A few thoughts, some more or less legal and some more or less cultural, on ABC’s effective firing of Jimmy Kimmel at the behest of Brendan Carr, acting under the authority of Donald Trump. I begin with a general bit of observation: Kimmel and Charlie Kirk have a good deal in common.
One thing they share is that I didn’t care for either of them qua media figures, and always assumed that this was quite irrelevant to how they should be treated by the state or by anyone else. This wasn’t so much a matter of de gustibus non est disputandum, since, in fact, in matters of taste I am quite correct and others are sadly in error. It had more to do with the fact that in a civilized society, one allows for differences in taste, and in an uncivilized one the problem is not a single speaker but the culture that encourages her. In any event, the civilized response to an uncivilized society is to behave in a civilized manner, which entails neither violence nor thuggish censorship.
Beyond that, though, they had in common that they each in their own way embodied one of the key elements of our cultural degradation over the past twenty years or so: the ascendance of opinion, cultural and political, as cheap entertainment. “Cheap” here is meant both as “inexpensive” and as “being of contemptibly low value.”
It’s no accident that this cultural shift coincided with the entrenchment of the Internet. (And let me not neglect to note that it also coincides with the rise of blogs, which next to our current 280-character culture are as Addison and Steele are to bathroom-stall graffiti.) But Kimmel was a broadcaster, part of the one-to-many and not the many-to-many style of communication. And cheap opinion as culture is equally a part of the descent of the mainstream press, such that the New York Times now seems to have more op-ed columnists and critics than beat reporters.
So one must conclude that the common tie is not the Internet as such, but the Internet style of culture, and the economic and cultural influence of the Internet on more traditional speech media. The Internet, and then social media, markets took as their foundation the hoary insight that opinions are like assholes–everybody has one–and realized that the saying was doubly wrong: people have many more than one, and, unlike the real thing, they delight in displaying their own and inspecting those of others. It is a hugely inexpensive form of entertainment, requiring not even truth or basic research. (Its technological apotheosis can be found in that popular tribute to laziness: “Grok, tell me why this person is wrong.”) And, for God knows what reason–perhaps simply the constant need for new material to exploit, or perhaps the dopamine rush of disagreement–it turns out that politics and the culture war were excellent vehicles for low-cost, easy-to-produce opining.
Against this, more conventional, staid, or expensive cultural transmission stood not a chance. And so those more conventional outlets have enthusiastically allowed themselves to be colonized by the Internet style of politics and of political opinion as cheap entertainment. It was always a bad bargain. And that is evident in the current culture, in which the competition is to have more, and more vulgar, opinions, consistency and integrity are of less value than feeding the beast, and the executive branch of the government is almost literally a social media account. The right seems particularly good at it, the left eager to emulate them, the Democrats desperate to do so.
But that is just the gross version of a phenomenon that preceded the latest versions. It includes a good decade or so of well-meaning, if shallow and conformist, liberals somehow foolishly convincing themselves that Jon Stewart was entertaining and had something worth saying, and that being entertained by Jon Stewart’s opinions was somehow a valid form not only of entertainment but of political participation: Slate, but with a laugh track. Or Letterman, but with the warming glow of confirming one’s seriousness and virtue without having to leave the sofa.
It’s a short, straight line from Stewart to Kimmel, and not a much longer one from that to the massive overhiring of opinion columnists by the Times, or to podcasts, Kirk, or Chapo Trap House. The main differences are that the broadcast versions retain a faint hint of tweed; that some versions, right or left, prefer to foreground the rage and cowardice; and that millions of entrepreneurs realized they didn’t need guests or a studio to make a fast, easy buck.
What we lose in losing Kimmel is: Nothing much. It’s the manner of his loss that is the problem. I gather that these days, because our culture is hot in the glow of recent martyrdom and our leaders are eager to fuel it (and in some cases are ambitious and stupid or ambitious and cowardly), I can be fired for observing that just as political violence is still worse a manner of loss, so I doubt we lose much as a culture by losing, not Kirk himself, but the business enterprise of his voice. There are always more opinions and more forums, and if you don’t like what’s on offer today I’m sure someone will happily “change his mind” to suit you. But it’s a degraded, democratic culture, and Kimmel and Kirk each in their way were very much a part of it. One imagines with hope and nostalgia a culture in which entertainment is not politics, politics is not entertaining, neither stand-up comics nor college dropouts are treated as authorities, having an opinion is no more celebrated than having an anus, and neither makes up our chief economic activity.