I'm Audie Cornish and this is the Assignment.

I'm not sure who had a weirder 48 hours, me or the CEO of Tylenol.

Jimmy Kimmel was back on air almost a week after ABC suspended his show over comments he made about Charlie Kirk's assassination.

You understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man.

Kimmel's suspension ignited this fierce debate about free speech, political pressure. Who gets to decide which voices stay on air? First, Colbert's late show is canceled, then Kimmel suspension. All of this is taking place among these kind of epic shifts in media. So how do we get here from say a decade ago when then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump hosted SNL? What forces brought us to this moment where conservative leaders and billionaire media owners are reshaping the media landscape, and what does that mean for you, the viewer? Stay with us.

So I'm here with Sara Fischer who covers breaking news and analysis about the media industry for Axios. She's also a CNN contributor who is usually on TV with me in the group chat. And I have to assume your group chats are blowing up the last 24 hours.

'Yep, this has been the biggest story for media since probably the whole paramount takeover. And it's going to continue to be one of the biggest stories, Audie, because of all the long-term implications it has on free speech.

So first, let's just get the goss on how this went down. The thing about Kimmel is you were reporting earlier in the week is that he wanted to get back on air right away and kind of like clarify, right? And say this thing I said referring and passing to like the MAGA crowd or the shooter being one of them. He's like, I want to clarify that. What happened with Disney executives? And maybe you could tell us a little bit about how Disney works, so to speak, when you're talking about all these people at the top of that pyramid.

Yes, so I think Disney executives were very nervous, Audie, about sending him out that soon. They were nervous that if he doubled down on the sort of defensive posture, he would inadvertently make it worse. They wanted to let things settle and then put him back out there. I also think we all sort of had an understanding about there would be a funeral or a memorial service and I think everybody wanted to sort of wait and see how that shook out, how the coverage of that went before they put more people out to talk about it. The thing is with Jimmy Kimmel, he's been with Disney for a long, long time, and in Disney world, you have various options of who could be your boss and who you report to, right? For someone like Kimmel obviously his show falls within ABC, but then he does a lot of other extra stuff within the network. He does advertising presentations on the business side. He will host special projects and award shows, whether that's Who Wants to be a Millionaire or the Oscars. And so technically, the person who oversees a lot of what he does is a woman named Dana Walden. She would be, in some cases, people think could be the heir apparent to Bob Iger, the CEO. But I think in this situation, Bob Iger, the CEO, was heavily, heavily involved with Dana and helping to make some of these decisions around his return.

So they literally had to sit down with him, him and the bosses. And they were like, I don't know about this, I don't about this. Do we know who changed whose minds? I mean, they were obviously there was a backlash in Hollywood. But what happened that they made this this decision to bring him back?

I think they always wanted to keep Kimmel on air. They love Kimmel. Kimmel's been loyal to them forever. It was always just a question of how and when would they actually do it and whether or not Kimmel wanted to come back. It's a very embarrassing thing. You've been a loyal employee for a very long time. Like I said, they've been touting him on advertising presentations. They have a great relationship with him. Do you want to go back after your employer publicly didn't back you on one line, one joke? I mean That is, I think, the big question for me. In terms of what got Disney executives feeling more comfortable, there were a few things that happened. There's obviously the business implications of this. Their market cap took a hit, stock went down. Two, the talent relations portion of this, you had on Monday over 400 major actors and musicians and Hollywood people write a letter alongside the ACLU standing up for free speech and defending Kimmel. So now you have a talent problem.

This blew my mind. Here's why. I feel like one of the reasons why Hollywood in particular has struggled this last year or two is, number one, they had their own kind of fracture with the war on Gaza. So a lot of these celebrities are burned from speaking out publicly or not speaking out publicly or fighting with each other about things they said publicly, right? So you have the community that's sort of like fractured in that moment. And then also, I feel like there was a little bit of like, yeah, we think maybe it was too woke for a while. We think the ladies were talking too much about me too. And all of a sudden you had something and someone to rally around, right? Like a guy you all like, cause he's one of them, he's a celebrity. He's not a broadcaster on the couch, reporter or something like that. They have dinner with him. And it felt like all of a sudden they all had a safe thing to rally around

That's exactly right, and they did it in conjunction with the ACLU, which is a very big, powerful labor union. So it wasn't like they had to find a leader, find someone who was going to champion the cause, rally around them, elevate them. They had someone they could just latch onto, which was a very strong organization that has ties already to Hollywood. It knows the labor function there. And then free speech is a safe issue in Hollywood. I think a lot of people, even if you're not a comedian or you're somebody that puts themselves out there every day publicly like that. A lot of people felt like they wouldn't want to be canceled for posting something on social media or showing up in an event. And so free speech was something they could all get around. And so I think the Audie, that was the second thing that Disney really felt pressured and when they tried to turn their decision around. And then there was a third thing, and I think this is probably one of the most important things that gets overlooked, which is the change in tone from Republicans around what Chairman Carr and President Trump were doing in pressuring ABC over Kimmel.

