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      Trump news at a glance: president says he hopes ‘there will be others’ after Comey indictment

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      Donald Trump has denied the indictment of former FBI director James Comey is part of a campaign of retribution against his political opponents.The US president told reporters on Friday: “It’s about justice, it’s not about revenge. He didn’t think he’d be caught, and he got caught,” Trump said, referring to the former FBI director he fired in 2017. “He lied. He lied a lot,” the president claimed.Trump also said he hoped “there will be others” who were prosecuted.Comey, a former Republican appointed to lead the bureau by Barack Obama and kept on by Trump until he fired him in 2017, was indicted on Thursday on charges related to allegedly lying to Congress five years ago during a hearing on the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US election.‘Dangerous abuse of power’: lawmakers sound alarm over Comey indictmentThe indictment is the latest sign that the president is making good on his promise “to turn our justice system into a weapon for punishing and silencing his critics”, said Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.Democratic senator Adam Schiff, a former federal prosecutor who played a lead role in Trump’s first impeachment, said on X he had “never witnessed such a blatant abuse” of the justice department, calling it “little more than an arm of the president’s retribution campaign”.Read the full storyMusk among names in latest Epstein cache releasedDemocratic lawmakers on Friday released documents from the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein that may show interactions between the disgraced financier and prominent conservatives including Elon Musk, Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel.Read the full storyIce officer ‘relieved of duties’ after manhandling woman A federal officer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has been “relieved of his duties” after a video showing him pushing a woman to the floor at an immigration court in New York City spread quickly on social media.Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, sent a statement to the Guardian saying the officer’s actions were “unacceptable and beneath the men and women of Ice”. “This officer is being relieved of current duties as we conduct a full investigation,” she added.Read the full storyImmigrants without criminal records now largest group in Ice detentionImmigrants who have no criminal record are now the largest group in US immigration detention, according to data released by the government. The number of people with no criminal history arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detained by the Trump administration has now surpassed the number of those charged with crimes.According to the official data, 16,523 people in immigration detention with no criminal record were arrested by Ice, compared to 15,725 who do have a criminal record and 13,767 with pending criminal charges.Separately, the superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district was detained by Ice agents on Friday, prompting shock among fellow educators.Read the full storyUS refuses to support UN health declaration on noncommunicable diseasesA new vision for tackling the global noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) crisis has failed to reach consensus at the UN after the US refused to give its support, forcing member states to a vote.After months of negotiations, the fourth political declaration on NCDs and mental health received overwhelming backing from governments at the UN general assembly on Thursday, but was rejected by the US during a speech by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary.Read the full storyRepublican lawmaker makes post calling for execution of Democratic congresswomanAn Arizona Republican state representative who has expressed support for January 6 insurrectionists called on Wednesday for a Democratic congresswoman to be executed, as a response to a video clip.Read the full storyAbu Dhabi royal family to take stake in TikTok US under Trump dealThe Abu Dhabi royal family is to take a stake in TikTok’s US business after Donald Trump signed an executive order brokering a deal valuing the social media company at $14bn. MGX, a fund chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, will take a 15% stake and gain a board seat when TikTok US is spun out.Read the full storyTrump jokingly asked Rolex executives if tariffs prompted US Open invite, CEO saysDonald Trump asked Rolex executives if he would have been invited to watch this month’s US Open final from the luxury watchmaker’s VIP box had he imposed steep tariffs on Swiss exports weeks earlier.The US president’s remarks were made “in jest”, stressed Jean-Frederic Dufour, the Rolex CEO, in a letter to Elizabeth Warren, the US senator who had raised questions about the decision to invite Trump – including whether the conglomerate was seeking to “curry favor” with the administration.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The mass shooter who suspected he had CTE when he killed four people and himself in a Manhattan office building in July did in fact have the degenerative brain disease, the New York City medical examiner said on Friday.

      Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to “finish the job” in Gaza and said the recognition of a Palestinian state was “insane” as delegations walked out of his address to the UN.

      Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that 20 US soldiers who took part in the 1890 massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee will keep the Medals of Honor that were awarded to them.

      The supreme court extended an order that allows Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5bn in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.

