The FCC’s Censorship of Jimmy Kimmel Is Insanely Corrupt

The censorship of Jimmy Kimmel was evidently a sacrifice at the altar of corporate interests.

ABC’s Wednesday decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel Live! came after decisions to pull the show from Nexstar Media Group and then Sinclair Broadcast Group, which own many ABC affiliate stations across the country. Earlier Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s censorial Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr had threatened broadcasters for platforming Kimmel, due to the host’s recent monologue about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. 

While Kimmel’s jokes focused on Trump’s and MAGA’s response to the killing, rather than the violence itself, Carr called it the “sickest conduct possible.” Nexstar and Sinclair followed suit, explaining their decision as a response to the purportedly “insensitive” and “problematic” comments. (Going beyond yanking the show, Sinclair also demanded that Kimmel apologize and donate to Kirk’s family and organization, and committed to broadcasting an hour-long tribute to Kirk during the show’s time slot.)

It is no coincidence that Nexstar is seeking to merge with another major media company, Tegna—a decision that requires not only FCC approval but also a change in regulations that limit companies’ reach. According to Poynter, the merger would expand Nexstar’s reach to 80 percent of TV households in the country, whereas the FCC currently has a 39 percent cap.  And Sinclair has pending business before the administration too—according to CNN media analyst Brian Stelter—and also proposed merging with Tegna, as The Wall Street Journal reported, following the announcement of Nexstar’s deal.

“So we know that two major TV station owners, both of which need to curry favor with the Trump administration, were the ones that most loudly and vocally condemned Kimmel and said they were going to not air the show tonight and in the coming nights,” Stelter said on Wednesday evening. “It’s an Occam’s razor situation. It’s exactly what it looks like.”

Fox News host Sean Hannity claimed that he couldn’t find a “single prominent conservative voice” pushing to knock Jimmy Kimmel off the air—but in July, President Donald Trump suggested that Kimmel would be “next” to be canceled.

“The left already—starting with humpty-dumpty CNN, Pritzker, Newsom—predictably claiming, ‘This is a conservative censorship. The MAGA crowd, Donald Trump got Jimmy Kimmel.’ That is false,” Hannity whined Wednesday night. “I can’t find a single prominent conservative voice in the country that even remotely wanted or hoped or was pushing to get Jimmy Kimmel taken off the air.”

But in July, after CBS announced that The Late Show With Stephen Colbert would be canceled, Trump celebrated the win against a vocal critic by listing who else he’d like to see taken off the air.

“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.”

It appears that Hannity is playing defense for the blatant act of political overreach from the Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, who publicly pressured Nexstar Media Group, the broadcast company that owns ABC, to punish Kimmel for his speech. Nexstar is currently seeking FCC approval for a $6.2 billion deal to buy Tegna, an acquisition that would make Nexstar the biggest owner of local stations in the country.

During his show Monday, Kimmel said that MAGA had spent the weekend “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.” In fact, Republicans started doing that the same day Kirk was shot, casting blame on the left and the transgender community before the shooter was even identified.

Kimmel’s remark about MAGA comments wasn’t even a matter of opinion, it was a well-documented fact.

Despite Representative Nancy Mace’s best efforts, her Democratic colleague Ilhan Omar will get to speak her mind another day.

Four Republicans joined the Democratic caucus Wednesday night to quash Mace’s measure, sending the South Carolinian into a tizzy over the foiled plan and the diminished support inside her own party. Those conservatives were Representatives Mike Flood, Tom McClintock, Jeff Hurd, and Cory Mills, all of whom Mace put on full blast after the vote.

“They voted to shield a woman who mocked the cold-blooded assassination of Charlie Kirk … a woman who belittled his grieving family,” Mace posted in the wake of the failed vote. “They showed us exactly who they are. Never forget it.”

Over the last week, Mace has advocated for stripping Omar of her committee assignments and censuring her, and has publicly suggested that Omar should be deported back to Somalia for having allegedly “smeared Charlie Kirk and implied he was to blame for his own murder” during an interview with Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan.

Disjointed clips from that interview were similarly picked up and recirculated by far-right personalities, who claimed that Omar had said Kirk deserved to die. But that wasn’t accurate.

