- Late night television host Jimmy Kimmel was removed from air after he implied Charlie Kirk’s shooter was a MAGA activist. The circumstances of ABC’s decision raise questions about the FCC’s role in regulating broadcast media.
As poet laureate Marshall Mathers once said, “the FCC won’t let me be, or let me be me, so let me see, they tried to shut me down on MTV.”
Jimmy Kimmel might have a newfound appreciation for Eminem’s lyrics today. Kimmel, a man who got his start in television encouraging scantily clad, buxom women to bounce on a trampoline, was pulled from the late night airwaves of ABC Wednesday after he roiled detractors with the baseless suggestion that Charlie Kirk’s killer was a MAGA activist.
On Monday night, Kimmel told his Jimmy Kimmel Live! audience, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
The implication of the statement is at best speculation and at worst misleading based on what we currently know.
Following the monologue Monday night, criticism began. On Tuesday, in an exchange with an ABC reporter, President Donald Trump suggested the network had been engaged in “hate speech” and pointed to a settled defamation lawsuit the President filed against the network. “Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech, so maybe they’ll have to go after you,” the President told reporter Jonathan Karl.
On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr told podcaster Benny Johnson that Kimmel’s remarks constituted “the sickest conduct possible” and teased that the FCC could remove ABC’s broadcasting license. Did Kimmel clumsily point fingers? Sure, but the sickest conduct possible? I don’t know.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Two companies that own ABC affiliate stations then informed the network that they would be pulling Kimmel from their nightly broadcasts. Nexstar, which operates nearly two dozen ABC affiliates, said in a press release that it “strongly objects” to Kimmel’s comments and was planning to “replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets.”
Sinclair Media, another owner of a large conglomerate of ABC affiliates, also announced plans to replace the show on its stations.
Both Nexstar and Sinclair have business pending before the FCC. In the case of Nexstar, a large corporate acquisition of another media group of stations, Tegna, must be approved by government regulators. Critics of the administration have argued that this could have resulted in the affiliates trying to curry favor with the FCC in the Kimmel situation.
The timing from Carr’s initial comments, to the stations preempting Kimmel’s show, to ABC’s pulling of the show was a matter of hours.
“Jimmy Kimmel Live will be pre-empted indefinitely,” an ABC spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, President Trump celebrated the decision, as he saw a second late night antagonist fall. Stephen Colbert was cancelled earlier this year. The President called for NBC to follow suit with ABC and CBS.
“Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “That leaves Jimmy (Fallon) and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”
The President is claiming critic scalps, although it’s not clear what Jimmy Fallon, who is pretty apolitical and comes across as a perennial juvenile, did to anyone.
Turn About Fair Play?
I don’t think many conservatives will start from a position of empathy for Kimmel. In recent years, the host shifted far left, centering much of his commentary on deriding Donald Trump and his supporters. He was, in many respects, a sanctimonious gasbag, who smugly and intentionally alienated half the country. Not a great recipe for the long-term success on a format meant to be light-hearted and entertaining. It doesn’t help that he’s not funny.
There are some who will see these developments as the left getting a taste of its own medicine. There’s ample evidence, for instance, that the Biden administration intimidated social media companies to restrict, and in some cases censor, conservative content from their platforms.
Then there’s the very real impression that the left has operated with a virtual monopoly on media. Democrats received de facto state run media for years because the pool of people in the press largely agreed with them and did their bidding, all while claiming journalistic objectivity.
There’s perhaps no greater recent example of this than the gaslighting that occurred for months and years as conservatives raised legitimate questions about former President Biden’s fitness for office. A fraud was perpetrated on the American people, while those who were correct about Biden’s decline were openly mocked.
So are conservatives who are concerned with the idea of using the force of government to dismantle a biased media suckers who “don’t know what time it is”? Have we entered America’s Machiavellian phase — where might makes right — or do core principles surrounding freedom and limited government still matter?
Republicans are now teetering near the edge of their own version of state run media by threatening licenses in response to unflattering commentary. Here, too, we can gain a lesson from Charlie Kirk, who instead of protesting a South Park caricature of himself, leaned into it and said it was funny.
There remain ways to mitigate and discourage untruthful speech, such as defamation lawsuits. But if you can silence someone using government’s regulatory power, it’s way easier to control what they say. It’s a different mechanism from the stranglehold the left has had over media, but arguably the same result.
For my part, I’ve got to believe there is a different and better third way — that the media, operating at its best, is both independent and honest about who they are. But a media scared of what the government can do to it is not a “free press” and is incapable of supplying accurate information and holding leaders accountable. The industry, writ large, also needs to sit with itself in a corner for a while and think about what it’s done to lose trust as rapidly as it has.
The truth is that the market was already beginning to hold legacy media accountable. A new wave and new style of media is rising, eclipsing the reach of traditional outlets. The late night talk show concept was hemorrhaging money and going the way of the dodo bird without intervention.
At some level, Brendan Carr’s “pull Kimmel or face the FCC” ultimatum just gives an excuse for an otherwise failing product. Now, his acolytes can claim he was done in by political pressure and not because he sucked.