      Fewer than one in three teenagers with opioid use disorder receive treatment, according to a study published in this month’s Health Affairs journal that looked at the disorder in minors from 2022 to 2023. Drug overdoses are now among the leading causes of death for US teenagers.

      Scores of Ryder Cup fans were denied glimpses of the opening tee shots at Bethpage Black due to stringent security measures put in place before the arrival of Trump.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened 25 September 2025. More

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      Elon Musk and Peter Thiel mentioned in Epstein documents released by Democrats

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      Democratic lawmakers on Friday released documents from the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein that may show interactions between the disgraced financier and prominent conservatives, including Elon Musk, Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel.The six pages of documents made public with redactions come from a batch provided by the justice department to the House oversight committee, which is investigating how the sex-trafficking charges against Epstein, who died in 2019 in federal custody, were handled.Copies of Epstein’s calendar released by the committee’s Democratic minority show a breakfast planned with Bannon, an influential Donald Trump ally, in February 2019. Other schedules mention a lunch with Thiel in November 2017 and a potential trip by Musk to Epstein’s private island in December 2014.A manifest from 2000 for Epstein’s plane includes Prince Andrew, whose relationship with Epstein is well documented, while a financial disclosure the Democrats released shows Epstein paying someone listed as “Andrew” for “Massage, Exercise, Yoga” that same year.Earlier this year, Musk accused Trump of being in the so-called “Epstein files” on social media after the tech mogul criticized Trump’s tax and spending legislation.Then in July, Musk publicly said: “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?”Pointing to the significance of the latest records’ release, Sara Guerrero, a spokesperson for the oversight committee, said: “It should be clear to every American that Jeffrey Epstein was friends with some of the most powerful and wealthiest men in the world. Every new document produced provides new information as we work to bring justice for the survivors and victims.”Meanwhile, Eric Swalwell, a Democratic representative of California, wrote on X following the records’ release, saying: “Trump OUTS @elonmusk as being in Epstein Files. Revenge for Elon outing Trump? Elon, what do you know about Trump’s involvement?”In response to the latest release, the Republican-led committee took to X and accused Democrats of selectively deciding which records to publicize.“This is old news. It’s sad how Democrats are conveniently withholding documents that contain the names of Democratic officials. Once again they are putting politics over victims. That’s all Robert Garcia and Oversight Dems know how to do. We are releasing them all soon,” the statement said, referring to Robert Garcia, the committee’s ranking member.Garcia, a Democrat of California, pushed back on X, writing in a separate statement: “We don’t care how wealthy or powerful you are – or if you are a Democrat or Republican. If you are in the Epstein documents and files we are going to expose it, and bring justice for the survivors. Release ALL THE FILES NOW!”The documents are the latest in the saga over the government’s handling of the Epstein case.In the House, Democrats have joined with a small group of Republicans on a petition that will force a vote on legislation to compel the release of the Epstein files. The push needs 218 signatures to succeed, which it is expected to soon get after Democrat Adelita Grijalva this week won a special election to an Arizona seat that became vacant when her father died.However, any legislation that passes the House will also need approval by the Senate, whose Republican leaders have shown little interest in the issue. Trump, who has called the furor over Epstein a “Democrat hoax” would also need to sign the bill.The Guardian has requested comment from Musk and Thiel.

      This article was amended on 26 September 2025. The seat won by Adelita Grijalva is in Arizona, not New Mexico, as we originally said. More

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      Hegseth says Wounded Knee massacre soldiers will keep Medals of Honor