“No one said he deserved to die. Ilhan Omar said the exact opposite to me,” Hasan wrote on X. “She condemned his killing. And she said her heart goes out to Kirk’s widow.”

Omar also pushed back against Mace, arguing that she never made the comments that Mace was attempting to silence her for.

“Her [resolution] does not contain a single quote from me because she couldn’t find any,” Omar said. “Unlike her, I have routinely condemned political violence, no matter the political ideology. This is all an attempt to push a false story so she can fundraise and boost her run for Governor.”

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr—who just a few years ago was waxing poetic about how political satire is the “oldest and most important form of free speech”—is now using The Office GIFs to celebrate taking away Jimmy Kimmel’s freedom of speech.

Carr appeared on conservative commentator Benny Johnson’s podcast and floated punishing Kimmel for making remarks about Trump’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s killing. While ABC was not initially going to rebuke Kimmel, as his statements were pretty run of the mill, threats from Carr and the Trump administration regarding pulling their broadcast licenses made them cave. Late that night they suspended Kimmel indefinitely.

Carr, who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC, has been jubilant in the days since Kimmel’s muzzling. Wednesday night he went on Hannity for a victory lap.

“Late-night shows, something’s gone seriously awry there. They went from going for applause, for laugh lines, to applause lines. They went from being court jesters that would make fun of everybody in power to being court clerics and enforcing a very narrow political ideology,” Carr told Hannity. “There’s more work to go, but I’m very glad to see that America’s broadcasters are standing up to serve the interests of the community and we don’t just have progressive foie gras coming out from New York and Hollywood.

Kimmel is no cleric. And Carr is rich for acting as if his firing was the product of some local, grassroots campaign when it’s extremely clear that this was a result of direct pressure on ABC from the federal government.

The backlash to Carr’s spineless hypocrisy has been swift, as receipt after receipt of him defending the same principles he is now attacking is circulating widely.

“Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not,” he said in 2019. “The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of ‘public interest.’”

“From Internet memes to late-night comedians, from cartoons to the plays and poems as old as organized government itself—Political Satire circumvents traditional gatekeepers & helps hold those in power accountable,” he said the very next year. “Not surprising that it’s long been targeted for censorship.”

The plug has been pulled on another Trump-critical late-night host, and the president is over the moon.

“Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED,” Donald Trump posted to Truth Social Wednesday. “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.”

“Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible,” he continued, referring to Stephen Colbert, who had his show on CBS canceled in July.

Jimmy Kimmel Live! was put on indefinite hiatus Wednesday by Nexstar, one of the largest owners of ABC stations in the country. Nexstar said it “strongly” objected “to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk,” according to a statement.

Kimmel was excoriated by Republicans after he suggested earlier this week that Kirk’s suspected killer, Tyler Robinson, was a MAGA conservative.

“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,” Kimmel said during a monologue.

But emerging details have painted a more complicated picture of the 22-year-old Utahn, who according to his friends was relatively apolitical.

The move to deplatform Kimmel immediately followed a threat from Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, who condemned Kimmel’s language as the “sickest conduct possible.”

“[This] appears to be an action by Jimmy Kimmel to play into the narrative that this was somehow a MAGA or Republican-motivated person,” Carr told YouTuber Benny Johnson. “What people don’t understand is that the broadcasters … have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest. When we see stuff like this, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Carr was celebrating the decision hours later. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the FCC chair thanked Nexstar for “doing the right thing” and implored other broadcasters to “follow Nexstar’s lead.”

Trump was, apparently, in a similar headspace. On Truth Social, the president made it clear that his ideal version of a late-night lineup involves nixing two other NBC hosts who have been hard on his administration. Addressing the network directly, Trump urged NBC to fire two of its stars: Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.

“That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC,” Trump wrote. “Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT.”

But Nexstar’s opposition to Kimmel’s monologue might not be entirely moralistic. The massive broadcast network is currently seeking FCC approval for a $6.2 billion deal to buy Tegna, an acquisition that would make Nexstar the biggest owner of local stations in the country.

The pattern is remarkably similar to the circumstances surrounding Colbert’s ended contract. Colbert’s show—the most popular show in its time slot—was canceled three days after the comedian claimed that Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Trump over his groundless lawsuit targeting Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview looked like a “big, fat bribe.” Days after the cancellation was announced, the FCC approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance.