Is this really what it takes?

Jimmy Kimmel's late night shows was back on the air (at least in most of the country) on Tuesday.  

Last week the Disney Corporation "preempted" (i.e., temporarily cancelled) Kimmel's show after being threatened by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a one time defender of free speech. But after what appears to have been pushback from subscribers looking up how to cancel their Disney and Hulu subscriptions, the company did a one-eighty. 

Two things are now a little clearer. First, corporate bosses seem to have slept through the course on Business Ethics (try BUS 186 - you can register through the Open University).  Just as Sukhinder Sing-Cassidy didn't spot the moral quagmire of putting servers into China just after the Chineses government had jailed a Yahoo subscriber for what they viewed as a "seditious email", Disney's top management team failed to put principle before dollars when Carr threatened to make life difficult.  I know I talk about shareholder value in my course, but I also remind my students that they may have to deal with situations in which doing the right thing may not be in their shareholders (or their own) financial best interests; and they will have to decide whether their principles are more important to them that money.

The second is that what appears to have outraged the American people is not the litany of improper ways in which the neo-authoritarian Trump regime has flouted ethics, principles, tradition, and often the law in its quest for power and vengeance, but when a comedy show is pulled.  One can only conclude that either very few Americans care about ethic, principles, tradition or the rule of law. Or that they simply haven't been paying attention. Either way, that's not a good sign for the future of the country.