Because Kimmel was even able to make jokes about Brendan Carr using Brendan Carr's own words, using Ted Cruz's own words. Like, this is one of those rare instances where every tweet from every Republican about free speech in the last five years has come back to haunt them.

'Correct. And I think just such a staunch opposition to what Carr had done from Republicans made Disney feel as though they could bring Kimmel back without completely isolating themselves from the conservative party. You'll remember a couple years ago, Disney got into a tit for tat with Ron DeSantis, the governor in Florida, over Disney's stance on the don't say gay bill. And Disney's reputation with Republicans took a short temporary hit. We've done some analysis to show that it's since back. But I think that this company does not want to be framed as the left-wing punching bag. They don't want to who the right goes to, to point fingers. And I think there was a concern that if they defended Kimmel too quickly in this moment, that they were going to solidify themselves as that punching bag for the right. And so when the right-wing attitude shifted on Carr, that's when I think Disney felt very comfortable saying, well, if we bring him back, we're not going to be this lefty-righteous organization. You know, we're going to be standing up for free speech. It took a few days, by the way, for Republicans to really, really come forward with that stance, because I think a lot of them were hesitant on how they should see this, too. But I'm just, you know, I'll give you some anecdotal opinion here. I'm very glad that they did, because free speech is a constitutional right, and we've shifted so far away in America, where our Republican Party used to be the party of sticking to the Constitution, and this was the first time I felt in a while that they've kind of moved back into those roots.

You know, one of the things I was thinking about is how there was this conversation with Brendan Carr. Everybody's going to the original comments on the Benny Johnson show, where he says the FCC may have some work to do and maybe they should do something about it. But he also said something else in that conversation. So Brendan Carr is talking with Benny Johnson and he says, Look, one of the things that President Trump did... When he ran for office as he ran directly at the legacy media establishment. He smashed the facade that they get to control what we say.

'What we say, what we think, the narrative around events, and we're seeing a lot of consequences that are flowing from President Trump doing that. I mean, look, NPR has been defunded, PBS has been defunding, Colbert is retiring, Joy Reid is out at MSNBC, Terry Moran-

...gone from ABC, he put everything in here. You know what I mean? He saw them all as a kind of win. And I wanna bring that up to you cause like I do think that's why it took a while for Republicans to speak because the perception is these folks were out of control. They used what was supposed to be a mainstream platform to pull everything left, pull everything towards the Democrat point of view. And now this is the backlash. Now this is a consequence that they're living with.

Audie, fine, like if media turns left, fine. I don't really care about that. What really frustrates me here is that Brenton Carr is a regulator of publicly owned airwaves. You and I own the spectrum that those local broadcasters float on. So that's why he has jurisdiction over the way certain media entities, such as ABC and CBS, are going to appear to us. A lot of these other examples have very little to do with the FCC. You know, I think about the PBS and NPR example, that is congressionally mandated funds and agree with it or not agree with, Congress repealed that funding that went through the proper political process. What's frustrating to me about this situation is you want to call these things wins, but things are only wins and only should be wins to a regulator if they go through the proper regulatory process. And when it comes to big media... There is no more of a champion in big legacy media than Brendan Carr. The whole platform that he rode to the chairman on is that he's going to empower local broadcasters. So local broadcaster are probably the biggest example of big legacy medias. They're owned by these massive conglomerates. So everything about that statement to me feels so hypocritical. And I think if he wants to tie this as a win to some of those other things, I don't think it makes much sense. You can tie your record to other regulatory enforcement actions, sure, but the vast majority of what happened with the other stuff he just mentioned are not regulatory enforcement actions. It was something done by Congress or it was bullying by the president. It had nothing to do with him or with the Republicans using political levers to win. It just doesn't make sense.

Okay, I'm talking with Sarah Fisher, CNN contributor. She's also a senior media correspondent for Axios. We'll be back in a moment.

So Sarah, I want to take us back to 2016, the media landscape then in the way back machine. We're all, we're using Twitter. We're excited about YouTube. Talk however, about how much the landscape has changed just in the last 10 years, because certainly in the news business... There's much lamentation, right? The billionaire owners of newspapers and magazines, they haven't solved problems. They've maybe created new ones. And I think that there's, I think you could give us probably a bulleted list of what's different.

