Comment by fleahunter

People keep treating this like "Trump vs comedians" culture war drama, but the interesting part is the FCC chair casually wandering into it like a party whip.

Once a regulator starts signaling, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way," every media company hears the real message: your license, your merger, your regulatory friction all depend on how much you annoy the people holding the pen. You don't even need explicit orders. A few public threats, a few well-timed approvals or delays, and suddenly "purely financial decisions" just happen to line up with political preferences.

This is soft censorship as a service: you outsource the actual silencing to risk-averse corporations who are already wired to overreact to anything that might jeopardize a multibillion dollar deal. The scary part isn't that a president wants a comedian fired, that's boringly normal. The scary part is when independent agencies stop pretending they're independent and start acting like they report to the comments section on Truth Social.