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- [00:02]
A
As the 21st century was getting underway, Hollywood released a series of films that were daring, entertaining and absolutely unmissable. Films like 25th Hour, Bring It On, Zodiac, and no country for Old Men. They arrived during the George W. Bush era, a chaotic time in America. Think 9, 11, Katrina, the mortgage crisis. After the Bush years, the country would never be the same, and neither would Hollywood. I'm Brian Raft, and in my new limited series, Mission Accomplished, we're gonna dive into some of the biggest movies of the Bush years and look at what they said about the state of the nation. We'll go behind the scenes with filmmakers and experts and relive some of your favorite movies from the early 2000s, from Donnie Darko to Michael Clayton, from Anchorman to Iron Man. So slip on your sketchers, dig out your old Nokia and join me for mission accomplished starting Aug. 12 on the big Picture Feat.
- [01:05]
B
This episode is brought to you by indeed. Hiring someone new for your business can be a big move, and I understand you probably want to take your time to make sure you found the right person. But playing the waiting game could do more harm than good because that's extra work and extra stress you're putting on you and your team. It's not a healthy work environment when it comes to hiring the right people. Fast Indeed is all you need. Their Sponsored Jobs Move your job posts to the top of the page, letting you stand out first to relevant candidates. It makes a massive difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Another great thing about sponsored Jobs is that you're only paying for results. You don't have to worry about monthly subscriptions or long term contracts. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@inn Indeed.com plane that's Indeed.com plane right now. And support our show by saying you heard about Indeed. On this podcast. Indeed.com plane terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need today. The Jimmy Kimmel saga, the Trump administration's leverage, and the state of free speech in America with controversial news stories. I've often found that it's useful to separate facts from analysis, evidence from interpretation. So in that spirit, I'm going to tell you, or maybe just remind many of you what happened in this extraordinary Jimmy Kimmel story. And then I'm going to tell you why I think it's part of a larger story that I think could be one of the most significant of our time. On Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel said on ABC that Trump supporters were desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, end quote. On Tuesday morning, outrage about this comment spread online. Meanwhile, texts between the suspected assassin Tyler Robinson and and his roommate partner were published by several news outlets. These texts seem to indicate that Kirk was killed in part for views that Tyler Robinson considered hateful. While Kimmel's comments were a bit unclear, the revelation of the texts seemed to suggest that Robinson was not a MAGA member, which some conservatives took as proof that Kimmel had said something plainly incorrect, which demanded punishment. On Wednesday, FCC Chairman Kim Brendan Carr appeared on a podcast to say that ABC would face consequences for Kimmel's commentary. Carr said, quote, we can do this the easy way or the hard way, end quote. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Disney was getting blowback from advertisers and affiliates. I think some entertainment economic context is important to understand what happens here. ABC is controlled by Disney, but it doesn't own most of the local TV stations that air its shows. Instead, it partners with stations called affiliates. Those stations are owned by other companies like Sinclair or nexstar. These affiliates pay ABC for the right to broadcast programming like Good Morning America or Jimmy Kimmel, and in turn, they sell local ads and air local news around the content. Nexstar, which is seeking a $6 billion merger that requires FCC approval, announced on Wednesday that it would refuse to air Kimmel's show. Finally, on Wednesday, an hour before Jimmy Kimmel was set to take the stage, Disney and ABC executives made the call to take the show off the air not for a day, not for a week, but indefinitely. That's one timeline. Here's another. For the last 10 or 15 years, progressives online and in management roles were broadly seen in America as using their cultural power to enforce a narrow range of speech. People lost their jobs for insensitive comments. Conservatives worried about being kicked off social media platforms for expressing certain views. Social media platforms, in fact, did deplatform, so to speak, various figures on the right, including Donald Trump himself. After the January 6th attacks. Some folks on the right were even cut off from bank accounts and other services. Conservatives despised these measures, and so, it must be said, did some liberals. A letter published by a group of centrists in Harper's Magazine famously advocated for free speech in the summer of 2020, when so called cancel culture felt to many like it was at its peak under the Biden administration, officials continued to crack down on what they called disinformation they pressured social media companies to take down certain posts, especially when they were seen as a public health risk. During the worst of COVID people on the right felt like they had had enough. Free speech became a central cause for many conservatives. Brendan Carr, before becoming Chairman of the FCC, co authored Project 2025, in which he said that the government should promote freedom of speech. The conservative intellectual Martin Gurry told my co author Ezra Klein in one interview that free speech had become an explicitly right wing cause and that Donald Trump was its champion. When Trump won the 2024 election, conservatives celebrated the return of First Amendment principles. Finally, many of them said, anybody can say what they want online without fear of cancellation. In his inaugural address, Trump said, never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order entitled Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship, which said in section 2B that the President would ensure that no federal government officer, employee or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen. End quote. Now fast forward to this week. It's not just the FCC threatening to revoke the licenses of networks for the content of their speech. After the murder of Charlie Kirk, Vice President J.D. vance went on YouTube and encouraged Americans to snitch on those who disparaged Trump. Online. The Attorney General of the US Warned Americans against using hate speech and threatened to have the federal government intervene if local kinkos refused to produce photos of Charlie Kirk. The Secretary of Transportation tweeted at American Airlines telling them that they should fire pilots for bad speech about Charlie Kirk. The State of Texas is investigating hundreds of teachers on the same grounds. Trump himself has said that other broadcasters should fire liberal celebrities like Jimmy Fallon and that networks should have their licenses revoked if they're against him. Matt Bellamy is the host of the Town podcast and the author of Puck's what I'm Hearing newsletter. He's one of the truly indispensable entertainment reporters in Hollywood. Today we talk about what happened behind the scenes at abc, Disney, why Bob Iger suspended his friend Jimmy Kimmel, and what this moment means when media companies are bending the knee to an administration that is clearly using its power to punish speech despite rising to power by promising to do the opposite. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Matt Bellany, welcome to the show.
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C
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Big week.
- [09:12]
B
A huge week. So, you know, when these kind of stories break, I feel like you often get analysis from some Folks, where the question of what exactly happened is muddled by the question of whether it's right or whether it's moral. And to the best of our ability, I want to start by literally just understanding what the hell just happened, blow for blow, what the conversations were like inside Disney, why they made this decision. And then once we have a sort of satisfying blow by blow, we'll get into what it means and just how extraordinary this moment is in politics and media history. So in my open that I just recorded, I walked people through the publicly known facts, the most publicly known facts. Kimmel's comments on Monday, the reaction that billows on Tuesday morning in social media of conservatives being upset about this, and then finally the cancellation or suspension. What I want to know from you is what happened behind the scenes when Disney and ABC executives are huddling to discuss the fallout of Kimmel's comments and the blowback? What are they talking about? What are they looking at and listening to when they made this decision?
- [10:16]
C
Well, just the precursor here is that it's not unusual for TV executives to be concerned about something that happened on their late night show the night before. I mean, I used to joke with people at HBO that in the pre Internet days or the pre social media days, they would monitor the phone calls on Saturdays because it was always people who were pissed about Bill Maher and something Bill Maher said. So these days, obviously that's amped way up the polarization of the electorate and the ability of anyone to comment whenever they want on social media. So ABC and Kimmel often deals with this. What happened here was, you know, in this environment with the Charlie Kirk assassination and all of the reactions and people getting fired at, you know, the local school and Matthew Dowd being taken off NBC, MSNBC for something. He said they were extra sensitive about what happened on Kimmel on Monday night. And you said what the comment was. It is what it is. The reaction on social media was pretty significant. And you had a lot of, of not just the, you know, right wing trolls, you had a lot of mainstream conservative commentators who were pretty critical of what Kimmel had said. And we can get into whether they were disingenuous or whether they were trying to fan the flames to go after someone that has been a target of the right for a long time. But ABC was concerned. Then the FCC chair went on a podcast and said that Disney needs to do something about this. He said, either we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Very explicit in his threat.
