Kimmel’s suspension confirms what many suspected after Colbert’s cancellation

ABC pulled 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' after a controversial remark, linked to Nexstar's merger interests. Photo / Getty Images

When Last Week Tonight won an Emmy on Sunday, Daniel O’Brien’s acceptance speech touched on something many intuited when Stephen Colbert’s show was cancelled in July – at precisely the moment Paramount was trying to get the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission to approve its merger with Skydance. “We are honoured to share [the Emmy] with all writers of late-night political comedy,” O’Brien said, “while that is still a type of show that’s allowed to exist.”

It won’t be allowed to exist for long. Sunday’s Emmy Awards were creepy and subdued for good reason: broadcast television, as it has existed for decades, is coming to an end. The crisis is as obvious as it is grave, and it has implications far beyond late-night: billionaires are accelerating their efforts to consolidate control over media platforms and the President is eager to help them do so, provided they shut down his critics. If they don’t, he threatens to use the levers of government – particularly those designed to remain independent – to financially punish them. None of this is secret; the brazenness is, at least partly, the point.

News broke yesterday that Disney-owned ABC – following a similar announcement from Nexstar, the largest owner of television stations in the United States – was pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, off the air. The shocking move was ostensibly in response to a remark Kimmel made on Monday night, which Nexstar and Sinclair, its biggest competitor, have characterised as so beyond the pale that the late-night comic’s show could not be permitted to air.

Here is that remark: “We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang 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 ordinariness of the statement is what unsettles the most. Accusations of political opportunism are hardly exceptional or unwarranted in this polarised landscape. Sure, Kimmel’s implication that the alleged shooter was “one of them” appears now to be inaccurate; based on the charging documents prosecutors submitted on Tuesday, suspect Tyler Robinson was not a Trump supporter. As jabs go, it was a miss. But the outrage is so bizarre it almost seems (dare I say it?) opportunistic. Particularly since Kimmel’s target wasn’t Charlie Kirk!

I say that not to condone the current rush to treat any criticism of Kirk, a right-wing activist, as a fireable offence; few things are more quintessentially American than obnoxiously criticising public figures. My point is simply that Kimmel didn’t. His claim was that “the MAGA gang” – that is, Trump supporters – were trying to “score political points” by mischaracterising Kirk’s alleged killer.

One might wonder, then, why Andrew Alford, the president of Nexstar’s broadcast division, characterised Kimmel’s riff about MAGA discussions of Kirk’s alleged killer as being “about the death of Charlie Kirk”. But Alford did exactly that in the statement he issued explaining why he believed Kimmel’s show had to be preempted immediately and “indefinitely”: “Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located.”

So there you have it: criticism of “the MAGA gang,” meaning the President’s supporters, is so “offensive and insensitive” that it cannot be shown to Nexstar’s audience – which is, per its 2024 annual report, nearly 39% of US households. “Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time,” Alford said, in a statement he probably did not intend as a very dark joke.

But it reads as one, because the decision to target Kimmel appears to have very little to do with the public interest and quite a bit to do with the private interests of the parties concerned.

In the least surprising news in the world, Nexstar is seeking approval from President Donald Trump’s FCC to acquire Tegna, another media company. The US$6.2 billion ($10.5b) deal would transform Nexstar-Tegna into an unprecedented mega-company whose reach would grow to 80% of US households. There’s a hitch: a long-standing broadcasting rule prevents any one company from reaching more than 39% of US households. So Nexstar doesn’t just need the FCC’s approval; it also needs the FCC to change that rule, or the deal can’t go through.

Luckily for Nexstar, FCC chairman Brendan Carr has signalled he’s open to ending “arcane artificial limits” on station ownership.

But just a few hours before Nexstar announced it was pulling Kimmel, guess who went on conservative commentator Benny Johnson’s podcast to blast Kimmel and threaten that there were “avenues here for the FCC” if companies didn’t take action? Carr.

Calling Kimmel’s remark “some of the sickest conduct possible” and part of “a concerted effort to lie to the American people”, Carr suggested he would use the agency to punish companies that failed to punish the comedian. “I mean, we can do this the easy way, or these companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead,” Carr said.

Shortly after Nexstar pulled Kimmel off the air, Carr celebrated the company’s decision to do “the right thing”. “Local broadcasters have an obligation to serve the public interest,” he wrote on X. “While this may be an unprecedented decision, it is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming that they determine falls short of community values.”

