Make It Up in Volume

Jimmy Kimmel is a New York Times bestselling author. In 2019, his children’s book The Serious Goose made the list. If you haven’t read it, you’re not missing much. Kimmel didn’t write Goodnight Moon; he dashed off a gag book for charity. Still, Jimmy Kimmel is a New York Times bestselling author. They can’t take that away.

There’s only one way to get to Carnegie Hall (practice), but there are two ways to get on the Times list: content and distribution. Some authors break through because their work is undeniable. More often, though, success is reverse-engineered by people like Kimmel, who can leverage pre-existing platforms. The Times doesn’t distinguish between the two, which means anyone with reach – or the money to buy it – can acquire the same credential, wave it around, and claim that their work too is undeniable.

Kimmel’s cancellation last week hit hard not just because it was a mask-off moment for the Trump administration, but because his show was (and now is again) one of the last distribution-first platforms still working on behalf of content-first creators – one of the few places where the downwardly mobile cultural elite still get distributed gratis to a truly mass audience. By riffing on headlines and offering his couch to people like Steven Pinker and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kimmel amplifies the work of journalists and thinkers to the volume of the paid speech that now dominates distribution platforms. Using Disney’s money, he gives the cultural elite stage time in a public square otherwise dominated by the financial elite¹.

Much of the Kimmel discourse has been about the importance of free speech, but the specifics of what transpired make it clear that this is really a fight about paid speech – that is, distribution. After Kimmel made remarks related to Charlie Kirk’s death, Trump-appointed FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened regulatory action against Disney-owned ABC and its affiliates – fines, license revocation – claiming the comments were “news distortion.” Major ABC affiliate groups Sinclair (right-wing) and Nexstar (waiting on FCC approval for a $6.2B merger) announced they would preempt Kimmel’s program, prompting Disney to put the show on hiatus. Then came protests and a Disney+ boycott. Then Disney CEO Bob Iger¹, a financial elite whose entire rep is rooted in his allegiance to cultural elites (his wife is the chair of USC’s journalism school), decided to bring Kimmel back. (TL;DR: The financial elite stuffed the cultural elite in a locker, but the cultural elite came back out swinging.)

The details are confusing, but the contours of the conflict aren’t new. In a country without an entrenched aristocracy, cultural and financial elites are natural enemies. Cultural elites—journalists, academics, comedians—are often downwardly mobile and status conscious. Financial elites are often upwardly mobile and status conscious. The two groups don’t just fight in the public square, they tussle over the microphone. It’s a high-stakes slap fight. As Rob Henderson pointed out in The Free Press last week: “For the masses to bring down a system, they need an individual or organization capable of solving the coordination problem of uniting large numbers of people toward a shared goal. Impoverished or ‘immiserated’ masses remain largely inert unless they are organized and led by disaffected elites.”

Henderson’s argument is supported by historical evidence – the French Revolution’s lawyer-radicals, the Bolshevik intelligentsia, the American founders – and by the largesse of Bari Weiss, the patron saint of distribution-first publishing. At the height of the Great Awakening in 2020, Weiss left The New York Times and pitched wealthy investors on her platform for heterodox views, particularly criticism of the entrenched elite. Dan Loeb and Peter Thiel’s investor pals staked her, allowing her to build a staff and build out distribution. The Free Press became The Serious Goose of media companies. The knock on it isn’t that it’s bad (it’s often good and many of the critiques are compelling) but that whether it’s bad or good is immaterial because it’s a distribution play.

Rumor has it Skydance wants to buy The Free Press for $200M and integrate it into CBS News. That would be a coup for the publication’s cultural-elite-hating backers, who essentially funded a slightly more mannered version of Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire—one genteel enough to get invited to parties on the UES.

The Daily Wire – millions of YouTube and podcast followers – is what happens when content enjoyed by financial elites doesn’t find a natural audience. Founded by Ben Shapiro in 2015, The Daily Wire promotes the same tired ideas Shapiro flogged in columns for Townhall and Breitbart, with his failed startup TruthRevolt, and in his not-at-all bestselling 2008 book Project President. The big difference: The Daily Wire is financed by fracking billionaire Farris Wilks, who paid for Hollywood producer Jeremy Boreing to give Shapiro a glow-up, build out his studio, and absolutely churn out content. No new ideas. Just lots of new distribution.

Say what you will about Bari Weiss, she’s a talented writer. Ben Shapiro is not. But his new crayon cri de cœur Lions and Scavengers will, like his last book The Authoritarian Moment, be a bestseller on day one thanks to bulk buys by his company and his patrons. He’ll play the public intellectual despite being only one of those things. The Times will do nothing to stop this—other than maybe allowing an underpaid junior reporter on the culture desk to write something catty.

That capitulation is discouraging and unprecedented. In the 1890s, when Hearst and Pulitzer³’s yellow press flooded New York with broadsheet sensationalism, Times Publisher Adolph Ochs introduced a new slogan: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” Today the slogan is read as a promise to publish important work; originally, it was a promise not to distribute nonsense. Arguably, that promise no longer befits the organization, which has spent the last few years doubling down on Wordle, Spelling Bee, and cooking apps.

When the Times stepped back from its role as an arbiter of seriousness, the silly geese stepped forward. Yes, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers are comedians, but they are also cultural elites operating in the role traditionally occupied by the cultural elite: determining what is fit to print. You can bulk-buy your way onto the bestseller list, put paid spend behind an Instagram post, or launch an influencer campaign on TikTok, but you can’t buy a mention in a Jimmy Kimmel monologue. This is why late night hosts have become political targets. Sure, they mock Trump. But, perhaps more saliently, they defy a financial elite eager to suck the media – all those creatives⁴, all those opinions – out of the business. Disney may not want to side with Kimmel and be a bulwark against that assault on cultural institutions, but that turns out to be, at the end of the day, the right business decision. Disney is a content-first business. The biggest if not the best.

Can Kimmel and Iger stave off what’s coming? No. They can protect their I.P., but they can’t shout back the sea. What happens next – what has already happened – is a great conflation. Capital and culture become indistinguishable. The choice ceases to be what we look at, but whether or not we look away.

That’s what a serious goose would do.

[2] One of the reasons the sacking and unsacking of Kimmel has been so interesting is that Bob Iger is neither stupid nor devoid of integrity. Decisions made at the top of large orgs are complicated because human consequences can legitimately outweigh moral good. Iger knows stuff – both about his company and the direction of this country. He is behaving accordingly.

[3] Wondering if you can use money to buy a reputation? Consider the life and afterlife of Joseph Pulitzer, a man who had an ummmmm complicated relationship with the truth.

[4] It’s likely Iger decided to bring Kimmel back because he was worried about Disney’s relationships with talent. The weird thing about that is that the value of those relationships isn’t solely the creative output of talent, but talents’ role in distribution, which is considerable. The funny thing about distribution in a social media age is that if you have distribution, you end up accidentally providing other people with distribution and maybe they don’t agree with you about some stuff.