Former White House strategist Ben Rhodes sounded the alarm on MSNBC's "All In" Wednesday evening, following the Trump administration's successful strong-arming of ABC News into indefinitely suspending late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel's show.
Kimmel was yanked after he criticized how the media bent to pro-Trump narratives about right-wing activist Charlie Kirk following his assassination.
"Let me just start with you," said anchor Chris Hayes. "I said this when Colbert was fired, that it's it's not too much of an overstatement to say, the test of a free society is whether you live in a place where late-night comedians can be on TV making fun of the leader. And I still feel that way, and today feels pretty bad on that score."
"No, it feels terrible ... and frankly, my book that you just put up there goes into a lot of detail about these takeovers of the media," agreed Rhodes.
"Here's what I stress about it," he continued. "Some people see this and they think, well, you know, it's just one TV show. It's just Stephen Colbert. It's just Jimmy Kimmel. It's just late-night. What you have to see, it is a part of a concerted strategy where not only do you have pro-Trump oligarchs consolidating control of the media, and frankly, that's what they are. I mean ... if we were talking about Russia, we're talking about Hungary, if we're talking about Turkey, you're talking about government-associated oligarchs, wealthy people with interests before the government buying up the media, because that's one way to retain favor with the leader."
"But also really importantly, it's the example that is set," said Rhodes. "It's not just about what Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert said. It's the fact that they basically got axed for their speech that is a message to every other broadcaster on every other medium in this country, that if you say something the leader doesn't like, you're probably at risk of getting axed. They want, Chris, people like you and me to be sitting here right now and have another voice in our head every time we open our mouths, that if we say the wrong thing, that might be it for us too, right?"
"This is not just cancel culture, it's way beyond that," he added. "It's trying to enforce, essentially, an ideological test on the broad-based news media that reaches the vast majority of Americans, so that the only content they're seeing is, essentially, ideologically aligned with whatever Trump and his FCC director and a small group of people around him think that's what's happening."