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      Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that 20 US soldiers who took part in the 1890 massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee will keep the Medals of Honor that were awarded to them.The move is the latest in a number of contentious actions taken by the Trump administration to reinterpret US history.The long debate over the events at Wounded Knee includes a dispute over its characterization as a “battle” given that, according to historical records, the US army killed about 250 Lakota Sioux people – many of whom were unarmed women and children – despite fighters in the camp having surrendered.“We’re making it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals,” Hegseth said, announcing the move in a video on social media on Thursday. Calling the men “brave soldiers”, he said a review panel had concluded in a report that the medals were justly awarded. “This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.”Hegseth’s Democratic predecessor at the Pentagon, former defense secretary Lloyd Austin, ordered the review of the honors in 2024 after Congress called for it in the 2022 defense bill. Announcing the review, the Pentagon said Austin wanted to “ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor”.But in Thursday’s video, Hegseth – who has a history of Christian nationalist sympathies – said his predecessor had been “more interested in being politically correct than historically correct”. It is unclear if the report will be made public.Hegseth’s move also halts a push from Democratic lawmakers to revoke medals tied to the massacre at a camp on what is now the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. For Native Americans, the massacre marked a devastating climax to the tragedy of Indigenous removals from their land.“We cannot be a country that celebrates and rewards horrifying acts of violence against Native people,” senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement earlier this year after reintroducing the proposed Remove the Stain Act.After the massacre, 19 soldiers from the seventh cavalry were awarded the Medal of Honor for their “bravery” and “gallantry” over actions ranging from rescuing fellow troops to efforts to “dislodge Sioux Indians” hiding in a ravine.Native Americans have long pushed for revocation of the medals. As time has gone on, the isolated site has become a place of mourning for many tribes, symbolizing the genocidal history of brutality and repression they have suffered at the hands of the US government. While Congress issued a formal apology in 1990 to the descendants of the massacre, the medals were left in place and no reparations offered.Thursday’s announcement is the latest move to sanitize the nation’s history taken by the Trump administration since Donald Trump signed an executive order in March titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”.In recent months, Hegseth has reverted the names of several US army bases back to Confederate-linked names, monuments to the Confederacy and Confederate figures have been restored, and he renamed a US navy ship that honored gay rights activist Harvey Milk.The Trump administration has also gone after cultural institutions like Smithsonian museums for exhibits it considers “unpatriotic”, purged and rewritten federal webpages related to topics including slavery, diversity and discrimination (some of which were later restored), and cut funding to grants to institutions that honor the lives of enslaved people.Some historians took to social media to denounce the administration’s latest move.“Only an administration intent on committing war crimes in the present and future would stoop to calling Wounded Knee a ‘battle’ rather than what it truly was,” Columbia University history professor Karl Jacoby posted on Bluesky.Jacoby added: “Fortunately, history does not work as Hegseth seems to believe. It is never “settled” and the government cannot (at least for now!) impose its interpretation of events on the rest of us.” More

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      US supreme court allows Trump to withhold nearly $5bn in foreign aid

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      The supreme court on Friday extended an order that allows Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5bn in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.The court acted on the Republican administration’s emergency appeal in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.The justice department sought the supreme court’s intervention after US district judge Amir Ali ruled that Trump’s action was likely illegal and that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.The federal appeals court in Washington declined to put Ali’s ruling on hold, but John Roberts, the chief justice, temporarily blocked it on 9 September. The full court indefinitely extended Roberts’ order.The court has previously cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip legal protections from hundreds of thousands of migrants, fire thousands of federal employees, oust transgender members of the military and remove the heads of independent government agencies.The legal victories, while not final rulings, all have come through emergency appeals, used sparingly under previous presidencies, to fast-track cases to the supreme court, where decisions are often handed down with no explanation.Trump told House speaker Mike Johnson in a 28 August letter that he would not spend $4.9bn in congressionally approved foreign aid, effectively cutting the budget without going through the legislative branch.He used what’s known as a pocket rescission. That’s a rarely used maneuver when a president submits a request to Congress toward the end of a current budget year to not spend the approved money. The late notice essentially flips the script. Under federal law,Congress has to approve the rescission within 45 days or the money must be spent. But the budget year will end before the 45-day window closes, and in this situation the White House is asserting that congressional inaction allows it to not spend the money.The Trump administration has made deep reductions to foreign aid one of its hallmark policies, despite the relatively meager savings relative to the deficit and possible damage to America’s reputation abroad as people lose access to food supplies and development programs.Justice department lawyers told a federal judge last month that another $6.5bn in aid that had been subject to the freeze would be spent before the end of the fiscal year next Tuesday. More

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      ‘Dangerous abuse of power’: lawmakers sound alarm over Comey indictment