- [12:02]
B
What does that mean to you? What does that mean to you, we can do this the easy way or.
- [12:05]
C
The hard way, meaning you can take action against Kimmel or we can force you to take action. And we have the levers to make sure that you will take action. And we can get into it in the. What those levers are. Obviously the ABC stations are all licensed by the fcc. Disney owns many of those stations, especially in the big markets, Chicago, New York, L.A. and they have relationships with these affiliates. They're called where there are station groups that agree to air the ABC content for a fee and are affiliated with them, but are not owned by Disney and abc. So that's the environment. And once Brendan Carr went after the show and went after Disney in particular, conversations started, meaning we have to address this on the show. And Kimmel said, okay, I'm going to address it on the show. And I think he knew in advance that he had to do that. And they went back and forth all day. They went back and forth on what Kimmel would say. And I reported in my Puck newsletter what Kimmel's response was going to be. And it was going to be a clarification that no, he did not mean to say that the shooter of Charlie Kirk was a MAGA person. What his point was is that people were using the shooting to try to dunk and gain political points. And they don't know, we don't know, and it's all up in the air. That's kind of what I'm paraphrasing, obviously. In addition to that, in addition to clarifying what he actually said, the comments went further. He went after people on social media who have in his mind mischaracterized this for their own political points. He specifically named Fox News and you know, their whole fair and balanced thing and mocked that. He made a number of comments in his model, in his draft of the monologue that ABC executives decided or thought would be further incendiary, meaning would make the situation worse, not better. They would have preferred that this be a. Not full throated because you don't want to lose your audience. But an apology, I should have been clearer. You know, it was ambiguous to the point where it allowed people to run with this, I'm sorry, move on. Kimmel didn't want to do that. And you know, I understand that he didn't do anything wrong per se. My take is that, you know, there are a lot of people that saw that before it aired. And you would think maybe a producer would be like, okay, let's retape that, let's make it Clear what you're actually saying. So there is no ambiguity. We know this is hypersensitive. We know that, that you have a target on your back. Let's make this extra clear. That didn't happen. And I think in retrospect, Disney kind of regrets that that didn't happen. Kimmel has been pretty steadfast that he did nothing wrong. Won't apologize, won't. You know, they weren't asking for an outright like this is my bad and I did something wrong. But they were asking for some version of a clarification slash. Yeah, I could see how this would be misconstrued. So once Kimmel and the late night executive Rob Mills couldn't get to an agreement, Dana Walden got involved. She's the head of the Disney television unit that oversees everything from ABC News to FX to Hulu, all the television content. She's one of the number twos at the company that is potentially going to succeed Bob Iger as CEO. She has a relationship with Kimmel long time. And even they couldn't get to an agreement and the clock was ticking. They usually taped that show about 4:30 in the afternoon, I believe. And they had to make a decision because Kimmel wanted to say what he wanted to say. They had people in line to come into the studio to watch the show. So they had to figure out what they were going to do. And with Iger. And Iger approved this and he's not out of this. I know they often try to protect him, but he made this decision as well. They chose to punt, essentially say we are suspending the show indefinitely. Didn't say temporarily, said indefinitely. And behind the scenes they said we need to figure out what to do here. Now the result of that was that it unleashed this global torrent of backlash because of the First Amendment issues, because of all the stuff that everybody's written about.
- [16:50]
B
Right. I really, really appreciate that breakdown. I mean, I want to understand how Bob Iger, a man whose name is on the ABC News building, a man whose wife is the dean of a journalism school, has made himself to look like the finger puppet of an administration that's basically dictating terms in ways that skirt very, very close to how we would describe other countries led by authoritarians. What is Bob Iger actually afraid of? Why is he making a decision to suspend a show indefinitely, understanding the kind of blowback that's going to create in the town from other Hollywood creators who work with Disney for so many different projects. What is he so afraid of that brought him to the point of making or green lighting. What is a really extraordinary decision.
