Thursday September 25 2025

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ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair

Discussion

Disney’s ABC is taking Jimmy Kimmel’s late night talk show off the air indefinitely amid a controversy over his recent comments about Charlie Kirk’s suspected killer.

“Jimmy Kimmel Live will be pre-empted indefinitely,” an ABC spokesperson said, declining to share any further details.

A representative for Kimmel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The stunning decision came just a few hours after the Trump administration official responsible for licensing ABC’s local stations publicly pressured the company to punish Kimmel.

At least two major owners of ABC-affiliated stations subsequently said they would preempt Kimmel’s show, sparking speculation that the owners were trying to curry favor with the administration. The local media conglomerates are each seeking mergers that would require administration approval.

As Kimmel prepared to tape Wednesday night’s episode in Hollywood, ABC decided to pull the plug, much to the astonishment of the entertainment industry.

Free speech and free expression groups immediately condemned ABC, calling the suspension cowardly, while President Trump, who frequently sparred with Kimmel, celebrated all the way from the UK, where he is on a state visit.

“Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done,” Trump wrote in a post 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 indefinite hiatus underscores how politicized opinions and comments around the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk have become, with high-profile campaigns urging employers to fire people who make comments perceived as unflattering about Kirk.

And the president has also gone after media companies, specifically, when they displease him, as with a $15 billion defamation lawsuit he filed against the New York Times this week and lawsuits against other outlets.

During his Monday evening monologue, Kimmel said the MAGA movement was trying to score political points by trying to prove that Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, was not one of its own.

“The MAGA Gang (is) 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. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”

The ABC late-night host’s remarks constituted “the sickest conduct possible,” FCC chair Brendan Carr told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on Wednesday. Carr suggested his FCC could move to revoke ABC affiliate licenses as a way to force Disney to punish Kimmel.

“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.”

And speaking on Fox Wednesday night, Carr suggested broadcasters would see more of this kind of pressure in the future.

“We at the FCC are going to force the public interest obligation. There are broadcasters out there that don’t like it, they can turn in their license in to the FCC,” Carr said. “But that’s our job. Again, we’re making some progress now.”

But Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic commissioner at the FCC, wrote on X that while “an inexcusable act of political violence by one disturbed individual must never be exploited as justification for broader censorship and control,” the Trump administration “is increasingly using the weight of government power to suppress lawful expression.”

Speaking with CNN’s Erin Burnett after Kimmel’s show was taken off the air, Gomez said “the First Amendment does not allow us, the FCC, to tell broadcasters what they can broadcast.”

“I saw the clip. He did not make any unfounded claims, but he did make a joke, one that others may even find crude, but that is neither illegal nor grounds for companies to capitulate to this administration in ways that violate the First Amendment,” Gomez told CNN. “This sets a dangerous new precedent, and companies must stand firm against any efforts to trade away First Amendment freedom.”

Pro-Trump websites and TV shows began to criticize Kimmel for his remarks on Tuesday, and as the story gained traction on Wednesday, some owners of ABC-affiliated stations felt compelled to speak out.

Nexstar, which operates about two dozen ABC affiliates, issued a press release saying it “strongly objects” to Kimmel’s remarks and saying its stations would “replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets.”

Notably, Nexstar is seeking Trump administration approval to acquire another big US station group, Tegna. The deal requires the FCC to loosen the government’s limits on broadcast station ownership.

Minutes after Nexstar criticized Kimmel publicly, ABC said the show was being yanked nationwide.

Later in the evening, another big station group, Sinclair, said it had also told ABC that it was preempting Kimmel’s show on its ABC-affiliated stations before the network announced its nationwide decision.

Sinclair, too, has business pending before the Trump administration, and it made a bid for Tegna a day before Nexstar stepped in with its bid. The company announced Wednesday night that it will air a one-hour special tribute to Kirk on Friday night in Kimmel’s usual time slot.

Following ABC’s action to indefinitely pull Kimmel’s show off the air, Sinclair 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.

