FCC: Fed Censorship Commission (Fresh Air)

Examining Kimmel's suspension and Trump's threats to free speech

Fresh Air (WHYY via NPR) with Terry Gross, Sept. 24, 2025 (43-minute audio)

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I'm just a court jester for blind kings

Jimmy Kimmel Live! is back, but New York Times reporter Adam Liptak and former Washington Post editor Martin Baron say the Trump administration is using federal power to control speech and [stifle] the press.

• Pop star PINK deletes IG comment mocking Charlie Kirk's [Neo-Nazi white Christian nationalist rally] funeral

TRANSCRIPT 

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Jimmy Kimmel and his show "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" returned to ABC last night after he was suspended indefinitely a week ago. The story of his suspension and return has implications beyond Kimmel, pertaining to conglomerate ownership of broadcast networks and news publications, the First Amendment and freedom of the press, the FCC and Pres. Trump. Here to talk about the larger story are [journalists] Marty Baron and Adam Liptak.

Collision of Power: Trump...

Baron was the editor of The Washington Post from 2013 until his retirement in 2021. During most of his tenure, The Post was owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Baron's memoir about that time is titled Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post. He was previously the editor of The Boston Globe. In the movie Spotlight, a drama based on The Globe's investigation, revealing sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, Baron was portrayed by Liev Schreiber.

Adam Liptak covers the courts and legal issues for The New York Times. Before joining the Times' news staff, he practiced law for 14 years, concentrating on First Amendment issues, including in The New York Times Company's corporate legal department. Let's start with a clip from Jimmy Kimmel's monologue last night.

• AUDIO: Trump's threats to free speech (NPR)

I, BB, will decide what you hear.

The sure mark of an Orwellian dystopia is the use of Newspeak: euphemismistic bill names.

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Big Brother is Watching You (1984)

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE!") JIMMY KIMMEL: I've been hearing a lot about what I need to say and do tonight, and the truth is, I don't think what I have to say is going to make much of a difference. If you like me, you like me. If you don't, you don't. I have no illusions about changing anyone's mind. But I do want to make something clear because it's important to me as a human, and that is you understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder (CRYING) of a young man. I don't... (APPLAUSE)

Federal Censorship Commission (FCC)

KIMMEL: ...I don't think there's anything funny about it. I posted a message on Instagram on the day he was killed, sending love to his family and asking for compassion, and I meant it. And I still do. Nor was it my intention to blame any specific group for the actions of what -- it was obviously a deeply disturbed individual. That was really the opposite of the point I was trying to make. But I understand that to some that felt either ill-timed or unclear, or maybe both. And for those who think I did point a finger, I get why you're upset. If the situation was reversed, there's a good chance I'd have felt the same way. I have many friends and family members on the other side who I love and remain close to, even though we don't agree on politics at all. I don't think the murderer who shot Charlie Kirk represents anyone. This was a sick person who believed violence was a solution, and it isn't. It - ever. And also selfishly... (APPLAUSE)

KIMMEL: ...I am a person who gets a lot of threats. I get many ugly and scary threats against my life, my wife, my kids, my coworkers because of what I choose to say. And I know those threats don't come from the kind of people on the right who I know and love. So that's what I wanted to say on that subject. But I don't want to make this about me because - and I know this is what people say when they make things about them. (LAUGHTER)

KIMMEL: But I really don't. This show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Woo!

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yeah! (CHEERING)

Federal Communications Commission 1937

KIMMEL: I've had the opportunity to meet and spend time with comedians and talk show hosts from countries like Russia, countries in the Middle East, who tell me they would get thrown in prison for making fun of those in power, and worse than being thrown in prison. They know how lucky we are here. Our freedom to speak is what they admire most about this country. And that's something I'm embarrassed to say I took for granted until they pulled my friend Stephen [Colbert] off the air and tried to coerce the affiliates who run our show in the cities that you live in to take my show off the air. That's not legal. That's not American. That is un-American. And it is so dangerous. (CHEERING)

I am the King of the USA!

GROSS: All right, so that was an excerpt of last night's monologue by Jimmy Kimmel. Kimmel went on to praise Charlie Kirk's widow, Erika Kirk, for forgiving her husband's assassin. And he added while tearing up...

