After getting Jimmy Kimmel suspended, FCC chair threatens ABC's The View

Libertarians in name only

The FCC, like other federal agencies, is independent. There's nothing in the article to suggest that Carr's decision to do this has anything to do with Trump, who doesn't actually have authority here. Per the article, Carr apparently doesn't think he did anything coercive either. He's just making public statements. The supposed "threat" doesn't seem to me like much of one.

And Carr is also irrelevant to the Kimmel firing. ABC faced pressure from affiliates and his ratings had been declining for a long time.

Not a Republican, or even an American, but I do have opinions about this (and I have heard from Republicans about it).

Basically, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45305810 has the right of it, for the most part.

But also: in my view, this isn't exactly "the government" doing it. It comes across that the major ABC affiliates already didn't like the show and have been looking for an excuse to get rid of Kimmel for a while. His show has been fading into irrelevance; if you exclude the videos with "Trump" in the title, the Youtube channel has been doing terribly of late relative to the subscriber count (over 20M). And even the Trump videos look lackluster next to the consistently popular documentaries on, say, Veritasium (which puts out science documentaries and has a similar subscriber count). At any rate, "pressure" like this isn't a 1A violation as far as I can tell; no law is being made by Congress.

And also, it does matter what the cause of action is. An allegation that your political opponents are trying to dodge responsibility for a serious crime committed by one of their own, is pretty heavy. Maybe you don't think that's worse than, say, insulting someone in a bigoted way; but the Republicans I've heard from seem to consider that the latter standard isn't applied consistently anyway. Which is to say: if they're getting called "Nazis" and "fascists" and there's no penalty for that, it seems like that ought to establish a standard whereby other insults of comparable severity are fair game.

One thing I've heard many times in right-wing political discourse, though I'm not sure of the exact phrasing, is "my rules applied fairly > your rules applied fairly > your rules as you apply them".

> I don't think the downvotes for those actually sharing their opinions [in a productive way] are deserved

In my experience, the arguments very often come from a place of hurt and a genuine sense of being mistreated. It's hard for them to end up being shared very productively.

1A makes freedom of speech a legal principle, but it also exists as a philosophical principle and a moral value.

But fair play is also a moral value held by many.

For years, in my experience, it was unilaterally the "blue tribe" in the US who would point at XKCD 1357, and argue that the constitutional protection of freedom of speech doesn't extend to being able to keep your job, since the job doesn't come from the government in the first place (and because of "at-will" employment laws, and because of your employer's freedom of association). But if you believe this, then you have to accept that it can also be used against you.

I personally think it matters quite a bit exactly what was said, along with how strongly it was identifiably tied to the company, and what the PR effect would be. Companies shouldn't, absent other extenuating factors, have to keep around someone whose mere presence will hurt the business. But it's also unfair if companies are given an inaccurate impression of what customers on balance actually think about the matter.

> If you don't believe in free speech, just say it. Say you don't want free speech, free assembly, free religion, and the free press. Don't cry about hurt feelings, though. That's what children do.

It comes across that you have decided what GP's values really are, and are trying to extract a confession through bullying. This is not a productive mode of discourse.

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