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"There is pressure from Trump, but more importantly..."
More importantly? I'd say secondarily. The more straightforward answer is that they were scared of the FCC: https://x.com/MattZeitlin/status/1968444362754269623
Nah. They would win a case if Kimmel was popular and not just propagating lies without comedy on TV. It would be a huge win. Instead they abandoned the guy right after another company abandoned a similar guy who was revealed to be expensive and losing that company lots of money.
If Kimmel merely makes a crass joke he probably gets the Colbert plan. These expensive, bad, shows are clearly set for execution and have been since that weird Jay Leno situation where Conan took over sorta but they also sorta gave Leno his own earlier show then walked it all back. The point is, they all have been a waste of money since approximately then, and have been operating on inertia, and the inertia is breaking.
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This is a slam dunk 1A case. And probably solid argument against any future fcc decision against disney with current admin.
No Murthy v. Missouri says otherwise.
Fairly sure that Disney have standing when FCC says to disney - change what you talk on you late night show or you may have trouble with your license.
The terms of an FCC broadcast license are more restrictive than straight 1A would imply (allowed on the basis that spectrum is a finite resource with not enough space for everyone to broadcast as much as they want). You may be right in this case, which certainly looks questionable for a few reasons, but there is a "public interest" requirement for broadcast that doesn't exist for newspapers and cable TV.
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isn't this just a muh plaintiffs don't have standing decision. if the plaintiffs weren't looking for relief against future violations from the government but instead focussed on current violations maybe they would have been successful.
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In the Murthy v Missouri case the implied threat was "we'll utterly ruin your whole business model by repealing section 230" not "we'll fine you for violating this specific provision of broadcaster regulations."
And that was in the context of regular check-ins with the FBI and other federal agents to ensure content rules were satisfactory, were being enforced, and also "we found a guy with five followers breaking a rule, please enforce the rule on him."
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the amount of people over the last 24 hours who had no idea this existed is...I mean it's not surprising at all but it has been amusing.
someone on the other site was like "When the government suggests to private industry to do something and then actors in private industry do it, that's government overreach and anti-free speech"
and I was like have I got a SCOTUS case for you!
wow it was a 6-3 ruling and the 3 liberal justices joined 3 conservatives to argue the no plaintiffs thing
amazing
wait so can Kimmel sue and be a valid plaintiff and resolve this question in 4+ years?
Depends on who has the standing - Kimmel or his parent company.
And Kimmel wasn't censored, he was fired. Fairly sure that Disney have a case against the government. Kimmel probably could sue Disney for wrongful termination or something.
His show was suspended indefinitely by ABC. Not canceled, actually, though in practice probably. As such he could argue for "constructive dismissal" or similar, but I do think it's worth mentioning this nit because theoretically there's nothing stopping ABC from bringing the show back to a smaller subset of distributors. But yeah, since the NY post is basically stalking Kimmel, we do know that he's been meeting with his lawyer recently.
While I do think Carr's comments make this situation legally murky to put it mildly, if you make the kind of money Kimmel makes speaking with a lawyer is the smart thing to do. You should absolutely pay a few thousand to see if it's worth pursuing millions.
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Is it, though?
The law courts of the US had a pretty lazy response when it came to the Left doing this with respect to threatening to sanction online platforms. Why should this be different?
(I'm not a fan of licensure being abused in this way, but then I remember debanking. This is one of those things that could and should be fixed with legislation.)
Yeah, but neither of the two branches of government can write legislation.
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