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Jimmy Kimmel pulled indefinitely by ABC for Charlie Kirk comments.
Late night talk show hosts have waned from their glorious Letterman days, but boomers still care about then enough that they're still a scalp worth scraping off the skull. It's hard to think of a prominent figure on the right that would be equal in stature - Gina Carano? Piers Morgan? Roseanne Barr? nothing like him - if only for the fact that the entertainment industry is so aligned to the left. Indeed, even during the height of the progressive cancel culture era, it was liberal icons like Louis CK and JK Rowling that felt the heat.
If such a big figure can fall, who will be next?
With Colbert going off the air, and with the upcoming FCC hearings on Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and Steam, one can only anticipate the prizes that are coming. Destiny and Hasan are obvious trophies that the right would love to claim, but I have no doubt that the powerjanitors of Reddit are quaking in their boots. How many leftist/liberal commentators have made snarky comments on social media, as of late? This is the reddest of the red meat, dripping with blood, raw. The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.
That's it? He didn't even, like, celebrate his death.
Seems like Nexstar is trying to butter up Trump for some deal that needs governmental approval in the future.
I actually think celebration would be less cancel-worthy than blatantly spreading misinformation like that. I don't know if there's enough leeway in judgment calls to say that Kimmel really believed that the murderer was a MAGA, or that this being a comedy show meant that it was not meant to be taken seriously (really, I don't know the laws around this - does the fact that the joke relies on an implicit statement of fact play into it?), but it looks like FCC pressure just from public comments may have played into the decision, which is the part I find troubling. I'd hope the owners would have enough decency to do this independently, but we'll never know, I suppose. But celebrating his death, that I'd see as simple edgy comedy like Maher saying the 9/11 hijackers were the brave ones, which got his Politically Incorrect show canceled, IIRC, unfairly, IMHO.
That part of his statement wasn't comedy, though; he was being serious. And that half of his serious-and-cancellable statements was actually correct!
The 9/11 hijackers were brave¹. Dying is scary. Flying a plane into a building is obviously going to cause immediate death. Overcoming a fear is bravery. Q.E.D. But we'd just watched them murder thousands of people, and our President (whose approval rating had just jumped from 50% to 90%; clearly logic was not the order of the day) said they were cowardly, so at that point the invalid syllogism "murder is bad, cowardice is bad, therefore murder is cowardice" wasn't a Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle to be avoided, it was practically mandated.
It probably really didn't help that Maher preceded his technically-correct statements with some much harder-to-justify ones. "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly." also wasn't edgy comedy, it was just a weirdly illogical insult. Overcoming fear of death is brave, but avoiding death when that's a good option isn't cowardly, it's just sensible.
It's also arguable to what extent either of these remarks were what got Maher cancelled. Some affiliates pulled him from the air for a week or two, but the show didn't finally get cancelled for good until half a year later, and ABC claimed it was due to declining ratings rather than the controversy. I'd guess most of the ratings decline was because of the controversy, but at this point the only evidence would be buried in some Nielsen database.
¹ Well, the pilots were brave, at least. The "muscle" hijackers were kept in the dark until just before they boarded the planes, and it's not impossible that up until the very end some were still expecting an old-fashioned "fly to Cuba, laugh at America, go home" hijacking. It's amusing (albeit probably just wishful thinking) to imagine box-cutter-waving psychopaths spending their last moments going "Hey, Marwan, we're flying kind of low now, shouldn't we pull up? Why's one of those skyscrapers smoking, Marwan? Marwan???"
I am reminded of the classic dril tweet.
Random aside: Track 5 on Roger Waters' 1992 album Amused to Death is called "The Bravery of Being Out of Range." It's a phrase that sometimes pops into my head when I see someone being belligerent with low risk of consequences.
See also Aesop's fable about the kid on the roof.
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He shouldn't have said it, especially as it turns out to have been wrong, but to take him off the air for it in a country presided over by one of the most prolific liars in history seems absolutely risible.
The idea that how much the leader of the country lies should play a factor in whether or not Kimmel should be taken off the air (by his bosses in an independent private decision) seems far more risible.
Why would it play a role, other that the decision appears partly government influenced? What it does is throw the stark difference into relief.
I don't know, you're the one claiming it should play a role. In any case, even presuming that this were government influenced (I would bet on it, and I would absolutely default to believing that it is, because any FCC official speaking about putting pressure on anyone necessarily influences the owners towards firing them), Trump's penchant for lying has nothing to do with this being wrong. We have no law, Constitutional clause, or general ethical principle that says that the honesty we hold ourselves up to shall never be greater than the honesty we hold our political leaders to. It's wrong because the government should play basically no part in enforcing speech among people who have been given the privileges of using our public airwaves to spread their message, with the few exceptions having to do with the well known exceptions like true threats, imminent lawless action, slander, and the like. The harm that such things cause to innocent individuals in society is not contingent on the honesty of the president.
The only almost-halfway plausible argument I can think of is that the president is the leader of the country and sets the tone and standard by which other people in political discourse are judged, but this argument still isn't plausible. If we want to talk about nebulous effects of what the pattern of honesty that one particular role has on the entire country, then we have to consider all equally nebulous, equally plausible effects, such as the honesty of journalists, honesty of academics, honesty of other government officials, honesty of other people in authoritative roles, etc. and actually prove that there's something about the president's honesty that makes it more influential or more meaningful. This argument hasn't been made and, AFAICT, can't be made in an honest and correct manner, because the idea of the president as a role model for all Americans to follow in terms of honesty is not something that has been considered true for at least 3+ decades by my observations.
I wonder where this meme got started. I saw a clip of Destiny appearing on Piers Morgan's show where he was asked about condemning the shooter (or condemning those who praised the shooter and/or minimized the shooting?), and he kept deflecting by saying something about how he won't condemn anything until Trump says something to lower the temperature or something. It's such a transparently obvious piece of deflection and whataboutism that, if I weren't familiar with Destiny via his tweets, I would have had a hard time believing that Destiny could actually believe that he was coming out looking as anything other than trying to distract.
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When the firing comes after public comments and criticism from the head of the FCC explicitly threatening legal action, the view that this is an "independent private decision" is pretty questionable
Calling such a view "questionable" is overselling its plausibility. I'd say it's almost risible! Like, it's possible - and unfortunately, due to the FCC's own choices in public statements, we'll never know - that the owners did it independently, but anyone who doesn't automatically default to presuming that this was coerced by the government and requiring a very high bar before believing otherwise is someone whose judgment I'd question greatly.
As you seem to agree then I'm confused why you used this language in the first place
What's confusing about it? I pointed out that taking Kimmel off the air, if decided independently by the owners without government influence, would be entirely justified and a reasonable and good thing to do, and this goodness doesn't change in any way based on Trump's words. I still stand by this statement.
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Where are you getting the idea he's any worse than any other politician, or even journalist or academic?
I continue to be fascinated by that brand of distraction, that Trump becomes the only standard (anything less is acceptable by default) and also the only person in the world with agency (no one else is blamed for actions he does in reaction, and any action generated reacting to Trump gets blamed on Trump).
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Not OP but I think it's an open question as to whether the number of Trump's lies, in absolute terms, is greater or less than other politicians, but I don't really think it's too important to close it with an answer, I don't care about it per se.
However, it seems completely obvious that the lies he tells are particularly... maybe "brazen" is the right word? Like in real life people tell white lies, and usually don't get caught. Trump tells white lies, and regularly does get caught, when prior presidents and many other public figures are often careful enough that they, on the whole, seem to lay off the white lies (silence works pretty well for most administrations, in fact almost equally as well in situations where a white lie would otherwise attempt to hide an awkward truth, they both hide it in effect).
The usual defense amounts to one of three things: 1) Trump's words were hyperbole or maybe technically incorrect, but the broader truth is correct so the precise verbiage doesn't matter, 2) Trump was just relaying his understanding based on other reports/TV/hearsay, and any incorrectness is a simple lack of due diligence, which is fine because again his broader points are correct and people can be wrong sometimes, 3) Well if you look at what he said earlier or later or some other day, that clarifies things, that's what he really meant, obviously he was just riffing off that, and we should kind of average all his statements. No particular word, phrase, or claim ever has absolute meaning.
You know, honestly I was lowkey fine with this during election season, and in a number of cases I defended Trump (!) by saying that in an election it really does matter more what people hear than what you say. We all even expect it, fact-checker mania or no. However, I (and most liberals and even most centrists even despite any biases) think that when governing the words you say have special meaning. We can't and shouldn't be guessing. It's not like the Bible where reasonable people can disagree if X scripture is literal or metaphorical or symbolic or something in between! A word has meaning. Sometimes flexible, but all meanings can be stretched so far as to break. As an example, Trump said the fired BLS chief "rigged" the numbers. That means something, and it's not a Biblical interpretation situation. Factually, by any definition, Trump was wrong. She did not rig the numbers. End of story. The End. There is no wiggle room there. So which is it, 1, 2, or 3? They have some partial explanatory power. I admit that. But they do not actually change the lie.
It's the President and he has a responsibility. Sure, Presidents lie. Some have told some really, really big whoppers. But by and large, as I said above, that's usually about the big stuff. Trump's statements are frequently wrong about the small stuff.
How bad is one versus the other? Hypothetically is it better to have a habitual fibber who is honest about the big stuff, or a charming fact-wielding guy hiding a devastating betrayal? I have no firm opinion, and to be fair it's a little bit of new territory, and with a yet-unwritten and unrevealed history to match. Will we discover a Trump Iran-Contra under our noses and thus have the worst of both worlds? Does anything so far count? No one can say yet for sure.
However, I think the small lies have spread such an atmosphere of distrust that it's creating a low-trust dynamic between the public and the President that is almost unprecedented outside of wartime (when frankly the President is semi-allowed to tell white lies IMO). I think it's justified to be dismayed about that and worried about it. Because there's a significantly wide, if not deep, "interaction surface" on the utterings of Presidents to the public. They are literally the most newsworthy person in the world, so a lot gets transmitted. Trump's white lies, even if that's really all they are (not a given but let's roll with it), do immense damage to this trust. Suddenly, rather than more limited debates about whether the government is telling the truth about specific and big things, we suddenly are expected to guess whether the government is telling the truth about small things, tiny things, mundane things. We are expected to produce custom weighted-average factual conclusions based on contradictory government information releases. That's exhausting.
Conservatives aren't really bothered by this because they mostly have delegated their decision-making to Trump and his administration, since they trust that he will not betray them overall, so the small stuff is almost irrelevant. They even tend to enjoy Trump cynically playing with those assumptions to make the traditional media dance to his pleasure. But if you put yourself in anyone else's shoes, it's a pretty terrible state of affairs.
A lot of right-wingers around here like to spread this whole idea of high and low trust societies. Okay, fine. Here is a mini-society, and Trump is almost singlehandedly making it a low-trust relation full of perpetual suspicion and mistrust. Maybe he's "owning the libs", but at what cost?
I agree with you that trying to quantify it is a futile task, but I would like someone to explicitly take into account some very obvious counter-arguments before making their conclusion. If we juxtapose Trump's lies with things like "racism is a public health emergency, therefore protests are perfectly fine", maybe it will still turn out that he is the worst in terms of damaging societal trust, but it's far from obvious to me, and I don't think people should get to just assert that, and act like everybody agrees with them.
Another thing I'd like to see is some direct comparisons to past presidents. Even if you want to go with the "Republicans bad" framing, it is again rather counter-intuitive for me that anything Trump said could be as bad as George Bush lying the country into the war in Iraq.
I agree, and confessed to being unsure and not fully exploring it. However, two wrongs don't make a right, and that discussion doesn't detract from the main point I made, I don't think.
I kinda think that it does.
I never said that Trump lying is right, just that it's far from the worst. As to your point about how all the little lies add up to an atmosphere of mistrust, I just flatly disagree. Politicians being dishonest was seen as cost of doing business in a democracy for as a long as I have lived, and almost certainly long before that ("How do you know a politician is lying? His lips are moving! HAR! HAR! HAR!" is probably one of the boomerest jokes one can think of), so the idea that Trump can move the needle feels rather off.
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A while back, somebody on this site said "Democrats lie like lawyers. Trump lies like a car salesman". That's stuck with me ever since, and I think it's part of what makes the PMCs so irate.
The problem isn't that it's a lie, but that it's a lie expressed outside of the expected class-coding.
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Trump lies like your uncle telling fish stories. Understanding this dynamic creates trust by generating low-stakes opportunities to display ingroup loyalty. All the right has to do to gain this benefit is not crash out whenever Trump calls something "the greatest show" because "AKSHUALLY EXPERTS SAY IT WAS ONLY THE FOURTH GREATEST SHOW".
And even more so by presumptively taking most claims of Trump lying as themselves lies. I remember going through a WaPo list of 800 Trump Lies From the Biden Debate, and concluding that most of their examples were insults (FACT CHECK: JOE BIDEN IS NOT A PALESTINIAN), extremely biased nitpicking (I don't think either of them managed to word themselves accurately when they were arguing about the deficit over their comparative terms, but I think Trump was less wrong), or claims that were defensible/true but that Democrats don't like.
And this matters in a context when trust has already been completely destroyed. Remember "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor?" That was a blatant, meaningful, painful lie. The self-appointed "fact-checkers" called it absolutely true, then slowly walked it back until after Obama's re-election when they admitted it was the "Lie of the Year".
Shit, "Obama has a healthcare plan" was a straight up lie! He literally just let his speechwriters write a check his policy team couldn't cash because he assumed Hilary was going to be the nominee anyway!
The cost is entirely to you. Every time a respectable outlet melts down over something that didn't happen (because they default assume that Trump MUST be lying about everything), you guys lose trust and respect and a few more people realize that NYT and WaPo and CNN are on the same level as Glenn Beck at his worst.
This whole post is just Blue Team being mad that they can't lie with impunity and nasty consequences to Red Team anymore.
The loss of trust in media is in good part self-inflicted yes. I think the conflation of facts with fact-checks, and the laundering of political opinion as fact was not good. For example, NPR lit its own listener trust on fire over the years, even if it was more a slow burn.
Still, a government official - the ultimate government official - should never be mistaken for a friendly uncle. He's currying ingroup loyalty at the explicit cost of more general trust destruction. That's exactly my point, and it's a bad trade. A lot of these utterances are magnified by broader traditional media yes, but they are actually said. While in years past someone suspicious of media spin could go back and just watch the original remarks directly to get the original truth, in recent years often listening to Trump directly leaves you less informed and more confused, with more effort to untangle the web. In short, although the perception of Trump's lies is worse than the reality, the reality of Trump's lies are also worse than prior past. Both are bad. I hate this idea that we need to choose one and only one person or organization or group to blame. And at the end of the day, no one elected the news but the President has special power and his wording matters more, so with greater power comes greater responsibility.
(IIRC that's a bit of an oversimplification of the Obamacare strategy. The original Politifact lie of the year article probably summed it up best: "Obama’s ideas on health care were first offered as general outlines then grew into specific legislation over the course of his presidency. Yet Obama never adjusted his rhetoric to give people a more accurate sense of the law’s real-world repercussions, even as fact-checkers flagged his statements as exaggerated at best." Yep, seems about right. So to be more specific, everyone really knew that the legislative effort would require a lot of changes to pass Congress, so I don't really think it's fair to ding 2007 Obama for the that. 2011 Obama and 2014 Obama, things are different.)
No, it's a fine trade because the general trust was utterly non-existent among the red tribe. Again, this complaint is Lucy crying "why won't you let me lie to you forever, Charlie Brown?"
Joe Biden goes utterly senile in office and the nation is run by a shadowy cabal of unnamed, unelected staffers and the real problem is the entitled electorate having the gall to ask questions about it.
George Bush lies us into Iraq (with a critical assist from the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, aka the man who handpicked the liars for the hearings), resulting in a million dead brown people, torching trillions of dollars from the treasury, destabilizing a large chunk of the world, terroristic blowback, total loss of America's moral standing in the world, sparking resentment and contempt from our allies and leaving us dangerously weak for the future. Totally fine, respectable elder statesman. Don't you know he paints?
Meanwhile, Trump says he has the biggest inauguration ever and he's a threat to democracy, a fascist, literally Hitler.
Sorry bro. You guys are just not serious people. Trump's lies are emphatically far from worse than the past, and they're still much less severe than the ones his enemies tell every day.
