, but instead wants “a world where most cultural institutions are simply subservient to his personal interests, his reputation, his amour-propre.” This should already have been obvious to anyone with a pulse, but last week, Trump was a hundred percent explicit about it, over and over again. On Monday, he sued the Times, several of its reporters, and Penguin Random House for defamation in a suit that, as CNN put it, read “at times like a pro-Trump op-ed, with page after page of gushing praise for the president.” On Tuesday, he accused the reporter Jonathan Karl and his employer, ABC News, of engaging in hate speech against him, and said that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, might go after them. On Wednesday, he said that Kimmel being “CANCELLED” was “Great News for America,” and urged NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers next. (Kimmel’s show has not been CANCELED, or at least not yet.) On Thursday, with Carr essentially arguing that Kimmel had been canceled by the free market, Trump said that the broadcast networks have been very mean to him, and that Carr, an “outstanding” “patriot,” might have to start taking licenses away. On Friday, Trump suggested that negative coverage about him is “really illegal.” On Saturday, he urged Bondi to prosecute several of his political rivals “NOW!!!” Yesterday, at a memorial service, Trump said that he disagreed with Kirk’s supposed leniency toward his ideological foes, adding: “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.” To put all this in televisual terms, if Andor is a tautly paced thriller in which the descent into authoritarianism is shown via subterfuge, insidious propaganda campaigns, and the arbitrary and opaque cranking of oppressive bureaucratic machinery, what we’re watching now is more like a Palpatine stand-up set. 

Or, perhaps more accurately, we’re watching both: the Kimmel story may have gotten a huge amount of media attention last week, and appeared to some observers to be a tipping point in state censorship in America, but under the radar, other speech-related stories arguably painted an even darker picture. An immigration board ordered the deportation of Mario Guevara, a journalist from El Salvador who was arrested while covering an anti-Trump protest in Georgia in June; the charges against Guevara were dropped, but he was transferred to the custody of immigration officials, even though, according to his attorney, he has a work permit and a pending green-card application; leading press-freedom groups have condemned his treatment as retaliation for his work. Meanwhile, a court ordered the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student who was detained as part of a broader administration clampdown on pro-Palestinian activism earlier this year. A judge ruled that Khalil omitted details from his green-card application, but his lawyers have denied this. (“They’re making up charges to remove him because they disagree with his dissent from US foreign policy,” one said.) They are fighting the decision. 

Ben Smith, of Semafor, said on MSNBC last week that, “in some ways,” Khalil “is less vulnerable than Jimmy Kimmel.” In almost every way, this is clearly nonsense. (I suspect that the millionaire Jimmy Kimmel will be just fine.) But Smith’s rationale was interesting. The source of Kimmel’s vulnerability, Smith said, is that he works for the sort of “big, consolidated mega-corporation” that is “very exposed to regulatory action.” Smith went on: “Bernie Sanders used to go around ranting about the corporate media. Honestly, as someone who worked in corporate media, I never really got it; I was not subject to government censorship.” Now, Smith acknowledged, he’s taking seriously “the warnings that came from, like, the Noam Chomsky left, about big consolidated media companies being subject to pressure.”

This, to me, is important if we’re to properly understand this moment: what we saw last week wasn’t a pitiless state machine crushing any perceived resistance in its path—or, again, wasn’t only that—but a decision, on the part of private actors with a range of business interests to protect, to be crushed. Jimmy Kimmel is an entertainer, not a journalist, but the networks that air(ed) his show control an awful lot of journalism; their behavior, and that of other major corporations that have similarly bowed to Trump in recent months, is proof positive that corporate media ownership is not some unflinching bulwark against the corrosive influence of official censorship. Indeed, decisions around speech have always played out somewhere within the tangled nexus of government power, corporate power, and audience reaction. Acknowledging the reality of corporate censorship was, perhaps, once a left-coded opinion, but—if the right’s recent cancel-culture discourse is any guide—it’s not anymore. (Indeed, some of the recent “woke era” censorship claims appear to have confused things that happened under, or at the hand of, the Biden administration and decisions that major media companies made under Trump the first time around.) Similarly, the libertarian idea that corporations are capable of making decisions in some sort of regulatory vacuum, free of any consideration of what the government might think, has always been a fallacy—one that has, nonetheless, provided a sort of implied baseline in some of the recent Kimmel coverage and commentary. (Even a true regulatory vacuum would reflect some form of state decision-making.) 

