Disney, in the end, did the right thing. That's the big news today. And it is a clear victory for free speech.

Last week, Disney abruptly yanked Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show off the airwaves, after being pressured to do so (for purely political reasons) by the head of the Federal Communications Commission. Today, Disney apparently saw the error of their ways and announced that Kimmel will return tomorrow night.

This is good news for anyone who cares about the First Amendment and free speech. Because government officials should never be able to stifle free speech just because they don't like the politics of the speaker -- which is exactly what happened last week. That is just not supposed to happen in America, period.

Today, the Walt Disney Company issued a short statement on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that still left some questions unanswered:

Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.

Tomorrow night, Kimmel will most likely make some sort of apology and also some sort of statement about the limits of his political satire going forward. That's what I would expect, at any rate.

But throughout all of this, there has been very little discussion of the dynamics which allowed this to happen, though. There used to be laws prohibiting consolidation of media ownership in America, because the politicians (quite rightly) feared the nation's airwaves being owned by a mere handful of companies.

ABC (which is owned by Disney) is a broadcast network. It doesn't own television stations, it provides content for television stations. Individual stations are owned by other entities than the network, as "affiliates" of the network. This is a similar model to the one used by the fast food and automobile industries. In those, "franchises" or "dealerships" are independently owned, but also aligned with the big provider of their products.

Back in the 1950s, Congress passed a law regulating media ownership. It limited any one person or business from owning more than seven television stations, seven AM radio stations, and seven FM radio stations, in the entire country. This "7-7-7 Rule" meant that no one company or person could grow into a nationwide conglomerate and control too much of the public airwaves.

That rule was relaxed under Ronald Reagan to allow ownership of up to 12 of each type of media (it became the "12-12-12 Rule"). Then in the 1990s, under Bill Clinton, the rule was essentially thrown out the window.

This has allowed corporate behemoths to buy up radio stations and television stations by the hundreds. We have gone from ownership of such stations being severely limited (with hundreds of individual companies owning up to seven affiliates each) to a relative handful of giant corporations who own hundreds of stations each. Which is exactly the situation the politicians back in the 1950s were so worried about.

There are still limits, but they are nowhere near as strict as the earlier ones. And they could be about to get a whole lot less strict, too. Right now, no company can own television stations that collectively reach more than 39 percent of the American population.

This gets back to the situation with Kimmel. The F.C.C. doesn't actually license broadcast networks, since they don't actually own any of the television stations. They issue broadcast licenses to each individual station instead. Last week, the head of the F.C.C. made it clear that the corporations which own the affiliates should be the ones pressuring Disney to take Kimmel off the air. Within hours, two of the biggest owners of ABC franchises, Sinclair and Nexstar, both publicly called for Kimmel to be yanked off the air. Disney executives reportedly didn't consider what Kimmel said last week to be all that offensive, but they caved to the pressure from the big affiliate owners. By 11:35 that night, Kimmel was off the airwaves.

As many have noted, Nexstar is in the midst of a merger it wants the F.C.C. to approve. Since it already owns stations which broadcast to 39 percent of the public, it is trying to convince the F.C.C. to essentially get rid of that limitation. If the merger is allowed to go through, Nexstar will reportedly then own stations that reach a whopping 80 percent of all Americans.

That is an incredible amount of power for one entity to control. As you can see by the whole Kimmel episode, the abuse of this power means that the networks would essentially no longer have editorial control over their own shows. They would have to dance to the affiliates' tune.

Of course, the affiliates have always held this ultimate power, even from the start. Any one station's owner can object to a network show, and either refuse to broadcast a single episode of it or yank it from their lineup altogether. But this power was diffuse, spread out over hundreds of individual station owners. Consolidation of the affiliates has meant that only a handful of companies now make these decisions, instead of hundreds of them.

ABC's announcement did not address the question of whether Sinclair and Nexstar will agree to continue airing Jimmy Kimmel Live! or not. Will Kimmel offer up an apology that will be good enough? Nobody knows, at this point.

When people think of media mergers and corporate ownership, they usually focus on the giant owners of television networks and movie studios and the like. Corporations like Disney and Paramount (and a handful of others) control the studios and networks which create content. But there's another layer to media ownership (the consolidation of the affiliates) that rarely gets much attention at all. The whole Kimmel episode should have put the political spotlight on this layer of corporate ownership, but so far Disney has taken most of the heat from the public for silencing Kimmel.

We will see what happens tomorrow night. Whether or not you are able to see Kimmel on your local broadcast television station might just come down to which corporation owns it. Those still lucky enough to live where smaller, more independent companies still own television stations may get to see Kimmel, but those whose local ABC stations are part of the Nexstar or Sinclair conglomerate may not.

Going back to the old limits (of 7-7-7 or even 12-12-12) is probably impossible nowadays. The media landscape has changed significantly since the 1990s. There are far more options these days to get television content than just through an antenna on your roof. And there is far more television content produced now than just what the big networks create -- which in the 1990s only included ABC, CBS, NBC, and the new kid on the block, Fox. So going back to a simpler time isn't just "not going to happen" but is actually impossible (with the explosion of technology since the 1990s).

Still, there is something to be said for limiting the power of corporations to control too big a chunk of the American airwaves. Even for broadcast stations (which are admittedly somewhat archaic these days, since few people even bother with rooftop antennas anymore).

This is all a side issue to the bigger one, of course. The bigger issue was the head of the F.C.C. deciding he didn't like a late-night comedian and threatening to use the government's power (in language so blatant that Senator Ted Cruz compared it to a "Mafioso" from Goodfellas) to remove that comedian from the airwaves. This is after a very similar thing happened with the cancellation of Stephen Colbert's show from late-night television at the end of the current season.

Political humor is not just free speech, it is speech for which the First Amendment provides the highest level of support. Because disagreeing with politicians that are in power is precisely why the First Amendment's free speech guarantee was written. Political speech is sacrosanct in America, period. A president or his administration should never have the power to dictate who is allowed on television and who is not.

Disney, in initially just "suspending" Kimmel, left the door open to doing the right thing. Now that Charlie Kirk's funeral is over, Kimmel will be allowed to return. He will doubtlessly offer up some sort of apology, and he will also quite likely be somewhat subdued in his jokes in the near future. Kimmel is not everyone's cup of tea, since of the big three late-night comedians he is without doubt the most scathing when it comes to mocking Trump. His jokes can be absolutely vicious, at times. Which turns some people off.

But there are still millions of people who do enjoy watching Kimmel. Precisely because he is so unrelenting in his criticism of Trump. And no matter what Trump thinks of Kimmel's comedy, Kimmel's fans should have the right to view the late-night comedian of their choice free of government censorship.

In the end, Disney realized this, and they did the right thing. For that, I commend them.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant