In cold blood: the death of American media

Opinion

Yes, blood can run cold.

It’s a hackneyed expression, one I never bought. Until they threw Kimmel off the air, after the FCC chairman in the United States threatened “we can do this the easy way. Or we can do it the hard way.”

My blood chilled in my veins. When you see the actual death of any semblance of independent media in a country happen right before your eyes, an old journalist cannot help it.

Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night comedian crime? Calling out MAGA for its political point-scoring hypocrisy over the murder of right wing (call him what he was, proven out with his own words, words that have been quoted many times during the week following his death) racist, misogynistic, homophobic Charlie Kirk. And for noting U.S. President Donald Trump’s response was to gloat about the construction site of the new massive ballroom being built for no reason other than to feed Trump’s ego.

You had to see something like this coming. Vice-President JD Vance, with indecent speed, “guest-hosted” Kirk’s rabid podcast and called for good MAGAheads, in their zeal to paint Kirk as a saintly figure, not to just call out anyone who dared call Kirk what he was, but to report such infidels to their employers and demand their firing. Loyal MAGA Republicans condemned “the radical left” for, in effect, simply quoting many of Kirk’s more nauseating rants, among them his remark (most of us have seen it by now) that “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

But you don’t kill people over their opinions, even when Trump encourages and incites political violence from his own side, savaging the “radical left” after the murder and threatening to hunt down “each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity … including the organizations that fund and support it.”

Trump and MAGA define the parsing and examination of Kirk’s actual beliefs as hate speech. Yet the Marjorie Taylor Greenes, the Laura Loomers, the Vances and the Trumps of their world are perfectly entitled to spew lies, twist truths, and spit out vile characterizations of those who disagree with them.

Kimmel, said a White House overjoyed at Kimmel’s excision from late night television, is a “sick freak.”

The American media has crumbled beneath Trump. ABC coughed up US$15 million before he even took office to silence a baseless defamation suit, Paramount/CBS paid him off US$16 million, ostensibly to erase a lawsuit against 60 Minutes, but far more likely to get their merger approved. He’s suing the Wall Street Journal for US$10 billion, the New York Times for US$15 billion. The Washington Post is owned by Trump acolyte Jeff Bezos. The corporate owners of MSNBC cut Trump-critical MSNBC loose, to survive or die on its own.

Independent mainstream legacy media in the United States is dead. The funeral just hasn’t been held yet.

Why does this matter to Canadians? Because when Parliament resumed in mid-September, Maple Syrup MAGAheads were out in force, with protesters wielding flags and signs reading: “F-ck Carney,” “Globalism is communism,” and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

A minority government is somehow “absolute power”?

And Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, after a brief exchange of civilized pleasantries with the prime minister, reverted to attack dog mode. Apparently, being trounced in his Ottawa seat in the last election did not result in any deep reflection into his penchant for vicious political hyperbole over crises that really don’t need his exaggerations; they’re already well-fixed in Canadians’ minds as massive problems that need resolving.

They’re equally obviously not problems anyone can fix in a few months.

But, like MAGA in the U.S., such vitriol is red meat to a chunk of the electorate that never did learn how to think critically or logically, or to examine facts rather than swallow hyperbole whole because it feeds your mindless existential fury.

So pay attention to what’s happened in the United States.

Much of Poilievre’s agenda, as so many mainstream editorial writers across our country described during his first go-round as opposition leader, bears an eerie resemblance to Trump’s democracy-destroying gospel. It has not changed. It’s a watered-down, Canadian version, but it is what it is.

And our media is far more concentrated in far fewer hands than American media has historically been. We do have the CBC, in a dramatically weakened state thanks to decades of funding cuts.

When my blood ran cold on hearing about Kimmel, it was not only out of despair for America’s media.

It was also out of fear for the media in my own country, should the Carney minority fall, an election transpire, and the Poilievre Conservatives assume the levers of power.

Maybe I shouldn’t sell my little house in Mexico.

Judy Waytiuk is a retired Winnipeg journalist who winters in Mexico and writes about politics in her Substack column, spoutingoff.com.