TRANSCRIPT OF THEN AND NOW, 9/19/25:
JULIAN ZELIZER:
This week, the media has once again been the center of a political discussion, as Jimmy Kimmel was suspended from his show after making some comments about the response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. So this week, Jon and I thought we’d [offer] another country to think about, and one that is relevant.
In 2000, in Russia, Vladimir Putin was upset about a political satire with puppets called Kolky, which had become a widely-viewed TV show. Kolky parodied political leaders, including him, and he became quite upset. Putin evidently worked with oligarchs to purchase the station, and the station felt the political pressure, and this show went away. So Jon, why was this on your mind as we’re thinking about the Kimmel situation?
JONATHAN ALTER:
Well, first of all, you’ll notice that today I’m wearing an old Colbert Report T-shirt in honor of another of the silenced comedians. I was in Russia in the 1990s covering free and fair presidential elections, where Boris Yeltsin ran against the communists and won. Yeltsin was depicted as a drunk in these puppet shows, and he complained about it, but he basically believed in democracy, and he let it continue. Then when Vladimir Putin came in, in 2000, and they depicted him as [doctor] operating on the bloody body of Russia—using a scalpel and a saw to wreck the body politic—he didn’t respond kindly to that. He pushed these comedians off the air, and eventually used his leverage to [neutralize] all of the various networks and newspapers that might criticize him. He got the oligarchs to do it, and then not too many years later, he started killing journalists.
So I’m not saying that we’re going to have dead journalists, although somebody from MAGA could take a shot at a critic. I think that’s quite possible. But we are otherwise seeing a replay of the Putin playbook. Putin did this to the media, then Orban in Hungary went for the same strategy. It doesn’t unfold all at once. Actually, Trump is doing it faster than Russia and Hungary, but they eventually eliminated free expression in their societies. We are on that road now. We crossed some sort of threshold this week with the Kimmel affair, and we are now living a real authoritarian nightmare, where the Head of State has declared publicly that he wants to shut down any criticism. Russia had no democratic tradition to draw on; we have 250 years of democratic antibodies to help us fight back. But Trump will use his leverage, his talents as an extortionist, to silence not just comedians, but anybody who dares criticize the king.
