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Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that with the woke cancellations it was mostly twitter mobs pressuring private companies. By contrast, with Kimmel it was directly the head of the FCC applying the pressure, not MAGAs cancelling their Disney+ to make them fire Kimmel.
So this is not tit-for-tat, but (tit+1)-for-tat. Expect the next D president to apply an FCC commissioner who will try to revoke the license of Fox News at the slightest provocation, and spend tons of public funds to ruin them in the legal system if they do not comply.
More generally, moral constraints, refraining to go tit-for-tat for some things, can serve as a foundation of a positive identity. If the other tribe puts your tribes kids on the BBQ whenever they catch them, but your tribe holds a principled objection against cannibalism even if it puts them at a disadvantage, that would cause me to like your tribe.
Whenever Trump does something bad, like being corrupt af, cancelling people and so on, the main response I get from his defenders here is that this is just tit-for-tat for the evils of the other side. It is about as convincing as hearing someone loudly complain about the child-eating monsters of the other tribe while munching a baby's leg.
I think it was actually mainly a twitter mob here as well. At 9-10am on wednesday there were already angry re-posts of the prior night's kimmel monologue, signal boosted by Elon to millions of views. So Kimmel was basically already the target of the day, for people who had been having a lot of success against their targets over the previous few days. That's why Benny Johnson had the FCC chair Carr on and why they were discussing Kimmel, which got posted that afternoon right before the affiliates announced they were cutting Kimmel.
Everyone who has told a more simplistic story about it being obviously due to a gangster FCC chair threatening ABC, or Nexstar having ulterior motives trying to butter up the administration, seems to ignore this part of the story that the outrage was already well under way on wednesday. (unless I got the timeline wrong myself)
edit: I think I did get part of the timeline wrong, and the monologue was apparently from monday night? Still, it was getting heat on wednesday morning from Elon & twitter.
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Attacks on free speech have been coming from both sides for some time here: the Biden administration leaned on Facebook and others to censor user posts about COVID vaccines. Biden also nominated Gigi Sohn to the FCC, who had previously tweeted strong negative opinions about Fox News (the Senate did not confirm the nomination). We also had the short-lived "Disinformation Governance Board."
Separately: Is Fox News even broadcast OTA anywhere? They don't need an FCC license to exist on cable networks. I know Kimmel is/was, and the "official" statement said gave OTA channels pulling the broadcast as the cause.
Yep exactly, the regular broadcast Fox stations just do regular down-the-middle local news like ABC/NBC. Fox News channel is completely different & separate, set up as a cable channel for exactly this reason (avoiding FCC regulation).
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But beyond that, it was governments pressuring banks. Like, Operation Chokepoint was a thing, and arguably it continues to be a thing with the credit card companies still being pressured by plausibly-deniable paragovernmental organizations (that whole porn ban thing).
I don’t think it changes much that it’s blatantly public, though it certainly does for others who are not aware that their pressure wasn’t just the people power they think it was.
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