Let’s return to Philippines journalist Maria Ressa’s interview with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. In the conversation she quotes a Swedish study that says 72% of the world is now under authoritarian rule and says that many people are voting these governments into power.

We are electing illiberal leaders democratically because of insidious manipulation … it starts with the manipulation and corruption of our public information ecosystem.”

When asked what happens next, she points to her own experiences in the Philippines as a journalist during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte.

We just kept doing our jobs, we kept putting one foot in front of the other.”

The chair of the US media regulator, Brendan Carr, has been doing the media rounds today, after comments he made yesterday were interpreted by some as lighting the fuse that led to Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension from ABC.

In an interview with CNBC, Carr was asked if it was Trump’s view that fellow late night hosts, Seth Myers and Jimmy Fallon should be taken off air. Carr said his goal was to make sure that broadcasters were “serving the public interest”.

We’re in the midst of a massive shift in dynamics in the media ecosystem for lot’s of reasons. Including the permission structure that president Trump’s election has provided. I would simply say we’re not done yet with seeing the consequences of this shift.”

On Wednesday, Carr, the FCC chair who was appointed by Trump, appeared on a rightwing podcast and threatened ABC affiliates’ broadcast licenses if action was not taken against Kimmel.

Maria Ressa has told Jon Stewart “Americans are deer in the head lights,” as she joined him on the Daily Show to discuss the collapse of US institutions and free speech that has accelerated under the Trump administration, particularly in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension by ABC.

If you don’t move and protest the rights you have, you lose them. And it’s so much harder to reclaim them.”

She said “there is a “dictator’s playbook”, comparing the Trump administration’s attacks on alleged Venezuelan drug boats to former president Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal crackdown on drug dealing in the Philippines.

Power is consolidated though “fear, anger and hate,” Ressa says. She goes on to say that social media “spreads lies,” saying that the Philippines was a test ground for the dissemination of misinformation through social media.

Maria Ressa, the journalist and author of How to Stand Up to a Dictator, has told Jon Stewart that the speed in which Donald Trump has “collapsed” America’s institutions has happened much faster than she anticipated.

Ressa, who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her fight for freedom of expression in the Philippines, drew comparisons between the Trump administration and the government of former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte.

She pointed to the targeting of individual justices and attacks on the rule of law. She went on to ask how “rule of law” could exist, without facts, pinning the blame on Silicon Valley tech companies for creating an information environment plagued by misinformation and lies.

Democratic politician Pete Buttigieg has issued an excoriating statement to business leaders, telling them that if they think kowtowing to demands from the president will get the Trump administration off their back, they are wrong.

You need to understand that this is a one way trip. If you play this game, you will have less room to manoeuvre in the future. They didn’t stop with the law firms, they didn’t stop with the universities and they didn’t stop with the comedians. They’re not going to stop until they have total power.

He goes on to characterise the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel as the president “pressuring a corporation that had business before the government to make sure that he was taken off the air.”

Jimmy Fallon has kicked off The Tonight Show with a monologue reacting to Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, his efforts somewhat more subdued than Jon Stewart’s own Daily Show.

After calling Kimmel a “decent, funny and loving guy” who he hopes will come back, Fallon goes on to say that he will cover the president’s trip to the UK just like he normally would. His comments on are then interrupted by an off screen voice over, praising Donald Trump.

Jon Stewart’s Daily Show appearance tonight has been a detailed effort to call out the hypocrisy of Trump officials and conservative commentators.

Highlighting recent clips from Donald Trump Jr and House speaker Mike Johnson criticising their political opponents for calling the president and his movement ‘“fascist”, Stewart then goes on to play a series of videos of Trump himself calling Democrats fascists, Joe Biden an “enemy of the state” and Nancy Pelosi an “animal”.

He then plays a clip of former vice-president Mike Pence saying the first amendment does not protect comedians who say crass or insensitive things.

Saying “only a bad person would celebrate violence or make crass jokes about it” Stewart goes on to air clips of Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and others, all making light of the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband at her San Francisco home in 2022.

Addressing head-on the spectre of censorship looming over US late night talk shows, Jon Stewart has come on air with an over-the-top portrayal of a politically obsequious television host under authoritarian rule.

“Coming to you tonight from … the crime ridden cesspool that is New York City. It is a tremendous disaster like no one’s ever seen before. Someone’s National Guard should invade this place, am I right?” Stewart said.

