ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel after his monologue criticising Donald Trump and his allies. Photo / Getty Images
The right-wing campaign to shut down perceived detractors of the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk reverberated through the entertainment industry on Thursday after ABC announced it would indefinitely suspend late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
The news, announced late on Wednesday, rocked Hollywood, prompting many to accuse ABC of buckling to a censorship campaign targeting one of President Donald Trump’s most vocal critics.
ABC did not give an explanation for suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live! after the host delivered a monologue accusing “the President and his henchmen” of trying to capitalise on Kirk’s fatal shooting in Utah last week. After Kirk’s death, Trump and his allies have urged people to drum the activist’s perceived detractors out of their jobs.
Kimmel’s suspension was announced hours after Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr criticised the comedian and implied that the FCC could retaliate against those who aired him.
Trump, who has complained about being the target of Kimmel’s jokes since long before Kirk’s death, reacted with glee. “Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done,” he wrote on social media, and called for the cancellation of two other late-night shows that have criticised him: NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers.
Later, at a news conference as he visited England, Trump downplayed concerns about free speech. He said Kimmel was “fired because he had bad ratings more than anything else”, and added, “You can call that free speech or not.”
And still later, as he flew home on Air Force One on Thursday, Trump suggested networks that give him bad publicity should “maybe” have their licences taken away. (The FCC regulates local TV station licences, not networks.)
Kimmel’s ratings were reportedly falling before his suspension. But the biggest owner of ABC-affiliated stations, Nexstar, did not cite ratings in a statement explaining why it pulled his show. The company instead blasted Kimmel’s “offensive and insensitive” comments about Kirk’s death, and said that “continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time”.
Bill Carter, an editor-at-large at LateNighter who has spent 40-plus years covering late-night comedy and the television industry, said “nothing even remotely like it has ever happened before”. Calling the Trump administration’s recent actions an “affront to the Constitution”, Carter stressed the role previous late-night stars like Johnny Carson played in public discourse.
Carson “spoke comedy to power”, Carter said. “And that’s what late-night shows have done ever since.”
Other expressions of shock and anger rolled through the Hollywood Hills and Capitol Hill on Thursday, as concerns mounted about a new era of government censorship.
“This is beyond McCarthyism,” Christopher Anders, director of the Democracy and Technology Division for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “Trump officials are repeatedly abusing their power to stop ideas they don’t like, deciding who can speak, write, and even joke. The Trump administration’s actions, paired with ABC’s capitulation, represent a grave threat to our First Amendment freedoms.”
“Jimmy Kimmel has been muzzled and taken off the air,” comedian Marc Maron said in an Instagram video posted early Thursday morning. “This is what authoritarianism looks like right now in this country … This is government censorship.”
“This isn’t right,” actor and director Ben Stiller wrote on X.
Damon Lindelof, the writer-producer of the hit TV show Lost, vowed to take action against ABC’s owner, Disney. “I can’t in good conscience work for the company that imposed [Kimmel’s suspension],” he said.
In contrast, Kimmel’s suspension was largely celebrated across the right-leaning media sphere, where some personalities tried to square his downfall with their professed embrace of free-speech rights.
“This is not cancel culture at all,” Trump-voting podcast host Dave Portnoy said in a video posted to social media. “What cancel culture is, is when you don’t like somebody, say me, and [are] like, ‘We want to get rid of Dave, so we are going to comb through everything Dave has said for the past 20 years, and we are going to find things we don’t like.”
“What happened to Kimmel, I would say, is consequences for your actions in real time,” he added.
On social media, Roseanne Barr noted that Kimmel had mocked her in 2018, when ABC abruptly cancelled her show after she posted a tweet comparing Valerie Jarrett, a Black former Obama administration official, to the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes”.
“Today is better than my birthday,” Barr wrote on X after learning of Kimmel’s suspension.
Mike Pence, who served as Trump’s Vice-President in his first term, told the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta that “private employers have every right to dismiss employees, whether they’re a television talk show host, or otherwise, if they violate the standards of that company”.
But Kimmel’s apparent punishment was condemned by the Free Press, an online news outlet founded by former New York Times editor Bari Weiss, who has been embraced by many conservatives for her critiques of alleged censorship by liberals.
“ABC benched late-night host Jimmy Kimmel,” read an editorial published on the Free Press on Thursday. “That in and of itself is no great loss to comedy. But the circumstances under which he has been suspended should alarm anyone who cares about free speech.”
