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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind that Kimmel has been hinting about retiring for a couple years now, his contract was up in the air, the "late night television show" category is evaporating (if there's still even a Tonight Show in 10 years, it'll be purely for nostalgia), and this sends Kimmel out in a blaze of glory.

I think it's too easy to sort of anthropomorphize these kinds of conflicts --- Kimmel's show has a large staff, and he's responsible for their livelihoods --- but it wouldn't be totally out of the question that Kimmel steered right into this.

There's nothing new about this, though: ABC also took Bill Maher off the air, 20 years ago, almost identical circumstances. Maher wound up at HBO. Kimmel will wind up on a podcast, and, like Conan, probably gain in relevance.

Moments later

I think some people here might be too young to immediately get the Maher reference, but the point there was: he was forced off the air for political reasons as well.

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> There's nothing new about this, though

Threats from the head of the FCC bandied about on a far-right podcast? Hello?

I don't know that the FCC is what is scaring anyone so much as the FTC/DOJ; Nexstar, the largest local affiliate operator in the country, is working on a huge merger, and pulled Kimmel independently. I'm sure they're all getting galactic-scale complaints about this.

I get why this is all activating and like I guess I agree, it's obviously bad, but it's also really stupid. These are programs written for middle-aged suburban professionals that air primarily to elderly customers who still watch linear television. Kimmel would have drastically more reach on an indie show online (who would you rather be, just in terms of reach, Kimmel or Hinchcliffe?).

The fact is it's not Kimmel's air, it's corporate air. Late-night hosts getting fucked over for crossing the interests of their corporate owners is a very old story; one of the great sitcoms of all time is based entirely off the premise (in fact, two of the great sitcoms of all time are).

Kimmel's got a good writing team. He's talented. He should have gotten off this dead time slot a long time ago.

This isn't at all about Kimmel though. This is about giving the administration a free win and a continual slide into more censorship (voluntary or not) and authoritarianism. This will egg them on even more.

Who cares about Kimmel.

You think they will stop at television? They'll deplatform people on the alternate media next, YouTube, Twitch, Kick, etc. They've already started to look at Twitch this very week.

Will you even notice when your train has arrived at the Gulag?

"Will you even notice when your train has arrived at the Gulag?"? What does that even mean?

I think it is a reference to your very noticeable habit of downplaying, "yes, but"-ting, "well, actually"-ing and generally minimizing the country's rapid descent into fascism. There are numerous examples of this, but even in just this thread, you draw a false analogy between Maher's cancellation (months after his remarks, following an advertiser boycott) and Kimmel's (immediately following a direct order from a government official).

I didn't think that was particularly abstruse, but sure, I thought your reply was missing the forest for the trees and you seemed oblivious or blasé at the rather obvious slippery slope ahead, if you can even call it that by now.

You acknowledged it was bad (sorta, kinda), but the rest is IMO completely irrelevant. "Galactic-scale complaints" or not (we don't know), the head of the FCC appearing on Benny Johnson's podcast threatening to pull their broadcast licence (he probably could not) is unprecedented. And one can wonder how many of the aforementioned complaints his comments incited.

Now they'll lose subscribers anyway.

I just want to understand the writing. What's the supposed scenario where my "train" pulls up at the "gulag" and what is it I'm supposed to be noticing or not? Did you make this up or is this an idiom somewhere? I couldn't find it on Google.

Gulag, the forced labor camps of the Soviet Union? It's a metaphor (I hope) of the plunge into authoritarianism and you seeming to downplay it, and if you're not paying attention now, you might find yourself there and wondering how the hell you got there.

Wouldn't I notice when they put me on the train in the first place?

> Wouldn't I notice when they put me on the train in the first place?

Welcome aboard. We left the station a few months ago.

In this metaphor we're all going to the gulag together? Then does it matter if I notice it or not?

> In this metaphor we're all going to the gulag together

You are wearing the metaphor thin.

The point was that intimidation by government of media organizations has been happening for months, this is the latest.

Suppression of free speech by government is applied unequally. Hypocrisy is a feature.

> Then does it matter if I notice it or not?

That's up to you, but it doesn't change the reality.

I think I was pretty clear that I understood the gist of what they were saying ("you're not taking this as seriously as I think you should"), but that I was curious about what the actual writing meant. The writing, at least, was interesting.

I guess moogly is baffled that as you apparently haven't noticed that this is where we are heading already - will you?

(Obviously it won't be a literal train given the state of our rail infrastructure but more likely a van in practice :p)

Dude, c'mon. You are smart enough to know it is a play on Martin Niemoller's "First They Came For...". If you don't think it apt, just say so.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

> Kimmel would have drastically more reach on an indie show online (who would you rather be, just in terms of reach, Kimmel or Hinchcliffe?)

