Jimmy Kimmel is back

Jimmy Kimmel’s broadcast has made a lot more news off the air than on it. The latest is that ABC will resume the show Tuesday night and that some 400 Hollywood celebrities have signed a petition supporting their friend. Stop the presses! Today’s celebrities support leftist politics! So does ABC’s corporate parent, Disney, the folks who lost a fortune by remaking Snow White as a progressive wet dream.

It would be a cruel joke to add, “If another 53 celebrity’s sign up to support Kimmel, his audience will double.” Actually, he will get a lot of viewers on his first night back. After that, viewers will remember why they didn’t watch.

The joke about Kimmel’s small audience may be cruel, but it captures two points. One is that Kimmel’s audience, like that of his mainstream peers, is a shriveled replica of Johnny Carson’s huge numbers. The second is that celebrity culture, represented by those 400 signatures, is badly out-of-touch with a broad swath of the American public and clueless about the most important lesson in marketing: don’t insult your audience. When you do that, the audience walks away, as they have from Miller Lite beer, Jaguar cars, and Cracker Barrel restaurants.

It’s even dumber to alienate your viewing audience when the media environment is as tough as it is today. With the internet and stream content, the market has grown more and more fragmented. As it has, the profitability of late-night shows has shrunk. Their traditional format has also grown stale. After the host finishes a short monologue, he sits behind a desk and talks with one guest at a time. The guests are familiar faces, fresh from Botox, promoting their latest ventures.

With this reduced viewership and dull format comes reduced profitability. The only winner has been a show with a different format and a different political angle. Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld is funny and snarky, but he never takes himself too seriously. He sits in a circle of chairs, talking with a group of guests, some of them regulars, some new for that episode. The goal, which has been wildly successful, is to draw in younger, more conservative viewers, who already like Fox News, and, according to polling, are shifting from Democrat to Republican.

Gutfeld, unlike Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, is performing on a conservative cable channel, not a mainstream network meant to appeal to all viewpoints across a wide demographic. Kimmel and Colbert seem to have missed the point, turning their mainstream broadcast slots into tendentious political platforms, mimicking MSNBC and CNN just as those cable networks were imploding.

Kimmel and Colbert’s decision to alienate half their potential audience is far different from the older, blander days of late-night talk shows, when the hosts poked gentle fun at both sides. Their goal was to appeal to the Upper Midwest as well as the Upper East Side and to provide calming entertainment to a broad national audience as they eased into bedtime. It’s not rocket science, and they knew it.

No one understood this logic better than Johnny Carson, by-far the most successful late-night host of all time. “Tell me the last time that Jack Benny, Red Skelton, any comedian, used his show to do serious issues. That’s not what I’m there for. Can’t they see that?” he told CBS’ Mike Wallace in 1979. “It’s a real danger. Once you start that, you start to get that self-important feeling.”

Gee, I hope Kimmel and Colbert don’t get that feeling. But, of course, they got it long ago. They chose to become political tribunes, a posture that appeals to some, alienates others, and fits better into a Hollywood party than a bed-time TV slot.

If Hollywood’s reaction to Kimmel’s troubles has been predictable, the reaction from Republican politicians has been more interesting – and surprisingly varied.

They were unified, naturally, in lambasting Kimmel for his malicious and factually incorrect statement that Charlie Kirk was killed by a MAGA supporter. He wasn’t. Kimmel should have known that – or shut up. The assassin was a crazed, left-wing ideologue, living with his transgender lover, and outraged at Kirk’s traditional Christian morality and willingness to debate issues that the assassin deemed beyond debate.

Now that Kimmel understands his misstatement, you might expect an apology. If so, you must be waiting for the Easter Bunny to arrive with your breakfast omelet. (When Kimmel goes back on the air, ABC will almost certainly force him to apologize. Kimmel and his team will negotiate to water it down as much as possible. The network will surely want pre-approval on anything he intends to say. They know Kimmel’s own judgment could land them in even more trouble.)

What’s new and unexpected is not the conservative revulsion at Kimmel’s comments but the pushback against the Trump administration for pressuring ABC and Disney. The leader of that pushback is Sen. Ted Cruz, aided by Rand Paul, and their target is Brendan Carr, the outspoken head of the Federal Communications Commission. Since the FCC controls broadcast licenses for TV and radio stations (not for cable or social media), his threats to reconsider ABC’s licenses pose a serious financial risk for that network and its corporate owner. Ted Cruz likened Carr’s threat to that of a Mafioso boss. He’s right.

The crucial distinction here is between pressure from a government agency and pressure from private citizens, station owners and advertisers. It is perfectly fine for a conservative media company, like Sinclair, to say they will not resume broadcasts of Kimmel’s show. They own the stations, and they can choose what to broadcast, within broad limits. Likewise, it’s perfectly fine for left-wing owners, or those in progressive markets, to say, “Let’s bring Kimmel back now! Our audience wants it.” It’s fine for the Acme Manufacturing Company to announce it will no longer advertise its Wile E. Coyote products on the Kimmel show. Or that they’d love to buy more advertising there.

Why is pressure from the government unacceptable? Because it carries the implicit threat to use the full force of the Executive Branch to harm the target. That’s why it was wrong for the public health agencies under Trump 45 and Biden to pressure social media companies to block alternative views about Covid, hoping to quash dissent.

We now know that the dissenting voices were often more accurate than the government “experts.” But even if the dissents had been mistaken and the CDC experts correct, the pressure from official sources would have been wrong. We are much more likely to find the right answers when we allow a vigorous public debate. We are much less likely to find it when the mailed fist of government suppresses our First Amendment freedoms.

The point here is not that “both sides do it” when they are in power. Sadly, they do. The point is our country and our citizens are best served by free and open debate, not the hidden, suppressive hand of the state. It is best served by letting viewers, advertisers, and media owners make their own decisions, after they’ve heard various voices.

Yes, publicly-licensed airways are subject to a few reasonable restraints. But those restraints shouldn’t be stretched to bind and gag alternative views. We also need a lot more self-restraint from powerful bureaucrats, who are all-too-ready to silence and punish anyone they oppose. When their self-restraint fails, we need the freedom to call out the miscreants in government, just as we need it to call out failed comedians for their malign and ignorant comments.