Another week, another late night show host gone: first Stephen Colbert, now Jimmy Kimmel. I think it’s fair to be shocked, but not surprised by Kimmel’s dismissal. As Professor Fara Dabhoiwala told me, there’s long been “blatant hypocrisy” on the part of powerful, “supposed free speech champions.” In fact, the very notion of free speech as we know it today was created by self-serving scoundrels. He advises a more balanced approach to ideas of free speech, even if, in our current, fraying democracy, our problems go “well beyond” free speech alone.
Professor Dabhoiwala is a Senior Research Scholar at Princeton and writes about social, cultural, and intellectual history from the Middle Ages to the present. He previously taught at Oxford and has made radio and TV for the BBC and other channels. His writing appears in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and The Shanghai Review of Books, among other places. Most recently, he’s the author of What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.
We recorded our interview before ABC pulled Kimmel’s show. I asked Professor Dabhoiwala for his thoughts after the news broke, which he kindly shared, and you’ll see those reflections italicized and woven into our conversation.
As for me, I’ll have more takes on the shifting media landscape. It’s clearly a precarious time to be a late night host on TV. It is, however, still a good time to be doing live comedy about history, and the theater where I perform asked me to do another run of Part One of my series on The Power Broker on Saturday, 10/4 at 4 PM. I hope to see some of you there. Thank you all for supporting history and laughter during these uncertain times!