Man, that was like a whole paragraph to admit that everything I said was completely true, but still somehow pretend that you disputed it. Still better than average for a hack outfit like Politifact.
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This is a much better metaphor than "Trump lies like a used car salesman." Used car salesmen do not, in fact, lie "like used car salesmen" (although some private used car sellers do).
The main reason why "is Trump a liar" is a scissor is that Trump tells fish tales in contexts where nobody else does, and his supporters don't see it as a problem. The cleanest example is the Letitia James commercial fraud litigation - Trump's people said in a mortgage application (where lying is a crime) that his personal real estate portfolio was THIS BIG, private bankers who are used to working with Trump and wanted to humour him pretended to believe them, Letitia James prosecuted the Trump organisation for lying on a mortgage application, the judge treated the lies as real lies intended to deceive (because that is what the law says, and what would be going on if anyone other than Donald Trump lied in a commercial mortgage application), and Trump's supporters were outraged that their guy could be punished for telling what was obviously a fish tale.
You can tell a similar story about golf cheating, economic statistics, Sharpiegate, pet-eating Haitians, and even the results of the 2020 election.
A yuge part of Trump's political success is that his reputation for fish tales creates a right wing version of "clown nose on, clown nose off" where he can make a false statement, act on it (or get other people to act on it), and then if it turns out not to be believable claim it was a fish tale all along. This creates as least as much outrage in his political opponents as OG "clown nose on, clown nose off" by MSM pseudo-comedians does in their political opponents.
In real-world angling, if you tell the neighbours that you caught a fifteen-pounder and invite them all round to dinner to eat it you are not allowed to serve up a tiddler and laugh at them for believing fish tales.
Yeah, all the "That's just Trump, that's the way it is" comes off as a bizarre gimme request by MAGA types to carve out an expection for lying for the most powerful man on the Earth, and it's even more bizarre that they don't appear to see how anyone else could even see it as bizarre.
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The Kyle Rittenhouse fact-check is a classic
Not even a "misleading", which imo is far more defensible, just a straight up, red FALSE so everyone who googled and skimmed leaves with the wrong impression.
Wow, are they serious?
"Rittenhouse ran away from protesters after prosecutors say he had already shot and killed someone."
Yeah, and he also ran away from the someone he shot and killed, while the guy was chasing him and grabbing for his weapon and Rittenhouse was shouting "Friendly! Friendly! Friendly!", only turning to fire after he heard a gunshot behind him and spun around to find the guy still close behind and charging him.
I'm getting the impression that these guys might not actually have a principled interest in preventing the misleading omission of relevant facts.
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Yup. The fundamental problem with the "Trump is an unprecedented liar" claim is that leftwingers constantly and consistantly lie about the purported lies.
Almost like they don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality, just competing power narratives, and thus no obligation to even try to be accurate.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump
I read a few reports quantifying his untruths vs Biden and Obama, and he came off much worse.
Whether there's an actually solid study comparing all politicians, journalists, academics and their lies I don't know, but it seems baldly apparent that he is up there with the best of them.
Anyway, don't many of his supporters acknowledge that he lies a lot, but say his lies are good car salesman style lies, whereas other politicians may not lie but they are selective with what they include and what they omit?
Trump lies all the time. As a result, many people never trust Trump (and yes, some trust him too much).
To quote the wisest of the Scott As, "the media very rarely lies." The problem being that too many people believe them when they do lie, so you end up with riots because people are orders of magnitude wrong about police behavior.
Joe lied about not pardoning Hunter. I suspect, in the long run, that whopper will have been more impactful than the vast majority of Trump's lies. But we'll have to wait a couple more administrations to really decide if it was a one-off massive insult to the office or a particularly dangerous precedent.
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So? Wikipedia is well known for slanted coverage of anything political, it's no surprise their edditors would autistically catalogue every misleading statent from him, and refuse to do the same for other politicians.
Yeah, and I think it's dishonest to pretend the former is worse than the latter.
This is where we part ways. Biased but true speech is interpretable and informational for smart people, even if it misleads others. Lying is simply pollution.
I disagree. Smart people are especially good at making inferences, so they get into the habit. Being selective with which facts you share and arranging them deliberately to mislead--to encourage people to infer an untruth--is actually especially likely to succeed with smart people. They're especially used to their inferences being correct.
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It's not true speech, it's a lie that uses truth to mask itself, making it more dangerous, because it's more likely to be believed.
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Ahh yes. A comic is always obligated to spread truth ...
Your comment doesn't seem even tangentially related to the contents of my comment, so I'm not sure why you're using it as a response to me.
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A comic is obligated to be aware of how it's related to truth, and to manage that relationship. For example:
(The monologue, for reference)
His references to MAGA denials were during the setup phase (when the information is usually supposed to be true, to serve as contrast to a false punchline), and he didn't use it to do anything before switching to talking about the Emmys.
I've said it before, but Bablyon Bee has a good relationship with the truth. They earn their moniker of "Fake News You Can Trust", and looking at the current front page, we have (complete listing):
Outside of the front page, good examples include:
Don't Call Your Wife 'Beautiful.' Use These Less Sexist Compliments Instead
Okay, this one made me laugh.
And this one truly is 'not fact based.'
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This has got to be one of the starkest and most pathetic instances I've ever seen of the "pseudocomedian political commentator shielded from scrutiny on the basis of their supposed comedian status" complex.
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His statement seems literally true: many MAGA-types were indeed desperately trying to portray the murderer as having anti-MAGA, pro-trans politics. Just because they were likely correct doesn't mean this couldn't be an interesting observation about the need to tribalize; us-versus-them; one of you did a bad thing. Kimmel wasn't making this criticism and was instead implying likely false things of the shooter, but I don't think the FCC should be pressuring Disney here. I think both Kimmel and Carr displayed poor judgment. There's some more context of the segment described at https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/what-did-jimmy-kimmel-say-jimmy-kimmel-live-pre-empted/3989961/
"Confidently and furiously" != "desperately". We assessed that the overwhelming likelihood was that this was a leftist with a strong likelihood of a side of anti-Christian bigotry, and we were correct. This was not a hard guess to make; I would estimate the likelihood as north of 90% simply based on the target, venue, and nature of the attack, and upwards of 98% once we had initial reporting of the messages scratched on the cases. The claims that the shooter was a Groyper or "one of his supporters firing a gun in the air in celebration" were the desperate ones, even more desperate because they were doing so amid an inescapable wave of leftist and notably LGB/Trans celebration of the murder. We knew that subsequent revelations would turn our opponents' position into a rhetorical kill-zone, and so we engaged with enthusiasm.
This statement demonstrates either complete lack of knowledge, or appalling dishonesty. I'm honestly not sure what the proper response should be. I could list off numerous previous incidents, both where Blues leaped immediately to tribalizing, us-versus-them, one-of-you-did-a-bad-thing even when the supposed wrongdoing was a hoax, and where Blues leaped immediately to how-dare-you-politicize-this even when the actions very clearly came from their side and when the harm was extremely serious. And this is how it works: When Blues are at fault, we all need to come together and rise above this petty tribalism. When Reds or even pseudo-reds are accused, then our irrational hatred and bigotry is threatening the foundations of our democracy. If any disagree that this is a well-established pattern at this point, by all means say so, and we can tally up examples and see what sum we arrive at.
In any case, I decline to play your shell game. I know my side will be blamed for anything that can even remotely be attributed to us, and for even more that is simply made up. Given this obvious fact, I hold that we should tally the cases as they come.
Why not? I have heard for a decade how dangerous misinformation is, and how necessary it is to crush such misinformation with the full might of the federal government. Numerous previous examples are ready at hand. Grassroots blues have been actively spreading misinformation on this event. Kimmel used his platform to spread that misinformation much, much further. By torching his career, we also place a large spotlight on the fact that he and his allies were lying, and we put significant pressure on a hostile institution.
Kirk was murdered because of a dedicated, well-financed hate campaign that Blue Tribe has been running nationwide for decades now. Why should people like me cooperate or deal gently with that campaign in any way?
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I think you are trying to make an argument that solely focuses on the literalness of his words which ignores all inflection and context of who he is and why he said it that way. When Kimmel filmed this episode, the "MAGA gang" didn't need to desperately distort the truth because the truth was already out there. Also, a private company firing someone for saying something was heavily weaponized by the left for years, and it was done for much more innocuous things.
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