Stewart fidgeted nervously as though he was worried about speaking the correct talking points. When the audience members reacted with an “awww” he whispered: “What are you doing? Shut up.”

Responding to the repeated statements from Trump supporters that Kimmel was suspended not because he had raised the president’s ire, but because of apparent mis-statements he made about the idealogical leanings of the shooter of Charlie Kirk, Stewart went on to say “people cannot just go on television and mislead viewers with made up crap.”

He then plays a supercut of various clips – mostly from Fox news – of Trump officials and conservative commentators making wildly outrageous claims, that range from “global warming is a hoax”, to a wild statement that the US was spending $50m to send condoms to Gaza.

Jon Stewart has hosted the first edition of The Daily Show since his fellow late-night hosts, Jimmy Kimmel, was suspended by ABC.

Marketing itself as the “all new government approved Daily Show”, Stewart appeared in a studio bedecked by gold trimming, in an apparent nod to the president’s goldening of the Oval office.

Promising a “fun, hilarious and administration-compliant show” Stewart at times seemed to be channelling Ri Chun-hee, North Korea’s famed news anchor, as he talked about America’s dear “father” with his legendary “warmth and radiance”, who is always “perfectly tinted”.

After a recap of Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom, Stewart went on to tackle Kimmel’s suspension, airing a clip of ITV journalist Robert Peston asking Trump on Thursday whether free speech was more under threat in the UK or the US?

Stewart then went on to air clips that provide a refresher on the new “rules of free speech” while showing a two month old social media post from Trump in which the president threatened that Kimmel’s show would be “next” to be axed.

We’ll bring you more from The Daily Show shortly.

Former president Barack Obama has offered more thoughts on this current febrile moment in American discourse, sharing articles written in recent days about freedom of speech.

“This commentary offers a clear, powerful statement of why freedom of speech is at the heart of democracy and must be defended, whether the speaker is Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel, MAGA supporters or MAGA opponents,” Obama said in a post on X.

Among the articles he has shared is a New York Times opinion piece by columnist David French.

We’re starting to understand a bit more about what went on behind the scenes before Jimmy Kimmel’s late night programme was suspended by ABC.

According to Reuters, representatives from ABC-owner Disney and Kimmel raced to find the right words on Wednesday to calm a social media furore that had erupted after his remarks about the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Death threats had led to concerns for the safety of Kimmel and his staff, a source told Reuters, who on to say that the late-night host prepared to make a statement, but Kimmel and Disney representatives could not find language that they agreed.

Disney’s senior leadership reportedly agreed that the best approach would be to take the show off the air and later find a way to bring Kimmel back later, Reuters has said.

Bloomberg has reported that executives are now set to meet with Kimmel to discuss the future of the programme.

Lois Beckett

As calls grew for boycotts against Disney and other companies involved in removing Jimmy Kimmel from the air, an estimated 200 to 300 people protested outside Disney’s headquarters in Burbank on Thursday afternoon. Disney, which owns ABC, “indefinitely” suspended Kimmel’s show on Wednesday night.

“I believe that Disney and ABC are 100% responsible. They gave zero pushback,” Konstantine Anthony, a city council member from Burbank, told the Hollywood Reporter.

Some have attacked Disney and its CEO Bob Iger for what they saw as a swift capitulation to the Trump administration’s demand that they censor a prominent comedian.

A number of people demonstrated outside ABC’s studios in New York, Variety reported, where the crowd chanted “un-American” and “Kimmel must stay, Iger must go”.

“We want Jimmy Kimmel back on the air and we will keep speaking up and putting pressure in any way we can until that happens,” Writers Guild of America West president Meredith Stiehm told the Hollywood Reporter.

A reminder that Jon Stewart will be hosting tonight’s episode of The Daily Show and his guest will be Maria Ressa , the journalist and author of How to Stand Up to a Dictator. Ressa shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her fight for freedom of expression in the Philippines.

Earlier this month she wrote in the Guardian that we are living through an “information armageddon” where truth is being “murdered”.

The greatest threat we face today isn’t any individual leader or government – it’s the technology that’s amplifying authoritarian tactics worldwide, enabled by democratic governments that abdicated their responsibility to protect the public.”

Technology platforms have become weapons of mass destruction to democracy. Their algorithms spread infection.”