I offer these observations not to soften the outrage of Trump and his administration’s censorial conduct, or to push the idea that both sides are culpable here. My intention is, in fact, something like the opposite. It is to say that there is not really such a thing as purely free speech, and that there are perfectly good reasons why governments, private actors, or some combination thereof might want to regulate it—to curb black-is-white misinformation or defamation, for instance, or to ensure competition within media markets. As I see it, the view that there should be no limits on speech at all is a very radical, and certainly ideological, one that hardly anyone sincerely believes—and asserting it, even implicitly, as the baseline for understanding this moment risks actually inviting the sort of both sides are culpable here scolding that has emerged as a rhetorical scaffold for the Trump administration’s recent war on critics. Nor should we, as journalists, give in to frameworks that muddy terms like “misinformation” and “defamation” by recasting them as purely subjective concepts whose sole use is to be weaponized, as Cruz and his ilk might have it, by both sides in turn. This is not to say that certain topics—like, for example, the Biden administration’s content-moderation relationships with major tech platforms—are beyond scrutiny or debate. (Indeed, we’ve participated in that debate.) What we need in this moment, at least in part, is coverage that drills down and explores with clarity and specificity why what Trump is doing is different. The precise boundaries of free speech will always be contested, and that contestation is inevitably fraught. But it can’t happen at all outside of democratic guardrails.

Not that much drilling is required, necessarily. Trump’s recent rhetoric about “illegal” coverage and all the rest is, on one level, very scary. But for those interested in protecting their First Amendment rights—including, hopefully, the entirety of the press—it might also be preferable to the alternative: namely, the arbitrary and opaque cranking of oppressive bureaucratic machinery. Trump’s threats are so explicit that news organizations have no excuse but to identify them for what they are. The courts, if and when it comes to it, should have no excuse either. Already, on Friday, a judge rejected Trump’s lawsuit against the Times in what CNN described as “a ruling dripping with derision” (Trump intends to refile the suit); the Supreme Court, as I’ve explored recently, seems to be in the business of making excuses these days, but its powers of reinterpretation aren’t endless. As various observers have pointed out, threats to take away broadcast licenses are chilling, but also might be empty, since that process is tough to consummate. Corporations can fight back, even if some won’t. And attempts to singlehandedly override the plain text of the Constitution will, at some point, have to win popular legitimacy—or at least avoid disavowal. I’m not so optimistic, at this point, as to believe that press freedom is a redline for the US electorate. But Trump’s mandate seems to me to revolve principally around bringing down prices. Some empires are not as galactic in scope as they may appear. And even Palpatine proved fallible.

Disney’s Andor was set in a fictional universe of good and evil, of course, but as Douthat eventually teased out in his interview with Tony Gilroy, it was a great show because it ultimately avoided Manichaean oversimplification: the characters on the Imperial side are depicted as human; the characters on the side of the rebellion as flawed; their struggle, at least at the ground level, advances in shades of gray. To the extent that politics can be read into it, they aren’t, as Gilroy maintained, necessarily leftist: Douthat acknowledged that libertarian friends of his see Andor as being about “localism and leaving us alone against the depredations of tyranny”; Gilroy said that “the universal flag that I think I can fly all the way through the whole show and feel comfortable with” was community, hardly a concept that the left owns. Well, that and rooting against an authoritarian regime; ultimately, that necessity is clear, and unavoidable. In the end, it’s a precondition of getting to have these discussions at all. You can’t stand above that fact.

Other Notable Stories… 
By Jem Bartholomew

• On September 10, Israel bombed a newspaper complex in Sana‘a, Yemen’s capital, killing thirty-five people—including thirty-one media workers—in what the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) labeled the deadliest attack on journalists in the past sixteen years. The complex housed three Houthi-connected media outlets, The Guardian reported, and at the time of the strike, members of the Yemeni army’s press arm were finishing the weekly print edition. The Israeli military said it had selected “military targets” and those disseminating “propaganda.” The CPJ said the bombing—and its justifications—continued a long-standing “Israeli tactic of portraying journalists as combatants to excuse their killing.” The bombing took place on the same day as Charlie Kirk’s shooting, with the coverage largely buried by that event. A journalist living next to the site in Sana‘a told the CPJ that about eight missiles turned the structure to rubble, leaving some journalists’ bodies buried underneath. You can read Jon Allsop’s piece for CJR on the Israeli claim that it does not target journalists “as such” here. 

