Firing Jimmy Kimmel confirms the US media is being silenced – and it breaks my heart

In his Monday night monologue, Kimmel referred to “the Maga gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it”. He mocked President Trump’s reaction to the murder. “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he calls a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish,” he said.

By Wednesday, he was out, “pre-empted indefinitely”, said a spokesperson for Disney, which sounds like a special kind of hell. “Great news for America,” crowed Trump – who is, of course, currently enjoying all the bells and whistles the British government can provide. (NB, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has just been barred from attending Trump’s press conference near London this week after the president had a combative exchange with ABC’s Americas editor, John Lyons.)

Karen Attiah, the last remaining Black full-time opinion writer at the once-glorious Washington Post, was also dismissed in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing. In posts on Bluesky she had condemned the ritualised responses to gun violence in America; reminded readers of the assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman (and her husband, and their dog) in June; and quoted Kirk’s stated opinion that Black women “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously”. Her posts were called “unacceptable”, “gross misconduct” and that was the end of that.

This is just in the last couple of days. I’m writing this 238 years and one day after the United States Constitution was signed. If you need a reminder, the first amendment runs: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Now, some have argued that this right to free speech does not cover private employers – applying rather to government actions restricting citizens’ free speech.

But I grew up in the United States of America. I did not grow up in a country in which the vice-president – acting as guest host on the late Kirk’s podcast – called for those who “celebrated” the activist’s murder to be hung out to dry: “Call them out, and, hell, call their employer,” JD Vance said.

I celebrate no one’s murder. I do celebrate free speech, beacon of the always-troubled project we have called the United States. Yes, I was born a decade or so past the era of Joe McCarthy, when the red scare saw citizens denounce each other for their association with communism, saw careers ruined and lives destroyed.

We can only learn so much from this, it seems: or rather, those who now run the US government have learned a different lesson.

Stephen Colbert was axed from his show too, let’s recall, back in July by CBS – just a couple of days after he criticised Paramount, his network’s parent company, for settling a lawsuit with Trump for $16m (£12m) over the president’s claim that CBS’s flagship show, 60 Minutes, had deceptively edited an interview with Kamala Harris.

National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service have had their funding demolished: if you can bear it, click on the White House’s website to read about “ending taxpayer subsidization of biased media” to find out more.

I learned a great deal about the history of my country from PBS’s brilliant series American Experience; as the New York Times reported, WGBH, the public television station based in Boston that has always been a flagship for PBS, laid off the 13 people who worked on the series and announced that no new shows will be made.

It is worth noting that Deutscher Journalisten Verband, the German professional association of journalists, has called on major US media outlets to support their journalists instead of, as Professor Timothy Snyder, a scholar of fascism has it, “obeying in advance” by preemptively silencing their employees.

But none of this is an accident. Do you remember when Trump was saying he didn’t know what Project 2025 was, that he had nothing to do with it, that he hadn’t read it, that we were all worried about nothing? Yeah, right.

Back in 2019, Trump called the press “the enemy of the people”. Project 2025 (“Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”), a 900-page document prepared in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing thinktank, laid it all out for us in black and white. The Brookings Institution, a non-profit public policy organisation, combed the vast tome and found that “the authors of Project 2025 allege public broadcasting can no longer be classified as educational (in fact, they see it as ‘noneducational’ and claim it is a biased liberal forum engaged in suppressing conservative views).

“To end what they consider unjustly privileged outlets, they say outlets that include the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the National Public Radio (NPR) should be defunded and stripped of their status as noncommercial, educational stations, and thereby required to pay hefty licensing fees.”

So let’s modify our shock. None of this is an accident. It is a feature, not a bug. I am a dual citizen who feels free to write this because I am resident in the UK, and working for a British newspaper; that it even crosses my mind to write these words simply breaks my damn heart.

It is a famous and well-worn tale but it bears repeating that at the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was approached, after the signing, by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

I have studied my native land. I know that the more perfect union has, so far, always been out of reach: and yet, I have hoped, always, that we might get there. These days, I’m far less sure.

Photographs by Michael Le Brecht/Disney via Getty Images, and Randy Holmes/Disney via Getty Images