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      For Donald Trump, the indictment of former FBI director and longtime foe James Comey was,“justice in America”. Legal observers and lawmakers see something far more troubling.A former Republican appointed to lead the bureau by Barack Obama and kept on by Trump until he fired him in 2017, Comey was indicted Thursday on charges related to allegedly lying to Congress five years ago during a hearing on the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.The charges were filed in the eastern district of Virginia only after Erik Siebert was forced out as US attorney for reportedly finding no grounds to indict Comey. The justice department replaced him with a Trump loyalist with little prosecutorial experience, Lindsey Halligan, and shortly after, a grand jury indicted Comey on one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding.The indictment is the latest sign that the president is making good on his promise “to turn our justice system into a weapon for punishing and silencing his critics”, said Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.“This kind of interference is a dangerous abuse of power. Our system depends on prosecutors making decisions based on evidence and the law, not on the personal grudges of a politician determined to settle scores,” Warner said.Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator and a former federal prosecutor who played a lead role in Trump’s first impeachment, said on X he had “never witnessed such a blatant abuse of the” justice department, calling it “little more than an arm of the president’s retribution campaign”.In a letter to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee described Siebert’s firing and Comey’s indictment as “the latest steps in President Trump’s efforts to reshape the nation’s leading law enforcement agency into a weapon focused on punishing his enemies”.Top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries said it was “crazy to me” that Trump was pursuing a “malicious prosecution” against Comey, given that the FBI chief’s public revival of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email use days before the 2016 election is seen as playing a role in Trump’s victory.“These charges are going to be dismissed. James Comey will win in court. But what it reflects is a broader attack on the rule of law that should frighten every single American, whether you’re a Democrat, an independent or a Republican,” he said at the Capitol.Mike Zamore, national director of policy and government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union, said Trump “has yet again proven his disdain for the principles that have actually made America great”.“By undermining the rule of law at each and every turn, threatening individuals who speak out against him, and arresting, investigating, and prosecuting elected officials of the opposition party and others who displease him, the president and his administration have corrupted our system of justice to turn his campaign of retribution into reality,” he said, adding that Trump’s public push to indict Comey amounts to “a grotesque abuse of presidential power”.Eric Swalwell, the Democratic congressman and member of the House judiciary committee, told CNN: “I promise you, when Democrats are in the majority, we are going to look at all of this, and there will be accountability, and bar licenses will be at stake in your local jurisdiction if you are corruptly indicting people where you cannot prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt on.”Norm Eisen, executive chair of pro-democracy group Democracy Defenders Fund, warned the indictment puts “the safety of every American and our national security itself in danger. This indictment has all the hallmarks of a vindictive and meritless prosecution, worthy only of the totalitarian states the United States used to oppose”.“This matters far beyond James Comey. It’s about every citizen’s right to live free from persecution by their own leaders. Criticizing our leaders is a fundamental right, regardless of how much our leaders don’t like it,” he said.Trump has spent the hours since Comey’s indictment was announced insulting him on Truth Social, calling him “One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to” on Thursday night and “A DIRTY COP” on Friday morning.His allies have taken up his argument, if not his tone.“Comey demonstrated complete arrogance and unwillingness to comply with the law,” said Ted Cruz, the Republican senator whose exchange with the former FBI director at a 2020 hearing is the subject of the allegations.Chuck Grassley, the Republican chair of the Senate judiciary committee, said: “If the facts and the evidence support the finding that Comey lied to Congress and obstructed our work, he ought to be held accountable.”“Say it with me, Democrats: nobody is above the law,” said Mike Davis, a prominent Trump legal defender, echoing a phrase often used by Democrats when Trump and his allies were facing prosecutions before his election victory last year.“We are just getting started today with this indictment,” Davis said. “It’s going to get much worse for the Democrats.” More

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      Rare orange lobster found in New York supermarket returned to sea