- [17:41]
C
Yeah, it's not just the town, because people in town are obviously upset. There are literally protests outside of Disney and on Hollywood Boulevard because of this. But there are two other reasons I think that are pretty significant. One is just a general business issue. The FCC does have power over Disney. And when the FCC decides that you are in violation of your duties to a, to not, you know, you have a duty to have decency on the airs. You have a duty to present fair, fair content that gives both sides a chance. Now, there's an exception for that for news programming that doesn't. And late night shows fall under that exception. You don't have to have equal time. That's why when Kamala Harris was on snl, NBC had to give equal time to Donald Trump. But if Kamala Harris or Donald Trump does Jimmy Kimmel, they don't have to do that because late night shows are under that. The additional thing is there's a very tenuous relationship between ABC and the affiliates. The affiliate groups are owned, as I said, by other companies. In this case, there's an affiliate group called nexstar that is based in Texas. They have ownership that is more conservative and they have power over ABC because they can choose whether to air this programming or not. And once the FCC said we're going after Disney for this, nexstar put out a statement saying they were pulling Kimmel. Now, there's a backstory there. Nexstar has a pending $6 billion merger with another station group that needs the FCC's approval. And it's a very tricky situation because traditionally the rules are that you cannot own more than 39% of the stations because the old FCC rules are they want diversity of opinion in the marketplace. They don't want all these stations for anti competitive and antitrust reasons. They don't want more than that owned by one company. There's a legitimate argument that in this modern age, when YouTube is everywhere and the Internet is everywhere, and there's no FCC rules on Google owning YouTube all over the world, forget individual markets, that the FCC rules are outdated. And the indication from the Trump administration is that the FCC under Trump agrees with that and would allow this merger to happen and create the world, you know, the country's largest station group. But we don't know that. And pretty clearly nexstar is trying to curry favor with the administration by backing this FCC statement. And their ownership, by all accounts, is pretty conservative as well. There's another station group, Sinclair, which is pretty openly Conservative. They put conservative commentary on their stations. And then they immediately came and they were asking not just to take Kimmel off the air, they wanted him replaced by a Charlie Kirk special. They wanted donations that Disney would have to make to Turning Point usa, his group. They wanted to go further. So that's the situation that Iger is dealing with here, where it's not just a do we like this content or do we not? It's can these affiliates hurt us by pulling the show? And that's what we saw with Bill Maher back in the, you know, you're too young. I'm just old enough.
- [21:08]
B
Yeah.
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C
In 2002, where Bill Maher made a very insensitive comment about the 911 attackers, said that they weren't cowardly, and everyone freaked out. And the affiliates and the advertisers, there's advertising issues here too. They, they said, we're done. And Disney ended up pulling the show. Now, you know, that was a different, a somewhat different thing. Bill Maher made an off the cuff comment. And this is a more, this is kind of, that was kind of more objectively offensive. This is just what everybody knows. Jimmy Kimmel makes jokes about Donald Trump. He has done that since Donald Trump became a public figure. It's not a surprise. The difference here is the leverage.
- [21:55]
B
I want to talk about that leverage because it's emerged, I think, to be one of the most interesting and troubling through lines the Trump administration. I mean, here are just some facts. Several months ago, Paramount was seeking a merger. The FCC was reviewing that merger. The company agreed to a $6 million settlement over an issue of Trump disliking the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with former president, former Vice president Kamala Harris. And shortly after that settlement, the FCC approves the merger. Nexstar, as you said, is interested in FCC sign off on another $6 billion acquisition of Tegna. And it also needs FCC approval to reach more television households. They're acting in a way that does seem to be bending the knee to the Trump administration. This is not just in media. Right. In intel, for example, Trump threatened the CEO of Intel, said he had Chinese connections. The CEO comes to the White House hours later, the state owns 10% of Intel. This is a transactional White House. They use leverage to get what they want from the private sector. And I wonder, is there a sense in Hollywood right now that this is administration that is comfortable with using threats and leverage in a way that is historically unique? Right. There are examples like, like Bill Maher in the past and throughout American history. Of broadcasters doing things in anticipation of making the state happier with them. But is there a general sense in Hollywood that this is a slightly different creature that we're dealing with right now?