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE!") KIMMEL: There it was. That's it, a selfless act of grace, forgiveness from a grieving widow. (Crying) And it touched me deeply. And I hope it... (APPLAUSE)

KIMMEL: ...It touches many. And if there's anything we should take from this tragedy to carry forward, I hope it can be that, and not this.

GROSS: So, Marty Baron, Adam Liptak, welcome to FRESH AIR. What was your reaction to last night's monologue?

FCC Censors/Commissioners inspect latest TV 1939 - Federal [Censorship] Commission

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MARTY BARON: Well, it was very moving, very emotional and, I think, very effective. I really think that this could end up being an extraordinarily important moment in the history of the country. And you know, I think back to the 1950s, actually. It recalled for me the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, when Joseph Welch was representing the U.S. Army. He told Senator Joseph McCarthy, have you no decency, sir? And that really proved to be a turning point when the country turned against McCarthy and his incredibly malicious behavior. So, you know, now we live in a time where - era where performative behavior is rewarded. It's all about spectacle. You know, we have a president who really revels in showmanship. So maybe what we need is a different spectacle in this instance, from an entertainer like Jimmy Kimmel, really, as a counterweight, as a corrective, because the standard forms of argument just aren't as effective as they once were. So I thought it was highly effective and effective in a way that traditional debate hasn't been.

GROSS: Adam Liptak, what are your thoughts?

Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell)

ADAM LIPTAK: I agree with Marty. It was, among other things, a robust defense of free speech in the sense that you don't have to agree with what Jimmy Kimmel was saying, although it's hard to disagree with much of what he said because it was so moving. But what free speech requires is that you hear him out and you consider it, and you don't try to stifle it or censor it. That said, my viewing of this was a little frustrating because I live in Washington, D.C., and I learned last night, as I tried to watch Jimmy Kimmel, that the local ABC affiliate is owned by Sinclair, and they had chosen not to air it. And while it appeared on YouTube soon enough, this is not an unalloyed victory. In much of the country, Kimmel remains unavailable, and this fight is not over.

GROSS: Yeah. I think that between Sinclair and Nexstar, they own about 20% of the ABC affiliates.

BARON: Yeah, I think they...

GROSS: They own 70 stations, and I think it's like 20% of...

BARON: ...Households. More

• AUDIO: Examining Kimmel's suspension and Trump's threats to free speech (NPR)
• Terry Gross, Fresh Air, WHYY.org via NPR.org; CC Liu, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Terry Gross

43-Minute Listen

Transcript

Buddhist Native Americans in Grand Canyon?

Hecklefish (The Why Files, 12/15/22); Pat Macpherson and Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

The Buddha is revered around the world, even in the Americas thanks to Afghan missionaries.

Smithsonian cover-up: Buddhists, Egyptians, and giants in the Grand Canyon

(The Why Files) In 1908, U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt wanted to declare the Grand Canyon off-limits to all timber and mining operations. It would take another 11 years for Congress to designate the Grand Canyon a national park.

Buddhist rock wall art of Gandhara, Asia

Sensing a final opportunity for adventure, explorer G.E. Kincaid took a boat down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. The canyon was rich in minerals like gold, silver, and copper, and Kincaid wanted to see what he could find before the area was closed off for good.

About 40 miles up-river from the El Tovar Crystal Canyon, Kincaid saw stains in the sediment formation about 2,000 feet up. He tied off the boat and got out to investigate.

Forbidden History Revealed

Kincaid couldn't find a trail, but after a short hike he found something interesting covered in desert brush: steps, hundreds of them, carved in sandstone, steps that wound their way up to a high shelf on the side of the canyon. He followed the steps until he came across a cavern entrance. An entrance that was clearly man-made.

Kincaid entered the cavern and turned on his flashlight. He saw a Buddha statue. On the walls he saw writing. But it wasn't English or Native American writing. It was ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Smithsonian hides the original

Kincaid lifted his flashlight and saw that the tunnel ran far into the distance. He didn't realize it at the time, but this was only the beginning. It was a whole underground world where he estimated 50,000 could survive in underground cities to preserve a civilization.