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      A rare orange lobster was released back into the wild this week after being spotted by an enthusiast at a local grocery store.The lobster, swiftly nicknamed Jean-Clawed Van Damme, is a one-in-30m catch, according to Humane Long Island, a wildlife rescue group, and the New York Aquarium, who aided in releasing it.Given that seeing an orange lobster typically means it is dead and boiled and on a plate, shopper Kyle Brancato did a double take when he spotted the lobster moving among the others for sale at a Tops grocery store in upstate New York.“I walked by the lobster tank, and I saw this bright orange lobster,” Brancato told WHAM, a local CNN affiliate. “Very different from all the other ones in the tank.”He suspected other shoppers mistook the lobster as diseased and passed it by.View image in fullscreenBrancato decided to buy it, with the hopes of ultimately freeing it, but without much experience in crustacean care he improvised at first.“I borrowed some tank water from Palmer’s, down the road,” said Brancato, referring to a local restaurant. “That bought me enough time to go to [pet supply store] Petco and pick up a 20-gallon tank, and I got 20 gallons of sea water that they sell in the store in boxes. And I emptied it into the tank, and cooled it down to the proper temperature.”The lobster was released into the open waters of the Long Island Sound on Wednesday, just a day before National Lobster Day, which marks the peak of the annual US lobster harvesting season.Amid seasonal special offers from eateries, thousands more lobsters than usual suffered a different fate from their wild orange cousin and ended up boiled, buttered, and eaten.In 2021 an orange lobster was rescued in Ontario by a Canadian couple, after being held captive in a grocery store tank, where it had languished for weeks after being shunned by shoppers because of its rare hue and was apparently being picked on by the other lobsters. That one ended up in an aquarium. More

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      Trump has called the US postal service ‘a joke’. But don’t expect Amazon to replace it | Niamh Rowe

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      In towns where Washington DC is an abstraction, the post office is the front desk of American democracy – sometimes the only public space at all. Here, postmasters are “the human side of government”, as the senator Jennings Randolph put it in 1976. “When such offices are closed,” he warned, “the American flag really comes down.”Championed by Benjamin Franklin in 1775, the roots of the US postal service – whose mandate is to “bind the nation together” – are older than the republic itself. The constitution calls for “post offices and post roads”. The USPS is still legally obligated to provide a “basic and fundamental” service to all Americans. In Scottsbluff, Nebraska, a rural carrier drives more than 700 miles a year to serve just two households.But after years in the red – and amid open hostility from the Trump administration – its future looks uncertain.The USPS has lost about $114bn since 2007, according to financial reports, amid declining letter volume, competition from private carriers and rising employee costs. Meanwhile, the specter of privatization looms larger than ever.“The postal service is a joke,” Donald Trump told reporters in 2020. A reform plan during his previous administration called for restructuring it “to return it to a sustainable business model or prepare it for future conversion from a Government agency into a privately-held corporation”.Given this historical scorn, it was no surprise when reports broke in February that Trump was considering dissolving the agency’s leadership and absorbing it into the Department of Commerce.“The fate of the USPS is no longer financial or managerial, but political,” James O’Rourke, a professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, recently told me. “Putting the post office up for an IPO would not be much of a stretch in the current climate. The checks and balances are gone.”Indeed, a Wells Fargo memo to investors titled “USPS Privatization: A Framework” was leaked last month. It reads: “Parcel could be carved out and sold or IPOed.” The plan predicts parcel prices would increase 30%–140% across product lines and proposes a post office sell-off so that “value can be harvested” from the real estate.Yet if the parcel segment were “carved out”, not all of the carcass would bear meat. Investors will seize only the parts they can further monetize, O’Rourke says. That would mean closing small-town post offices and ending home delivery on unprofitable