The F.C.C. Threatened to Punish Kimmel ‘the Hard Way.’ ABC Made It Easy.

On a podcast Wednesday, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, complained about remarks that Jimmy Kimmel had made about Tyler Robinson, the man accused of shooting the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, and about President Trump’s MAGA political movement. Mr. Carr described a couple of paths toward the consequences he wanted to see happen.

“We can do this the easy way,” he said, “or the hard way.”

Later that day, ABC did it for him the easy way.

ABC did not explain its decision to pull Mr. Kimmel’s late-night show “indefinitely.” But the sequence of events was easy to follow, and the dynamics are chillingly familiar.

Mr. Carr, who holds power over local stations’ broadcast licenses, called on ABC affiliates to “push back.” Quickly, an owner of affiliate groups — which is planning an acquisition deal that will be scrutinized by the F.C.C. — did just that, announcing that it would pre-empt Mr. Kimmel’s show.

By Wednesday night, Mr. Kimmel was on hiatus.

What did Mr. Kimmel say to end his show (at least for now)? In his Monday night monologue, he said, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

You could call Mr. Kimmel’s framing tendentious, uncharitable, unfair, slanted, off base. (Prosecutors said Mr. Robinson had written in private messages about Mr. Kirk’s “hatred,” without specifying what he found hateful; his mother told prosecutors that her son had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.”)

But if you held comics to a standard of evenhanded probity, the biggest show in late-night would be a test pattern. As for his statement about scoring “political points” — since Mr. Kirk’s shooting, President Trump and his officials have sought to go after liberal groups and tie them to political violence. After Mr. Kirk’s death, Mr. Kimmel also posted on social media, “Instead of the angry finger-pointing, can we just for one day agree that it is horrible and monstrous to shoot another human?”

But one does not have to defend or even like Mr. Kimmel’s comments to see a pattern. Mr. Trump and his administration have been yanking an array of levers to bring news and entertainment outlets to heel. They have brought lawsuits, dangled investigations and threatened financial interests. (Mr. Trump recently sued The New York Times for coverage that questioned his level of business success.)

And it has often worked. ABC settled a suit brought by the Trump administration over news coverage, and then Paramount settled one over “60 Minutes,” even as it sought approval of a multibillion-dollar merger. Paramount and CBS said that the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late-night show was purely for business reasons. But Mr. Trump celebrated the sidelining of his frequent critic anyway, as he did with Mr. Kimmel, and he encouraged NBC to visit the same upon Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.

All the while, the demands for apologies, payments, removals and concessions have continued and escalated. The message has been sent that getting on the bad side of the president and his allies can cost dearly.

And apparently, few in the media and Hollywood want to foot that bill. So many others are paying tribute and giving in — why should you stick your neck out? Maybe it’s just better to be cautious. Maybe don’t say anything that gives your haters an opening. Maybe don’t say anything rash.

Maybe don’t say anything.

“South Park” nailed this dynamic in its season premiere, in which the Trump administration’s pressure even reached Jesus Christ, who warned, “You really want to end up like Colbert?” Reruns of its second episode — which made fun of Mr. Kirk’s politics, weeks before his killing — were pulled from Comedy Central after the assassination, though they remain on the Paramount+ streaming platform. (Mr. Kirk, incidentally, called the spoof “kind of funny” before his death.)

Maybe what Mr. Trump and his allies are doing is not precisely what Viktor Orban did to control media in Hungary, or Vladimir Putin in Russia, or Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. Some governments do it the hard way; some do it the easy way. Every freeze on public discourse produces its own unique snowflake.

You can feel the chill. Accepting an Emmy on Sunday night for the HBO show “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” the writer Daniel O’Brien said, “We are honored to share it with all writers of late-night political comedy while that’s still a type of show that’s allowed to exist.” After Mr. Kimmel’s suspension, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut called it part of “the systematic destruction of free speech.”

It might seem melodramatic to cry censorship over late-night shows, which are ultimately not news institutions but entertainment productions that exist to make money. And yes, comedy is different from the news: A lot of people who don’t pay attention to the news pay attention to comedy.

Leaders certainly do: the satirical puppet show “Kukly” disappeared from Russian TV under pressure from Mr. Putin’s government, and Chinese censors banned online memes likening President Xi Jinping to Winnie-the-Pooh. Mr. Trump’s social media feeds over his political career have read like a Statler and Waldorf running commentary against his satirizers.

One way you can measure a democracy’s health is by people’s freedom to mock their leaders — not just Poli Sci 101, letter-of-the-law freedom, but financial and cultural and logistical freedom. And practically speaking, free speech will only thrive on TV to the extent that companies are willing to locate their guts and stand up to political and financial pressure.

Sure, nobody is throwing Mr. Kimmel in a gulag. He, like Stephen Colbert, will likely personally be fine. But a media system in which comedians are forbidden from mocking the president’s faction by corporate fiat is not functionally freer than one in which they are forbidden by law. One does not need to tear up the First Amendment if enough people who own enough microphones can be induced to behave as if you have.

America may not be an actual autocracy. But it increasingly seems to be playing one on TV.