- [23:24]
C
Oh, not slightly different. I think this is a 100% new territory. Absolutely transactional. They will use whatever leverage they have. I mean, the best example that I think caught everyone's attention was when I reported in my Puck newsletter about Amazon paying $40 million for a Melania Trump documentary that is above and beyond any price that has been paid for any celebrity doc. We're talking Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, all of these celebrity docs. Melania Trump gets 40 million. Now, people will probably watch that. Brett Ratner is directing it, which is a whole different story. But. But that was perceived in town as just pure graft and designed to please the president. And lo and behold, he's now saying nice things about Jeff Bezos. So that is what is terrifying for these companies. And I didn't get a chance to talk about the other prong of the Disney concern, which is not just the business issue, but the brand issue. Disney is in a unique spot in that it is one of the most known brands in the world and it is a brand for everybody. They are terrified of the Disney brand becoming politicized. This is what happened with the whole fight in Florida over the don't say Gay bill where Ron Desantis was going after Disney for political points. And their CEO at the time walked into that and got into this big fracas, ended up getting ousted not just because of that, but in part because of that. And when Iger came in, when he came back to the company, he really made efforts to, to depoliticize Disney, settled all the lawsuits. He's, you know, he's, he's ordering people to not do controversial content like the same sex kiss in the Buzz Lightyear movie and some of the other things that were products of the kind of COVID George Floyd era of Disney. They're walking all of that back. And the idea is that Disney is a family brand for everybody. So this notion that Jimmy Kimmel is, has now become the face of Disney to the right is pretty terrifying for Disney.
- [25:39]
B
You know, it's interesting because you, you go back to the first Trump administration. Bob Iger spoke out publicly against the Muslim ban in 2017. In the first months of that administration, you reported that he withdrew from a presidential advisory council, citing a matter of principle after Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords. Iger was, he was talking about running for president in what, 2017, 2018. Something's changed here, right? He's being widely seen as now bending the knee to Donald Trump in Trump 2.0. Now, one thing you could say has changed is that Disney's changed. Iger experimented with, you could say politics. Disney experimented with getting into politics in the last decade. And it burned them. It burned them reputationally. It burned them maybe at the box office. I'm not endorsing any particular view. I'm just saying that's one argument is that Disney itself experimented with politics, learned from it, and now they've made a decision. The other thing you could say is that the environment has changed. They're more subject to the vicissitudes of what nexstar wants to do, what Sinclair wants to do, especially with abc, they're dependent upon their affiliate relationships. And then door number three is that it's Trump that's changed. And the Trump administration now feels emboldened to use the leverage that they have to demand specific things from the private sector that they just didn't do between 2017 and 2020. What door are you walking through here? What combination of doors explains the question of how did a guy who was synonymous with being a progressive CEO in 2017 and 2018 now finds himself paying tribute to and firing his biggest star or not cancel, you know, suspending his biggest star. Benching because. Benching his biggest star. Thank you for the verb. Because Trump asked him to.