routes.Think of the mule train that descends into Havasupai territory in the Grand Canyon; the small aircraft and seasonal boats that serve Little Diomede, Alaska, where residents can see Russia from their windows; or Point Roberts, Washington, where mail crosses Canada to reach a US town. If universal service falters, those addresses are likely to be abandoned first.People in affected zip codes – already more likely to be lower income – will have to travel to pick up parcels or pay steep delivery costs. “Those people will do with less or do without,” O’Rourke says.But the cost of losing universal service would be more than financial. Vote-by-mail and absentee ballots are particularly critical in rural areas with distant polling stations, and the USPS ensures those ballots reach voters. It also handles 1.2bn prescription-drug shipments each year, as of 2020, according to the National Association of Letter Carriers union. In places with no nearby banks, the post office may be the only location where residents can pay bills.Rural postal workers also fulfill a civic role that transcends transporting mail. A study of village postmasters from the 1970s illustrates how closely woven they can become into civic life: “People going out of town commonly leave their house keys with the postmaster … residents leave notes with the postmaster for friends to retrieve later in the day.”While the advent of the internet renders that depiction somewhat antiquated, its essence remains true. “Rural carriers are still the fabric that knits some communities together,” Don Maston, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, told me. In some towns, carriers may be the only contact residents have with the outside world – and thus a lifeline, he added. Carriers still carry out “wellness checks” if a resident fails to collect their mail.Mark Jamison spent 15 years as a postmaster in a remote office in the mountains of North Carolina, where he was the town’s only government worker. Many residents were not literate, so he assisted with written tasks. Older residents would stop by the post office on their way home so he could open their jars. He assembled bicycles at Christmas. Locals referred to him as the “bartender”, because people came in with stories to tell and advice to seek.“There are still postal employees who do that,” Jamison said.While the USPS has staved off a formal sell-off so far under the current administration, its universal service is already being eroded in de facto terms. This year, its 10-year “Delivering for America” modernization plan kicks off in a bid to save at least $36 billion. The plan will slow service for about three-quarters of the country’s zip codes, according to the advocacy group Save the Post Office, with rural areas bearing the brunt. The Postal Regulatory Commission voiced opposition to the plan in January, noting it was “very concerned” about how it would disadvantage rural communities.Louis DeJoy, the former US postmaster general, announced a plan in March to cut 10,000 USPS jobs. Amid reports Trump urged the USPS board of governors to appoint FedEx board member David P Steiner as postmaster general, Brian Renfroe, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, alleged a “hostile takeover” of the postal service. (Steiner, who took the job in July, has said he does not believe the USPS should be privatized and that he believes “in the current structure of the postal service as a self-financing, independent entity of the executive branch”.)At the same time, Amazon Logistics is on track to surpass the USPS as the nation’s largest parcel carrier by volume. The company is also speeding up in rural America, as AI-driven efficiencies make more routes economically viable. In April, it announced a $4bn investment to expand its rural “last-mile” network – tripling its size by the end of next year and reaching 13,000 more rural zip codes.This will be welcome news to those households. But Amazon drivers can’t go the extra mile. They lack the civic responsibilities of government workers, and their routes fluctuate algorithmically, meaning it’s harder to build community ties.What’s more, Amazon’s last-mile network will expand only as long as it’s profitable to do so. “I don’t see it going into the mule train business, right?” said Christopher W Shaw, author of First Class: The US Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat. An Amazon driver will never sing the USPS’s unofficial motto: “Every piece, every address, every day.” Without a legal mandate, why would they?As one Minnesota town-hall clerk put it in the 1970s: “The post office is like drinking water. You don’t appreciate it till you don’t have it.”