“Sinclair will not lift the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! on our stations until formal discussions are held with ABC regarding the network’s commitment to professionalism and accountability,” the company said in its statement. “Regardless of ABC’s plans for the future of the program, Sinclair intends not to return Jimmy Kimmel Live! to our air until we are confident that appropriate steps have been taken to uphold the standards expected of a national broadcast platform.”

Sinclair said it demanded Kimmel directly apologize to the Kirk family and make a “meaningful” donation to Kirk’s family and his organization, Turning Point USA.

The FCC regulates the public airwaves, including broadcast signals and content. Before Trump appointed Carr to lead the agency, the FCC, for the most part, had taken a hands-off approach to broadcasters’ political content in recent years.

But Carr has taken a broader view of the FCC’s remit to serve the public interest, and has served as a political attack dog for Trump, threatening his perceived enemies in the broadcast media.

“I can’t imagine another time when we’ve had local broadcasters tell a national programmer like Disney that your content no longer meets the needs and the values of our community,” Carr told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Wednesday. “So this is an important turning point.”

The Center for American Rights, which has previously lodged bias complaints against NBC, ABC and CBS, on Wednesday filed a complaint with the FCC over Kimmel’s comments, writing that “it is no defense to say that Kimmel was engaging in satire or late-night comedy rather than traditional news.”

“ABC’s affiliates need to step up and hold ABC accountable as a network for passing through material that fails to respect the public-interest standard to which they are held,” Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights, wrote in the complaint. “Disney as ABC’s corporate owner needs to act directly to correct this problem.”

SAG-AFTRA, the actors union, said Wednesday night that it “condemns” the suspension of Kimmel’s show.

“Our society depends on freedom of expression. Suppression of free speech and retaliation for speaking out on significant issues of public concern run counter to the fundamental rights we all rely on,” the union said in its statement.

“The decision to suspend airing Jimmy Kimmel Live! is the type of suppression and retaliation that endangers everyone’s freedoms.”

Kimmel has also been a frequent target of President Trump’s ire. Shortly after CBS announced the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late-night talk show — a move Carr publicly celebrated — Trump suggested that “Next up will be an even less talented Jimmy Kimmel.”

D-Machine•6 days ago

He literally said "with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them". Interpretation hinges on the "desperately" here, but your reading of this as him saying "they were quick to paint him as blue tribe before knowing his tribe" is far too distant from the literal words. The right were not "desperate" to distance him from MAGA or red tribe, because that was never a strong position given reason and the evidence, which pointed, if anywhere, towards blue tribe. The "desperation", if anywhere, was on the left linking him to MAGA, because it was very clear, even then, to anyone who read beyond Reddit "best" comments, that the links to the left were far stronger and more reasonable. Kimmel's phrasing not just implied, but directly stated that the desperation was in the opposite place to where it was in actuality, and so strongly implied a preponderance of evidence in a direction opposite to the general direction dictated by reason and evidence already known at that time. So no, there is not the synonymity you claim.

As others have pointed out, this kind of insinuation is very hard to see as anything other than deliberate, given basic media literacy and how modern media operates (https://www.themotte.org/post/3263/culture-war-roundup-for-t...). To save you a click:

> The "desperation" implies a sort of losing battle that they're grasping at straws to prove something that's factually wrong, rather than simply stating truths that are obvious, evident and obviously evident. "Desperate" is a subjective judgment call, of course, so Kimmel absolutely deserves zero government censorship for this, by my lights; all it does is show that his judgment is so bad that it reflects poorly on the judgment of people who hired him as a host for a show like that. That MAGA was trying to characterize the murderer as anything other than MAGA is arguably a bland, neutral fact about reality, but that MAGA was desperately trying to do so is a judgment call that shows extremely poor ability to observe reality or to discern reality.

mrguyorama•6 days ago

>Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.

These were one thing, The New Deal. Done by Democrats who had 90% control of congress, a hyper popular president, and 1 out of every 5 Americans was jobless. When the Supreme Court threatened to push back on The New Deal, FDR threatened that he could pack the court, and that threat carried weight because he actually had the congress to do so, and the public would have been on his side as well. The public wanted The New Deal.