It’s hard not to connect those dots. It seems possible, and even probable, that Nexstar indefinitely preempted Kimmel’s show because Trump’s FCC chairman made it clear there would be consequences – which might have to do with the Tegna deal – if he didn’t.

Not to be outdone, Sinclair Broadcasting Group – which has also been lobbying the FCC for deregulation and to lift the 39% cap – praised Carr and did his bidding without taking the trouble to conceal their ask. “We appreciate FCC chairman Carr’s remarks today and this incident highlights the critical need for the FCC to take immediate regulatory action to address control held over local broadcasters by the big national networks,” Sinclair said. Sinclair also demanded that Kimmel apologise to Kirk’s family and that he make donations to Kirk’s family and to Kirk’s organisation, Turning Point USA.

If this all sounds oddly similar to the circumstances surrounding Colbert’s cancellation – which also took place around a gigantic prospective merger awaiting FCC approval – it should. The next question might be: Why Kimmel? Why did Carr decide a throwaway line in a comedian’s monologue should be his line in the sand, and the terrain on which to wage his war against untruths told to the American public?

Well, here’s what Donald Trump wrote July 18, in a Truth Social post celebrating Colbert’s cancellation. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert!” His reaction to Kimmel’s firing reads thusly: “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. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC.” The post ends with “Do it NBC!!!”

Not even Carr can keep track of the rationale for targeting Kimmel. “Something’s gone seriously awry,” he said on Wednesday on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News while discussing late-night TV. He charged hosts with going “from laugh lines to applause lines”, arguing that “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”. That doesn’t quite square with his original stated grievance, which was that the American people were being lied to.

But then, the goal is control, not consistency. “This action today by Nexstar and Sinclair, frankly, is unprecedented,” Carr told Hannity. “I can’t imagine another time when we’ve had local broadcasters tell what we’d call a national programmer like Disney that ‘Your content no longer meets the needs and values of our community.’ So this is an important turning point.” As a reminder: The deal Carr is poised to approve would expand Nexstar’s “community” to 80% of US households. And the company has shown that it’s more than willing to dictate what those households can and cannot watch.

The systematic effort to censor American media isn’t exactly subtle. The President has not disguised his intentions or his reasons. He has gone to some trouble to emphasise that he wants to control who’s on television and what they say. (And in newspapers too – in the past two months, he has filed lawsuits against the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.) When Colbert’s Late Night with Stephen Colbert was cancelled in July, Trump posted “It’s really good to see them go,” “and I hope I played a major part in it!”

A quick review of the events leading to Colbert’s cancellation: Trump sued CBS in October 2024 for content he deemed unfair to him. In July, Paramount Global paid the President US$16m to settle rather than fight the lawsuit. The other party in the merger, Skydance Media, promised to “eliminate DEI” – referring to diversity, equity and inclusion policies – and hire an ombudsman to address “bias”. Paramount cancelled Colbert’s show July 17. One week later, Carr’s FCC approved the Paramount-Skydance merger.

Rather than downplay his involvement, Trump emphasised that both parties to the deal were trying to placate him, personally. (Why, one might ask, if Trump’s lawsuit against CBS News had no bearing on the merger?) Trump claimed, once the merger was approved, that in addition to Paramount’s US$16m payout, he had also secured a “side deal” from Skydance Media owner David Ellison, who had pledged him an additional US$16m to US$19m in ads from Skydance.

Carr, too, rather than assert his agency’s independence from the President, has consistently gone out of his way to praise the President for his involvement. He credited Trump in interviews following Colbert’s cancellation: “President Trump is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape, and the way he’s doing that is, when he ran for election, he ran directly at these legacy broadcast media outlets, ABC, NBC, CBS,” he told CNBC’s Squawk on the Street.

On Hannity on Wednesday night, he presented himself as the President’s avenging fury, there to punish the networks for mistreating Trump. “President Trump ran against immense odds; these legacy media outlets threw everything at him, almost every single hoax imaginable,” he said, “but President Trump punched back.”

Two days after the Paramount-Skydance merger went through, Trump suggested that ABC and NBC should lose their licences. Accusing them of being arms of the “Democratic Party”, he suggested that “their licences could, and should, be revoked! MAGA.” He renewed that threat on August 24. Perhaps Carr took note. Pressured by the country’s largest station operators, which were pressured in turn by Carr, ABC has now bent the knee. NBC may be next.

After that, who knows? Here’s one possibility: Paramount-Skydance, which is financially backed by David Ellison’s father, Trump pal and Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, is now reportedly mulling a US$70b acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. It owns HBO. Take note, viewers of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight.

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