- [27:25]
C
I think this is a little cop out. It's a little bit of all three. You have nicely summarized the issues here. And I think that the. If Iger was on this show, he would say that he serves at the pleasure of the board of the Walt Disney Company. And his responsibility is a fiduciary obligations to the shareholders of that company to steer this company through these very, very tumultuous times. And to do that, he has had to make sacrifices that are not in line with maybe his personal views, which he felt a little more free to discuss and pursue in pre Trump 2.0 land. But now, given the climate, given the environment, and given the risks that involved, for Disney to become a punching bag of the right, he has an obligation to make these very difficult decisions that are not gonna make people happy in Hollywood, but are ultimately going to be for the best interests of the company. That's what I think he would say. I don't know if that's gonna work. I think this was a misstep. I think they underestimated the backlash to taking Kimmel off the air, and they've been frustrated and not frustrated, but they've been concerned for a long time about the political nature of Kimmel and how much he has become an adversarial voice in this administration. But I think that what they should have done, and Dana Walden can fight me on this if she disagrees. But I think in that situation, you express your concerns to the host. You say, we've had a long 25 year relationship with you. We would like you to tone this down. And if you don't want to, we will support you and you can go on. But know that if this doesn't get better and the pitchforks come out, there is a scenario where this show ends and then you let him do what he wants. And if he goes on the air and gives that monologue and it does indeed get worse and the advertisers won't come back and the affiliates are saying we're done, then you say, we love Jimmy, but we have to cancel the show because we don't believe we can have a national late night program without affiliates to carry this. And then it becomes a Kimmel issue, not a Disney issue. Right now it's a Disney issue. And they've got to figure out they want to get him back. But I don't know that there's a path back. We can talk about what a path back might be, but I don't know that they're going to be able to do that.
- [30:11]
B
That's my last question for you. But before we get there, I want to talk about the FCC's role in this. You're the lawyer here. The FCC's chair has now threatened to pull ABC's licenses over comments by a comedian that the President doesn't like. He's talked about going after the view as well. Trump, who says a lot of stuff and not all of it is necessarily instantiated into executive order. And law has floated revoking licenses of all broadcasters that are, quote, against him. How does this stack up against the typical role of the fcc?
- [30:48]
C
Well, it's an understatement to say that it's highly unusual. The question is, is it legally permissible? And most, and I'm not a telecommunications lawyer, I did study the First Amendment in law school and I practiced a little bit in this area. But it's pretty clear to me that this would be a content based restriction on speech. The government cannot make decisions on who gets a license, who doesn't, who is by by whether it likes the speech. And there's recent precedent, not necessarily binding. But the Supreme Court actually evaluated these issues in a case brought during the Biden administration by Republican attorney generals from red states over social media bans. And the Supreme Court, I'm paraphrasing here, but essentially said, when you are making choices about which speech to ban and which speech to not ban, or you are forcing private companies to make decisions on which speech to ban and not ban based on their availability of government licenses or governments or government involvement, that is unconstitutional. And it was. Even the conservative wing of the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito, has an opinion in this arena where he said specifically that you cannot do this and that it would be a ban. Now, the Supreme Court.
- [32:18]
B
I have the quote. I have the quote right here, quote, government officials may not coerce private entities to suppress speech, end quote.
- [32:25]
C
That's pretty straightforward, and it's very applicable here. It's not a secret what Brendan Carr is doing here. He went on a podcast and he said it. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. He is trying to coerce Disney into firing Jimmy Kimmel. And in my opinion, and this recent jurisprudence backs it up, that is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. So Disney would have a claim, Kimmel would have a claim. And the question is, would they ever want to bring that claim? I don't know. But it seems to me that this is all pretty unconstitutional and that the Supreme Court, even the conservatives, would back that up. You know, we've seen flip flops on issues, especially with this court, but seems pretty clear to me this is another.
- [33:16]
B
Unanimous Supreme Court ruling. The First Amendment, quote, prohibits government officials from relying on the threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion to achieve the suppression of disfavored speech, end quote. Again, the Supreme Court could not be clearer that you can't go on a podcast as the head of the FCC and use mafia language to threaten to invoke legal sanctions for the purpose of suppressing speech. It seems quite clear what they've been going after in terms of defining the First Amendment in this space. And I think this makes it a really, a really scary moment for a lot of people in this area. Two more questions before we go. The last thing is going to be, what do you think is going to happen next? Which is, of course, the hardest question to answer. But before we get there, what are you hearing from people whose job in the commentator space or news programming space would be threatened if the FCC and Trump feel emboldened by the fact that, look, we threatened Disney over George STEPHANOPOULOS. We got $16 million. We threatened Paramount, CBS over the editing of an interview with Kamala Harris. We got another settlement. We went on a podcast with Denny Johnson and just said, easy way or hard way? And minutes later, Jimmy Kimmel was fired. Why would we stop here? Let's keep this train going. If people are feeling like this is just the beginning of the use of government leverage and threat to force private actors to only deliver speech that is favorable to the Trump administration, what kind of fear are you hearing about the fallout of this?