How is this relevant ? Are the Presidency and FCC now giving career advice?

> The fact is it's not Kimmel's air, it's corporate air.

not even corporate air - it’s government air obviously

> I don't know that the FCC is what is scaring anyone so much as the FTC/DOJ

Sure, but shouldn't we continue to call out the fact that this administration is wielding power to censor? I do agree with you that late-night talk shows are a dying format, and maybe Kimmel would have been out (for whatever reasons, perhaps his own) in the next year or so, but to me, that's besides the point.

I'm interested in what is happening here; I have other vectors for doing politics that aren't HN.

> almost identical circumstances

That is a stretch, "similar" is a better characterization. The Wikipedia article says he made the comments days after 9/11, and advertisers withdrew and the show suffered as a result, but the show wasn't cancelled until the following June.

[flagged]

Please don't put words I didn't say in between quotation marks as if I had said them.

Your comment stated "There's nothing new about this, though: ABC also took Bill Maher off the air, 20 years ago, almost identical circumstances"

People often use quotes like that to paraphrase.

This is an HN idiosyncrasy and if I have to adhere to it so does everybody else. :)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

(The quote they created is also nowhere close to what I was saying or what I believe, but I'm not interested in litigating that.)

The actual guideline is “there is a convention on HN of asking users not to use quotation marks to make it look like they're quoting someone when they're actually not.” That clearly didn’t happen here because the commenter indicated what you literally said with ‘>’ and then put their paraphrase underneath it in quotation marks. No-one would have mistaken it for a literal quote.

If you think your position was misunderstood then that’s that’s the real issue, not punctuation usage. IMO it would be better addressed by engaging with the substance of the post (including the salient point that the Maher case is not comparable) rather finding some technical violation of HN common law to pick at. I’m sure there’s also a guideline against derailing substantive discussions into irrelevant picking over minor guidelines.

I don't really understand the problem since you can read the comment and see it's not a quote, but I agree that you've proven it's a policy. Written English might benefit from a special syntax to denote something not intended to be a literal quote, but I guess writing "(paraphrased)" (not quoting you here) would suffice.

Edit: Funnily enough, I can't actually find this policy in the guideline. I see now that dang said it's actually not a guideline but telling people not to do it anyway is apparently a thing, which I find really fucking weird. Also funny that the same 'quote as framing' device (which I'm now avoiding) is used to paraphrase a position in the guidelines!

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think that instance is more like quoting to indicate an example, not to paraphrase.

like in Haskell-ish terms:

    shorten :: String -> String
    shorten "Did you even read the article! It mentions that" = "The article mentions that"

I guess I'm pointing out that there are blessed uses of quotes aside from direct quotations and I don't understand why this particular thing has carve outs as being bad.

Here's a video of the Maher reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1c672...

I don’t see why it would matter whether Kimmel has steered into this or not (which seems pretty unlikely to me anyway)

His comments were not a fireable offence. He can’t steer into something if there’s nothing to steer into.

I wonder if, from a staffing perspective, it's actually easier to cancel a show under these circumstances than through a more traditional cancellation process.

> Keep in mind that Kimmel has been hinting about retiring for a couple years now

Keep in mind also that Trump threatened getting Kimmel of the air a couple of months ago

Additionally, the FCC chief also threatened affiliates today

Is it all a coincidence ? Could be.

But absent a statement from Kimmel we can conclude that pressure was applied to ABC or it’s affiliates to censor speech

Kindly, your post reads like a variation of the “Broken window fallacy”

Hey, who needs late night comedy shows any more

You have way too much karma for this

While the reasons you list reduce the cost to ABC for cancelling Kimmel, it is no less outrageous and alarming that the current administration forced Kimmel out because of his criticism of the government.

Maher, like the Dixie Chicks and Garofalo, criticized a deeply popular war (regardless of what you think of it) and were ostensibly cancelled pre-cancellation era. The government didn't issue a statement through a right-wing podcast stating that the network better toe the line or get it's affiliate license revoked.

You are right, this has happened before. This is far more like the purges of the red scare. People were just (perhaps naively) hoping society had progressed from where we were ~70 years ago.

Deeeeeeeefinitely not the political angle. Anything but, really.

All that's probably true, but the average person thinks Trump single-handedly accomplished this. Annoying because he certainly contributed, but he's not the sole reason.

Yeah, probably just coincidence. /s

I got downvoted for saying the same thing... go figure.

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