• #Ancient #Unsolved #Mystery
• EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Gino Gentile, Jennifer Gentile, AJ Gentile.
• Patreon members THANK YOU, MODS: Daniel_Van_Auken, jengen13, pratty505, VictoriaY, Jschoop, Zanythos.
• SOURCES & LINKS
• The Leak Project: leakproject.com
• Jerry and Kathy Wills' Patreon: patreon.com/Xpeditions

"Why Buddhism is True: The Science..." (NPR)

Terry Gross, Fresh Air (NPR.org, Aug. 7, 2017); Dhr. Seven, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
 

Can Buddhist practices help us overcome the biological pull of dissatisfaction?

(Veronica Grech/Getty Images)

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Author, science Prof. Robert Wright

"There's a kind of a bridge between cognitive therapy and Buddhist practice in evolutionary psychology," says author Robert Wright.

 

Are human beings hard-wired to be perpetually dissatisfied? Author Robert Wright, who teaches about the interface of evolutionary biology and religion, thinks so.

 

Wright points out that evolution rewards people for seeking out pleasure rather than pain, which helps ensure that human beings are frequently unsatisfied:

"We are condemned to always want things to be a little different, always want a little more," he says. "We're not designed by natural selection to be happy."

But all is not lost. In his new book, Why Buddhism is True, Wright makes the case that some Buddhist practices can help humans overcome the biological pull towards dissatisfaction.

 

"I think of mindfulness meditation as almost a rebellion against natural selection," he says. "Natural selection is the process that created us. It gave us our values. It sets our agenda, and Buddhism says, 'We don't have to play this game.' "

• BOOK: Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by Robert Wright, hardcover, 321 pages (purchase).

Interview Highlights
On how natural selection is at odds with the Buddhist notion that pleasure is fleeting

Host Terry Gross

This was in the Buddha's first sermon after his enlightenment: a big source of our suffering is that we crave things, we want things.

But then the gratification tends not to last. So we find ourselves in a state of almost perennial dissatisfaction. And, in fact, people may have heard that Buddhism says that life is full of suffering.

[It actually is better translated as, "All conditioned states of existence are unsatisfactory"]. And it's true that suffering is the translation of the [Sanskrit and Pali] word dukkha. 

It's a respectable translation [for such a widely applicable term the meaning of which runs the gamut between agitation and agony], but a lot of people think that that word would be just as well translated as "unsatisfactoriness" [or as "disappointing"].

 

Certainly when you think about the logic of natural selection, it makes sense that we would be like this. Natural selection built us to do some things, a series of things that help us get genes into the next generation. Those include eating food so we stay alive, having sex -- things like that.

 

If it were the case that any of these things brought permanent gratification [satisfaction], then we would quit doing them, right? I mean, you would eat, you'd feel blissed out, you'd never eat again.

If I have sex then I'll be blissed out forever.

You'd have sex, you'd, like, lie there basking in the afterglow, never have sex again. Well, obviously that's not a prescription for getting genes into the next generation. So natural selection seems to have built animals in general to be recurrently dissatisfied. And this seems to be a central feature of life -- and it's central to the Buddhist diagnosis of what the problem is. 

On how to approach physical pain with mindfulness

A basic principle of mindfulness meditation is to not run away from feelings that you normally run away from. By "run away from" I mean you're averse to them.

Like, if you feel anxiety or physical pain, you want it to go away. You want to do something that makes it go away. And the idea of mindfulness meditation is that you actually sit there -- kind of observe [dispassionately watch] the feeling, experience the feeling -- and ironically, that can give you a kind of critical distance from it, a kind of detachment from it.

So not running away from the pain or the emotional distress, or whatever, can, through meditative practice, disempower the pain or the distress.

• 13.7: Cosmos And Culture 
• Does Mindfulness Mean Anything?
• TED Radio Hour: Are We Wired To Be Compassionate?

On how Buddhist meditation can counteract the biological pull towards dissatisfaction

What I can say about meditation is that it attacks the levers that natural selection kind of uses to control us, at a very fundamental level....

By our nature we just seek good feelings and avoid bad feelings, that's just our nature. Buddhism diagnosed this as kind of a problem and remarkably came up with a technique that allows you to actually disempower those levers, to no longer respond to the fundamental incentive structure of trying to avoid painful feelings and try to always seek the thing that promises to be gratifying. That's an amazing thing -- that it can work.

 

On how Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Buddhism work together

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works by kind of interrogating people about the logic behind things like fears and anxieties, like, Is there really much of a chance of you projectile vomiting while speaking to a crowd? You've never done it before. ... So there's a suspicion there about the logic behind feelings.

 

Prof. Robert Wright (UTS, NYC)

Robert Wright is a visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. His previous books include The Evolution of God and Three Scientists and their Gods (Barry Munger/Simon & Schuster).

Well, in Buddhism there's a suspicion of the logic behind feelings more broadly, I would say. But as a practical matter, Buddhism works at the level of feeling. They don't interrogate the logic explicitly, but you deal with the feeling itself in a way that disempowers it.

And there's a kind of bridge between cognitive therapy and Buddhist practice in evolutionary psychology; because evolutionary psychology explains that, indeed, a lot of the feelings we have are not worth following, for various reasons. They may have literally been designed to mislead us to begin with by natural selection.

...We live in an environment so different from the environment that natural selection designed us for that we have these counterproductive feelings, like fear of public speaking.

So evolutionary psychology gives a back story, explaining why it is that we so often are misled by feelings... and then Buddhist meditation tells us what to do about that.

• Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper adapted it for the Web. [Wisdom Quarterly further adapted it for this post.]

Forest Bathing: a retreat to Nature can boost immunity and mood

Area 51 Uncensored: UFOs or USSR trick?

Terri Gross (NPR, Fresh Air, WHYY, May 17, 2011)

U.S. Geological Survey "Area 51" from above in 1968

• LISTEN

[The cover up continues with a new and outrageous twist: Russian genetic anomalies in a UFO-like spy plane were crashed in the US to scare Americans.]

Seventy-five miles north of Las Vegas sits a land parcel in the middle of the desert. Called Area 51, the parcel is just outside of the abandoned Nevada Test and Training Range, where more than 100 atmospheric bomb tests were conducted in the 1950s.

Officially, the U.S. government has never acknowledged the existence of Area 51. Unofficially, it has become a place associated with conspiracy theories, alien landings and tiny spaceships.

Journalist Annie Jacobsen tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that the site has remained classified for many years -- not because of aliens or spaceships, but because the government once used the site for top-secret nuclear testing and weapons development.

In Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base, Jacobsen details how several agencies -- including the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Defense and the CIA -- once used the site to conduct controversial and secretive research on aircraft and pilot-related projects, including planes that traveled three times faster than the speed of sound and nuclear-propelled, space-based missile launch systems.

Area 51: An Uncensored History, Annie Jacobsen

Read an Excerpt

Operation Plumbbob

In the summer and fall of 1957, a series of atmospheric nuclear tests -- called Operation Plumbbob -- were conducted above ground at the Nevada testing and training range, located just outside of Area 51.

Twenty-nine explosions were set off while tests were conducted on troop readiness, accidental detonations and the effects of flying debris on living targets, according to documents declassified by the Department of Energy that Jacobsen details in her book.

During the explosions, security officer Richard Mingus stood guard outside many of the weapons-testing sites, including one with the largest atmospheric bomb that has ever exploded in the United States. More

A Prescription for "Brain Gain"? (radio)

Health & Science

• Listen Now [20 min 4 sec]

Fresh Air from WHYY, April 20, 2009 · In the modern world of busy schedules and busier lives, some people are turning to "neuro-enhancing" drugs to gain a competitive edge.

As journalist Margaret Talbot writes in the April 27 issue of The New Yorker magazine, a variety of students, professors and business people are taking drugs intended for attention deficit disorder, narcolepsy, and epilepsy in an effort to enhance brain function and get ahead.

Proponents of "cosmetic neurology" say that the drugs allow people to reach their full potential, while critics warn that the drugs have not been tested for off-label uses, and that some may be addictive or harmful.

Talbot has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2003. She has previously worked as an editor at The New Republic and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. She is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

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