- [34:59]
C
Oh, it's terrifying for everyone that works in the entertainment industry. Listen, it takes a lot to get people to show up at a protest on a hot day in September in Burbank. Hundreds of people were outside Disney, and there are plans for more protests. I mean, this is extremely terrifying to people who work in not just late night or news or any of this stuff. They are. The administration is openly saying, if you are not with us, Trump is saying, if you are against me, then you are vulnerable. And the chilling effect, I believe, is already in place. I think people around town are hearing the message and are not going there in a way that they might have. So the chilling effect on speech is already happening. And if you were Comcast, which owns MSNBC for now and NBC, and you've got these late night shows, they're next. I mean, why would the Trump administration stop? At some point, someone is going to have to stand up at one of these media companies and say, we won't be bullied and we're not gonna do this. I thought it would have been Bob Iger. They're the biggest traditional entertainment company in town. They have a history of standing up. I just. I'm surprised it wasn't him. And I'm surprised that. That Iger didn't see the path that settling the ABC News case would lead the industry down. Because when you have a bully and you give him a little bit, he doesn't go home. He wants more. Right.
- [36:25]
B
What happens next?
- [36:27]
C
They got to figure out the Kimmel situation. There was a meeting yesterday afternoon with Kimmel and his lawyer and the Disney people, and they're trying to figure out a way to bring him back. And I think Kimmel does want to come back. I mean, I said this on the town, but I had an interesting interview with Lorne Michaels a couple weeks ago where he talked about these issues, and he was citing the Smothers Brothers case from the 60s where they were taken off the air and people. Yeah, but he learned a lesson. He said, where, you know, it's easy to be a martyr. It's, it's less easy to figure out a path back and keep the platform. And he's always been interested in keeping the platform because the martyr thing goes away, in his opinion. Now, obviously, others like Conan and Bill Maher and now Colbert, they're going to do fine, becoming martyrs. But his goal has always been to keep the platform. And I think Kimmel understands that, that he has a very powerful platform. And, and he is really kind of the face of abc. He does their reality shows, he does their TV up fronts, he does the Oscars. So I think both sides want to come to a resolution here. Kimmel just doesn't want to have to bend the knee. He doesn't want to have to apologize or do something that he doesn't feel good about. And the question is whether they can get to a. A compromise that works for both sides. And I think, honestly, Iger and Dana Walden, this is a real challenge for them. They've got to figure out a way out of this. And for Walden, it could mean if she does it, she could put herself on the path to be CEO. But we'll see. Gonna be a really interesting three or four days.
- [38:08]
B
And just so everyone knows, we are speaking at noon on Friday, and it's possible that events the next three hours could obviate a lot of our analysis. This story is fast moving. Everything with the Trump administration is fast moving. So I hope people understand that. A part of me feels like Bob Iger would be crazy to not regret a little bit how this was handled and how it was interpreted by folks across entertainment. I mean, he looks like a finger puppet of the administration at this moment. My guess is that he's gonna be very motivated to save face for himself and for the company. But I have no idea what happens from here on out and what's next.
- [38:48]
C
I mean, if they go after the View, how will he handle that? The View already didn't talk about Kimmel yesterday, and that's something that they probably would have talked about.
- [38:58]
B
Matt Bellany, thank you very much.
- [39:00]
C
Thank you.
- [39:02]
B
Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Beraldi and we are back to our twice a week schedule. We'll talk to you soon.
- [39:12]
C
Sam.