Prominent Democrats, meanwhile, expressed unqualified outrage.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer called on Trump to fire Carr, who Trump nominated to chair the FCC shortly after his election in November.
“I can’t think of a greater threat to free speech than Carr in many, many years,” Schumer told reporters. “He’s despicable. He’s anti-American. He ought to resign and Trump ought to fire him.”
The lone Biden appointee on the three-person FCC commission, Anna Gomez, issued a strong dissent from her colleagues on Thursday, saying her agency did not have the “authority, the ability, or the constitutional right” to punish Kimmel.
“We cannot allow an inexcusable act of political violence to be twisted into a justification for government censorship and control,” Gomez said. Gomez cited ABC News reporter Matt Gutman’s recent apology for his coverage of the Kirk shooting alongside the Kimmel decision as evidence of government pressure on media companies to punish speech it dislikes.
Such actions, she said, “put the foundation of the First Amendment in danger”.
And on social media, former President Barack Obama accused the current administration of “routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like”.
“What we are witnessing is an outright abuse of power,” former Vice-President Kamala Harris wrote on X. “We cannot dare to be silent or complacent in the face of this frontal assault on free speech.”
Kimmel’s initial response to Kirk’s death was unremarkable: on his show last week, the comedian called the killing “senseless” and said he had seen “extraordinarily vile responses to this from both sides of the political spectrum”, including those he said were “cheering” Kirk’s death.
But Kimmel caught Carr’s attention Monday night, when he said the “MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterise 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 comedian was referring to 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, the Utah man accused of killing Kirk. Robinson grew up in a Republican household but had apparently become sympathetic to leftist causes, according to Utah Governor Spencer Cox. Authorities have not announced a motive for Kirk’s killing.
On Wednesday, Carr appeared to threaten ABC if it did not punish Kimmel.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” the FCC chief told conservative podcast host Benny Johnson. “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.”
Hours later, Nexstar, which owns ABC stations in more than 30 markets, said it would replace his show.
Notably, Nexstar is seeking the Trump administration’s approval to acquire Tegna, another big group of US stations. The deal requires the FCC to loosen the government’s limits on broadcast station ownership.
Minutes after the company criticised Kimmel, ABC announced that the show was being yanked nationwide.
Later Wednesday evening, another big station group, Sinclair, announced it would air a one-hour special tribute to Kirk on Friday night in Kimmel’s usual time slot.
Sinclair, whose broadcasts have often aligned with conservative political positions, issued a statement saying the late-night host’s suspension “is not enough” and called on the network, the FCC and Kimmel to go further. It demanded Kimmel apologise to the Kirk family and make a “meaningful” donation to his relatives and Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organisation Kirk founded.
Sinclair, too, has business pending before the Trump administration. It made a bid for Tegna a day before Nexstar stepped in with its bid.
The maelstrom over Kimmel’s show recalled CBS’s announcement in July that it would not renew its Emmy-winning Late Night with Stephen Colbert, whose host had also angered Trump by mocking him.
The network called Colbert’s cancellation “purely a financial decision,” and “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at” its parent company, Paramount.
Days before the announcement, Colbert had criticised Paramount’s US$16 million lawsuit settlement with the President, calling it a “big fat bribe” as the media company sought FCC approval for an US$8 billion corporate merger.
Trump celebrated Colbert’s cancellation, too.
Kimmel’s contract with ABC was set to expire next year, and there was speculation about whether it would be renewed in light of what happened to Colbert.
David Letterman, the king of a previous generation of late-night TV hosts, spoke about Kimmel’s suspension at the Atlantic Festival in New York on Thursday. He said that as host of Late Night With David Letterman, he had mocked presidents across six administrations without fear of retribution.
We “attacked these men mercilessly”, Letterman told Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg. “Beating up on these people, rightly or wrongly, accurately or perhaps inaccurately in the name of comedy, not once were we squeezed by anyone from any governmental agency, let alone the dreaded FCC.”
“The institution of the President of the United States ought to be bigger than a guy doing a talk show. You know, it just really ought to be bigger,” Letterman added. “By the way, I have heard from Jimmy. He was nice enough to text me this morning, and he’s sitting up in bed taking nourishment. He’s going to be fine.”
Patrick Svitek contributed to this report.
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