      Niamh Rowe is a New York-based writer and podcast producer More

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      Kimmel controversy highlights ‘wildly dangerous’ consolidation of TV broadcasting

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      If the controversy behind Jimmy Kimmel’s show is a series of dominoes that fell one after the other, from the late-night host making his comments on Charlie Kirk’s killing to ABC halting production of his show, the first domino arguably fell this summer.Months before Kimmel was briefly pulled off the air, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) quietly announced it was seeking to make a major change to broadcasting rules.The change would primarily affect three companies that own more local TV stations than any other company: Sinclair Broadcasting, Nexstar Media Group and Gray Television Inc. All three companies own the maximum number of local TV stations that is legally permitted for a single company to own.That national cap is set by FCC rules and says a single company can’t reach more than 39% of the total national television audience.In June, the FCC announced that it was seeking public comment to raise the cap, which would allow the companies to acquire more local TV stations. In a filing to the FCC, media watchdog Free Press said that changing the national cap would be “wildly dangerous”.“Handing even more media control to a handful of conglomerates and billionaires already so dominant in the space is a wildly dangerous idea, no matter who holds the presidency,” the group said.But by August, Nexstar announced its intention to acquire its broadcast rival Tegna for $6.2bn.“The initiatives being pursued by the Trump administration offer local broadcasters the opportunity to expand reach, level the playing field, and compete more effectively with the big tech and legacy big media companies that have unchecked reach and vast financial resources,” Nexstar’s chief executive officer, Perry Sook, said at the time.Nexstar – already the largest operator of local television stations – oversees more than 200 owned and partner stations in 116 markets across the US. Tegna owns 64 news stations across 51 markets. The deal would be illegal under current FCC rules, as it would put Nexstar over the national cap.Immediately after Kimmel was taken off the air, multiple reports have noted that Donald Trump’s appointed FCC chair, Brendan Carr, blatantly threatened the companies that air Kimmel’s show.“When you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said on a podcast. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”Media experts called the move unprecedented.“The FCC is explicitly threatening companies that, if they don’t change their content in some way, they would suffer regulatory consequences,” said Gregory J Martin, a political economy professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who has researched the effect that media conglomeration has had on local TV news. “That just didn’t really happen before.”Soon after, Nexstar announced it would preempt Kimmel’s show. As a local TV station conglomerate, Nexstar partners with the “big four” networks – ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC – to run their content on its stations. This is where the term “affiliate” comes from. If a station is, for example, an ABC affiliate, that means that the TV station owner has partnered with ABC to run shows like Kimmel’s.That’s why Nexstar’s announcement was such a big deal. When it comes to Kimmel being broadcast on TV, ABC relies on these local TV station owners to get him on the air.After Nexstar’s announcement, ABC announced that it was indefinitely halting the production of Kimmel’s show.The backlash that ensued led to ABC announcing it would continue producing Kimmel’s show. But Nexstar and its competitor, Sinclair Broadcasting, both said they will continue to preempt the show, meaning 25% of TV viewers won’t be getting Kimmel’s show on TV.“Nexstar is continuing to evaluate the status of Jimmy Kimmel Live! on our ABC-affiliated local television stations, and the show will be preempted while we do so,” Nexstar said in a statement. “We are engaged in productive discussion with executives at the Walt Disney Company, with a focus on ensuring the program reflects and respects the diverse interests of the communities we serve.”To media watchdogs, the conflict highlights the size of the media conglomerates such as Nexstar, which critics argue have become too large and too powerful.“This has been a problem at the FCC for quite some time. We’ve been concerned for decades about what happens when you allow media companies to become too consolidated and too influential,” said Timothy Karr, the senior director of strategy and communications at Free Press.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They become beholden to political power because they have so many entanglements with government agencies regarding merger approvals [and] policy changes that they … soft-pedal their reporting when it comes to criticism of those in power,” he added.Historians often point to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which dramatically relaxed regulations limiting the number of TV and radio stations a single company could own. The law set the stage for media companies such as Nexstar and Sinclair to exist and own a massive number of local TV stations.Over the past few years, political experts have expressed concern that this consolidation has been negatively affecting the quality of local television news. Though the number of local TV news viewers has been declining, millions of Americans still rely on their local TV news. And the funding for these local TV broadcasts comes from the station owners such as Sinclair and Nexstar.The Kimmel affair is not the first time that the station owners have shown their political colors. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Sinclair directed its local news anchors to read identical scripts criticizing “fake” news stories and “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country”.Trump defended the decision: “So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased. Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke,” he wrote on what was then Twitter.When criticizing Kimmel, Carr said that the FCC has to ensure that broadcasters who are using public airwaves are operating in the “public interest”. Martin said that, typically, the “public interest” requirement refers to producing local TV news shows.“That’s how they satisfy their public obligation, by providing informative news shows. It’s never been on the table that they could be interpreted to mean they have to not criticize the president,” he said. “That’s a big, important change in how the FCC operates.”Karr, of Free Press, said that the media watchdog has made it clear, in a filing to the FCC, that the regulator would need congressional approval to change the national reach cap.“We need to be watching the FCC very carefully over the next couple of weeks to see how far Carr will go in removing this huge hurdle to the merger,” he said.The New York Post reported this week that there is also growing criticism of the Nexstar/Tegna deal from conservatives concerned that the Kimmel suspension is “nothing more than a ruse to convince the White House its programming is watchful of leftwing bias” in order to convince the FCC to pass a deal that will hand the media group too much power.When he went back on air on Tuesday, Kimmel took a direct jab at Carr in his monologue, which has now received over 20m views on YouTube. Kimmel quoted the threats Carr made to broadcast networks over his show and said it is “a direct violation of the first amendment [and] not a particularly intelligent threat to make in public”.“You almost have to feel sorry for him,” Kimmel said. “He did his best to cancel me. Instead, he forced millions of people to watch the show.” More