‘I’ve always admired and respected Mr Trump,’ Seth Meyers jokes, showering the president who wants him fired with fake praise

Robert Mackey

The NBC late-night host Seth Meyers made light of fears that he might be next in line to be canceled for mocking by pausing at the start of show on Thursday to say that while “his administration is pursuing a crack down on free speech… completely unrelated, I just want to say before we get started here that I’ve always admired and respected Mr Trump.”

As his audience broke into laughter, Meyers continued: “I’ve always believed he was, no, no, so, a visionary, an innovator, a great president, an even better golfer. And if you’ve ever seen me say anything negative about him, that’s just AI.”

He then went on to skewer Trump with his usual relish.

Meyers has been an antagonist of Trump for so long that he was the main act at the 2011 White House Correspondents Association dinner when Barack Obama famously brought the house down with his mockery of Trump, who was in the room.

Meyers focused on Trump for several minutes that night, starting with the observation that “Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke.”

Trump responded to Meyers and Obama at the time on his YouTube video blog, From the Desk of Donald Trump, attacking Meyers as “a third-rate comedian” but claiming, improbably that he was flattered rather than enraged by Obama’s demolition of him.

Obama, he said, “was fine; he was respectful; he was cute… his delivery was great, and we all had a good time.”

“I tapped my wife on the knee,” Trump added. “I said, ‘Melania, do you believe this? Everybody’s talking about me. They’re up there, the president of the United States is talking about me, during this whole thing. I’m having a great time. This is unbelievable.’”

Before he left England on Thursday, Donald Trump found time to repeat his bizarre claim that he had settled a war between two nations that have never been at war: Albania and “Aberbajan”.

The president appeared to be referring, imprecisely, to a White House event last month in which the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a joint declaration of their intention to end decades of fighting over control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway region within Azerbaijan’s borders that was home to ethnic Armenians.

After Azerbaijan seized the region by force in 2023, the two countries agreed to a peace deal in March of this year, but implementation has been slow. To drive the process forward, the US brought the leaders of both to the White House to sign a deal focused on an economic development zone named for Trump.

Trump has continually claimed credit for actually ending the fighting himself, as part of a PR campaign aimed at winning himself the Nobel Peace Prize, but his knowledge of the conflict is so hazy that Thursday was the second time in a week that he mistakenly claimed that Albania, not Armenia, was a belligerent.

Last week, as the late-night host Seth Meyers explained, Trump made the same mistake during a live interview on a Fox morning show.

In his opening monologue on Thursday night, Stephen Colbert mocked Disney executives for caving to threats from FCC chairman Brendan Carr when they pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

In an excerpt posted on Instagram before broadcast, Colbert also scolded Carr for calling Kimmel’s commentary on the rush to politicize Charlie Kirk’s murder an affront to community values. “Well, you know what my community values are, Buster?” Colbert asked. “Freedom of speech.”

“People across the country are shocked by this blatant assault on the freedom of speech,” Colbert added.

During his flight back to Washington on Thursday, Donald Trump expressed surprise that National Public Radio still exists, despite a vote by Congress in July to cease all federal funding for public media, and asked an NPR reporter if her outlet was connected the antifascist activists he described as terrorists earlier in the day.

“Mr. President regarding antifa, what you posted,” an NPR reporter began, in reference to Trump’s late-night social media post promising to designate loosely affiliated antifascist activist groups as “a major terror organization”.

“Who are you with?” Trump asked.

“NPR, sir,” the reporter replied.

“NPR. I heard they were gone,” Trump said, shaking his head in mock amazement. “Are they still here? Oh good, congratulations.”

“Regarding designating them a terrorist organization, when they don’t have defined leadership or membership, how do you target them?” the reporter asked.

“When who doesn’t?” Trump asked.

“Antifa,” the journalist repeated.

“Uhhh, we’re going to find out, right? We’re gonna see. People have been talking about it for a long time. We’re going to see,” Trump said. “Did they have anything to do with your network, antifa?”

“No,” the reporter said.

“OK, well we’re going to find out,” the president said.

Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times, told Axios on Thursday that there is no way for the news organization to settle in court when it is “being sued for libel by the president of the United States”.

Kahn made the comments in a live interview in which he also said, of the $15bn lawsuit:

“I don’t think the president of the United States should be suing media organizations for libel, full stop. I think that’s wrong. But I especially think it’s wrong when he’s wrong on the facts, when he’s wrong about the story, when he misunderstands the protections that the law offers to media organizations under the supreme court’s interpretation of libel law, and I think it’s incumbent on us to fight that to the end.”