'Yeah. So let's go way, way back for one quick second. There's a researcher named Gaye Tuchman, who said that traditionally newspapers and magazines in the United States were rooted in liberal ideology because they were founded by people who lived in the northeast of the United States. That's where all the printing presses were consolidated. And they were people who were more likely to go to these, you know, early universities, all of that. Then you fast forward to where we are today and- in- or let's fast forward to 2016. I think there was a sense that a lot of major media still had that sort of liberal rooted ideology. And when it came to Donald Trump running for president, one of the best examples I always give of where the mainstream media really messed up was they put coverage of him in the entertainment section, not the news section. Like they didn't take it very seriously. And to me, that's where a lot of that traditionally rooted left-wing bias showed. What's shifted now between 2016 and where we are today in 2025, is it's become very clear that you're going to get the story and the facts wrong if you don't take Donald Trump as a person and as a candidate and as a politician seriously. And so I think we're no longer in a place where news companies can set the agenda over who has the right to and who should run for office. That's a big, big, big shift. I think another major shift has been, if you look at where young people sit, young people are not as progressive as everybody once thought that they possibly were.

No, yeah, for sure.

And the future of these media companies depends on young people. As cable and as we mentioned, broadcast, as both of them lose some market share to streaming and to mobile apps, like the only way that they survive is that they cater to young people, and so I think they recognize that from a survival perspective, they've got to evolve. And so we're now in a landscape where some of those big institutions in print and broadcast that had roots in traditional sort of liberal ideology have had to shift for business reasons. And again, that to me is a reflection of society. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

No. And I think also I like you getting into the platforms themselves as part of the shift, right? Because Twitter is a different place because Elon Musk owns it. That is something you can just see demonstrably. And you open up the app and now the first tweet you might see is his, right? Like that is showing your power. And Twitter used to be an absolute soapbox for the progressive left. And whatever movements that were growing out of that. And then you look at something like the owners of newspapers being billionaires that might be affiliated with the White House, not just saying like, I'm glad I own a paper. They're almost, it's almost a throwback, right? To the 1920s or something where it's like, I own paper and here are my thoughts about how this thing should run. Am I misreading that?

'No, but I wanna just caution everyone. X, formerly Twitter, it's a very small part of American media diets. It's a small part of where Americans say that they get trusted news. This is why the Brendan Carr stuff matters. Most Americans say that their most trusted news source by far is their local broadcast station. People are- recognize that social media is toxic. It's more entertainment for them. And then in terms of where they spend their time on social media, I mean, it's Instagram for young people. It's also Snapchat. It is TikTok. And so- we look at the politicization of some platforms and we think, oh my God, social media landscape has totally shifted right. I actually think that it's not, I think that the user base-

Well, hold on a second, I was on the Axios website, okay, looking at stories with your byline and it says, the media landscape has shifted. What is the thing that has shifted to your mind that's notable?

'Well, I think that they are, in terms of how they regulate themselves, they are not regulating themselves with liberal bias in mind, but I do not believe that they're regulating themselves right now with conservative bias in mind. I think they're doing a lot more to allow users' speech to remain, but that doesn't mean that they are actively trying to box out liberal speech. Right, and at the time, so that's-

'Right, and at the time, if I go back to 2016, we were all like, Cambridge Analytica seems like a problem. We were still even trying to figure out what this means. What does it mean to have influence? What is an influence campaign? I think all this language now that we take for granted about disinformation, I mean, it comes out of that period. But in the scrum of that, no one knew how to deal with it. And the companies didn't know how to deal with it, nor, I think, could they- did they want to reckon with their own power, right? It was a little bit like, I wanna run something that's the size of a country, but I don't wanna be answerable to citizens. And I feel like this back and forth politically, Zuckerberg's a good example of someone who went from being like, I'm gonna take this seriously, to being like I am into UFC now and we're not gonna do content moderation. It just feels like they haven't settled on what they even think their role is other than making money, other than taking my data, I don't know.

This is correct, what you're describing is correct. But let me give you a wrinkle. In 2016, the reason that Meta, in particular, and Google felt so much pressure to succumb to threats of regulation in terms of content moderation is because there was proven foreign interference on their platforms. And that made people very nervous. It's one thing to have misinformation and disinformation on your platforms. We don't sue phone companies, utilities, because somebody tells a lie on a phone. It's another, if you're gonna use that platform to spend money on advertising in rubles. So that is where I think they got themselves in a very sticky situation. They proved that they couldn't govern themselves in a way that could prevent them from violating FEC, Federal Election Commission regulations. So what happened is they all overcompensated. They all doubled down. On trying to regulate misinformation in part because they wanted to get ahead of this foreign interference question. What then happened in COVID was the Biden administration took it a step further and sort of urged these platforms to double down on blocking misinformation around vaccines.

And we just saw this week, Alphabet, say YouTube, other platforms they own, all the folks we kicked off and deplatformed during that time, you're allowed to reapply and get back onto our platforms. We're sorry that the Biden administration made us do it, but like that about face just happened this week.

