the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Sep 29, 2025
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” saw a huge viewership boost for its post-suspension return. All of Trump’s attempts to force Disney to shut down the show, just because it made fun of Trump, only aroused more interest in the show and provided it a much wider audience.
In fact, it was widespread anger over the cancelling of the show that most likely forced Disney to bring it back in the first place. After Disney caved to Trump and imposed the “indefinite suspension” of Kimmel’s show, consumers began a boycott of Disney services, products, cruises and vacations as a protest.
But Kimmel’s return with a larger audience is only a small setback for Trump, who has plenty of allies and supporters among the corporate elite who own the biggest media and entertainment companies. Two large media conglomerates, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group, continue to back Trump and kept Kimmel off the air in dozens of cities for additional days.
Trump also has an important ally in multibillionaire David Ellison, who just bought up Paramount and CBS. Ellison is already taking extraordinary steps to please the Trump administration by appointing Trump’s people to key positions in the news division and cancelling another late-night comedian Trump doesn’t like, Stephen Colbert.
Ellison has been very busy lately, buying up major media companies like so much candy. He is soon slated to gain a major stake in TikTok in a deal being put together by the Trump administration with the Chinese government. And according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, he is in the process of trying to buy up Warner Brothers-Discovery, which owns CNN, HBO and many more channels.
Ellison can well afford to throw a lot of money into these ventures. His father, Larry Ellison, is sitting on a fortune valued at 400 billion dollars, making him one of the richest people in the world.
If all these deals go through, Ellison will have assembled an extraordinarily large and wide group of holdings in a very short period of time. According to The New York Times on September 18, these include “a material stake in a powerful social media platform, an iconic Hollywood movie studio and one of the largest content streaming services, as well as two of the country’s largest news organizations.”
In other words, Ellison will have an extraordinary amount of power over what people in the U.S. and all over the world see and hear, simply based on how much wealth he possesses.
Right now, says The New York Times, “Given Ellison’s friendship with, and affinity for, Donald Trump, an increasingly emboldened president could be getting an extraordinarily powerful media ally.” But obviously this alliance between two capitalist snakes is only based on how much they can use and benefit from each other.
As nice as the return of Jimmy Kimmel’s show is, no one should have any illusion that the First Amendment means that there is a protection of freedom of the press for ordinary people. Not in this society, run for the profit of the capitalist class.
“All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake ‘public opinion’ for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.” Those words were written more than a century ago by the Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin.
And they still hold true today.