• The Trump administration’s so-called Department of War said in a memo on Friday that journalists who publish sensitive material unauthorized by the Pentagon could have their press credentials revoked. The mandate would apply even to unclassified information. It was immediately condemned by news organizations and several lawmakers across both parties. Matt Murray, executive editor of the Washington Post, which first reported the memo, said the move is “counter to the First Amendment and against the public interest.” Don Bacon, a retired military officer and now a GOP representative for Nebraska, said on X: “This is so dumb that I have a hard time believing it is true. We don’t want a bunch of Pravda newspapers only touting the Government’s official position. A free press makes our country better. This sounds like more amateur hour.” More than two dozen news organizations operate at the Pentagon. The move continues Secretary Pete Hegseth’s push to exert pressure on news reporting, which CJR has been covering since the administration took office.

• In the UK last week, the security services—known as MI5—admitted for the first time to illegally spying on the phone communications of a reporter, the BBC’s Vincent Kearney. The revelations came from documents submitted to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a judicial body that investigates surveillance. Kearney, who became BBC Northern Ireland home affairs correspondent in 2006, had phone data intercepted by MI5 in 2006 and 2009, which was then shared with several police forces. MI5 accepted that the surveillance breached articles eight and ten of the European Convention on Human Rights. A lawyer for Kearney and the BBC said this “appears to be the first time in any tribunal proceedings in which MI5 publicly accept[ed] interference with a journalist’s communications data.” Kearney said it was “deeply concerning…for all journalists” and that he wants to pursue as much detail as possible.

• Around 1:30pm on Friday in Sacramento, three bullets were fired into a window of the ABC10 TV station. No one was harmed in the shooting, according to ABC10’s owner, Tegna Inc. Local police told NPR that a sixty-four-year-old man was arrested on Saturday and charged with felonies including shooting into an occupied building, assault with a deadly weapon, and negligent discharge of a firearm. He is expected to appear in court on Tuesday. The shots were fired the day after protests outside the station following ABC’s suspension of Kimmel. The National Association of Black Journalists’ Sacramento chapter condemned the violence and said its members working at ABC10 were “shaken up.” 

• The world of fashion magazines got a new entrant this month. On the first cover of 72 magazine, instead of the usual rundown of features, the new quarterly publication just had a list of twenty celebrities. These were the people whom Edward Enninful, former British Vogue editor in chief, had tapped to feature in his first edition, with Julia Roberts pictured on the cover, interviewed by George Clooney. Enninful was in charge of British Vogue for six years, departing in 2023, amid reports of a power struggle with Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour. Wintour announced this summer that she would be stepping away from her role as editor, the significance of which Haley Mlotek wrote about for CJR. (Wintour remains at Condé Nast.) Enninful, who was the British title’s first Black editor in chief, told Bloomberg that he never wanted Wintour’s job anyway. “I wanted my own thing,” he said. “I wanted to create something for the next generation.”
  
• And tributes were paid to Robert Redford last week, after the Hollywood star and Oscar-winning director died at eighty-nine at home in Utah on Tuesday. No specific cause of death was given by his publicity firm, but it said he died in his sleep surrounded by loved ones. Redford was a movie star for decades—partly down to his chiseled handsomeness as a romantic lead, partly down to his skill as “a subtle performer with a definite magnetism,” as his New York Timesobituary put it—but it was how he used that star power that counted. Redford demanded that his films carry cultural weight and explore serious topics. He used his influence in Hollywood to bring All the President’s Men, by Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to the screen in 1976. Redford played Woodward in the story of two reporters unraveling Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal. It is frequently cited as among the best movies about journalism. As Redford was once quoted saying: “The role and fate of journalism is an ongoing issue and constantly needs to be looked at and looked after.”

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