'So I think you're seeing a course correct now where they're recognizing that they were pressured by a progressive government and they succumbed to it. And the result of that was that they looked like they had sided with progressive ideology because at the end of the day, there was no regulatory mandate that the administration could enforce to force tech companies where again, internet's not regulated to do this. They voluntarily succumbed because they were nervous about the repercussions. So this is why like government pressure is really interesting. But at the end of the day, there's, it's up to the companies to figure out how they respond to government pressure. And how they-

But it's carrot and stick. We just watched all like, for instance, these guys all are in the middle of an AI war, spending war, regulatory, hand wringing. If the White House snaps their finger, they show up. They show up saying thank you. They show up shaking hands. You want us to come to the Middle East with you? We are there. They need this government. And it looks like I think people are thinking, aren't they going to just try and please this government?

'They are because we don't have a strong regulatory body that could independently regulate them and that they could independently follow. One thing we do have already is we have courts. In the case of the Biden pressure, you had Republican states attorneys general sort of suing to try to get to the bottom of that. That ended up, those cases ended up not going anywhere. But I think a lot of these issues now between free market economics, the tension between free-market economics and government regulatory approach are going to come to a head in courts because we don't have like an FCC for the internet. But zooming way out for a second, government has the power to pressure private companies to do things that they might not otherwise want to do out of fear of not getting other business done. We know that that is the case of what's happening right now in the Trump administration. And it's been the case in other administrations as well. Don't get me wrong. In fact, I think one of the things that happened during the Biden administration was a lot of these tech platforms changed their content moderation policies to curry favor with a liberal administration. And I think that if you're Meta, you do look like you are one of those companies that swings back and forth with the pendulum. There are other companies though that won't, like Snapchat has still not revived Donald Trump's account that it banned when it banned him in 2021.

I didn't notice that.

Yeah.

They're hoping we didn't notice that.

'Well, I think they are allowing him to make a new account, but that old account with his initial followers, that was banned and banned for good. And so I think you don't have every single solitary company succumbing, but we're in a situation now where there's more, here's where I'd say that the two-sides-ism argument can't apply. I do think there's a more government pressure now on these types of companies than there was before.

Okay, so before I let you go, what is your biggest takeaway from this whole Kimmel kerfuffle? Because like, we didn't see this with Colbert, right? There was outcry, but it didn't feel like a pivotal moment the way this does. What do you think is the thing that people aren't paying attention to, right, that you're like, look, this is something to to take away from this.

Yeah, conservatives, for them, free speech is actually their red line. So their government can pressure media companies all it wants to do certain things. Conservatives aren't going to care. They're not going to push back. But when it comes to messing with free speech, that is a line that's gone too far. And I think that's why Disney feels comfortable bringing Kimmel back. I think that's why you're seeing pressure from Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Tucker Carlson and other conservatives. And when it comes to concerted values and ideology, I'm very curious to see moving forward, what are the other red lines? Where are the places where conservatives are going to say, no, that's not right? I do remember, Audie, when the White House stepped up and said, we're not going to listen to the White House Correspondence Association's seating charts of who gets access here. There are a few conservative media outlets that signed on with progressive media outlets to say that's not right. I think about Fox News, I think about Newsmax. And the reason why it's important to know where the red lines are is because that will dictate how far Donald Trump can push.

So you're saying, let's keep an eye out for what their red lines are. And the flip side for me is what are the red lines for companies? At what point are media companies who, as you said, are still big business, like not get shoved around or not, I think, respond to every political whim. I mean, that's my thing looking at Disney, like Ron DeSantis, this guy, whoever. I mean, is anyone who complains about a Pixar character, Disney's gonna give them the time of day?

They're always going to defer back to what makes the most sense for the business. Their red line is their bottom line. So I think in the case of Jimmy Kimmel, they felt comfortable, not comfortable, but they pulled him off air in response to these regulatory threats because they didn't want to have to be in a bad position in getting deals approved. And when it became clear that they probably have a strong argument to make with Republicans around this, they felt more comfortable bouncing back. So I think for them it's all about what do they need to do to keep their business alive and afloat? And by the way, keeping your business alive and afloat, it definitely means being able to retain relationships with talent and not succumbing sometimes means you can maintain those relationships with talent. It means being able to continue to have viewership and audience and pissing off viewership and audience by yanking people's favorite comedian from the air does have repercussions. So they have to balance the business demands with the regulatory threats. But their red line is always gonna come down to what is best for the shareholder. That's because they're publicly traded companies in America.

That's Sara Fisher. She covers breaking news and analysis of the media industry for Axios. She's also a CNN contributor. You can see her with me on CNN This Morning. Thanks so much for being with us. We'll be back next week.