Then the Progressive Democrats got big support on the Civil Rights bill. That support was also used to force, through Federal power, a bunch of sourthern states to stop segregation and other literal racist bullshit. Many federal politicians blamed that on the Democrat party (which is untrue, both support and opposition to the Civil Rights act were bipartisan), and southern states have largely voted Republican since.

Then Carter's "Lets do clean energy and a strong environment and do the hard things to make a good nation" were so thoroughly rejected by the American public that it is considered a huge political realignment, and the Democrat party responded by giving up, and adopting neoliberal policies because they were so fucking popular with the public, that they might as well get rich and elected.

As a result, the Clinton years got us the damn Crime Bill. We also got the Nutrition Facts panel on food, and that thing is awesome in ways I think most people don't realize.

Then, when Obama came close to having real power in congress, we got the ACA.

If you want to see this nation do things, give the people who want to build things actual power. Give the Democrats actual damn power. Not "President and half of one house of congress". That's not how power works in the US system when you are following the rules.

If the Democrats got 60 senators, 400 reps, and the president, maaaybe then they could get something done, but even then, the Supreme Court could trivially stop anything they tried to do.

This is all intentional. It's how the American system was purposely designed. It's hard to build things on purpose.

qcnguy•6 days ago

Kimmel made that exact claim. Fake news has been spread by the left by way more people than him. The lying is so far off the charts that the left is having a massive collective break from reality. YouGov has found Democrats mostly believe that Kirk's killer was either right wing, or they aren't sure.

https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52988-donald-trum...

Even The Atlantic has had to admit that this is stupid and they can't work out why anyone believes it. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/charlie-ki...

> "The evidence that Robinson was a “Groyper”—a member of an online further-right-than-thou movement that had harassed Kirk and President Donald Trump—was paltry. Why did anyone believe that idea to begin with? Already it bore the marks of an incipient conspiracy theory, a soothing nugget of esoteric knowledge, suppressed for political purposes. Many of those suckered in were victims of their own motivated reasoning. It hurts to admit that a movement you like has produced a bad person, and it hurts even more to admit that bitter truth to a gloating member of a movement you hate."

They're soothing themselves. Nobody on the right is "gloating" over Kirk being killed. This really happened because leftists have deliberately tried to confuse everyone about the truth. On their safe space Bluesky they even admit to it:

https://substack.com/@mrandyngo/note/c-157561235

> "Anyway probably for the best if everyone asserts he's a Groyper whether he is or not. The narrative really does matter more than the truth in this case"

> "Lying to flood the news is good actually"

> "Spending the last week repeating that the killer was one of the right's own may have helped take the wind out of their sails. Regardless of whether that ends up being true it was rhetorically useful in the interim. Now you can pivot. Nobody is going to care what your last position was."

These tactics work. The internet has filled up with leftists who genuinely believe Kirk was killed for not being right wing enough, and anyone who tries to talk them back to reality gets answers like "I won't read any right wing sources". It's a self-created filter bubble of madness.

nobody9999•7 days ago

The link you referenced[0] also includes this:

   A 2017 report by The Nation Institute and the Center for Investigative 
   Reporting analyzed a list of the terrorist incidents which occurred in the US 
   between 2008 and 2016.[27] It found:[28]

   115 far-right inspired terrorist incidents. 35% of these incidents were 
   foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 29% of them 
   resulted in fatalities. These incidents caused 79 deaths.
   
   63 Islamist inspired terrorist incidents. 76% of these terrorist incidents 
   were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 13% of 
   them resulted in fatalities. These incidents caused 90 deaths.

   19 far-left inspired terrorist incidents. 20% of these terrorist incidents 
   were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 10% of 
   them resulted in fatalities. Two of these incidents were described as 
   "plausibly" attributed to a perpetrator with left-wing sympathies and caused 
   7 deaths. These are not included in the official government database.[15]

So out of 197 incidents reported between 2008 and 2016, 58% were "Far Right" inspired, 32% were "Islamist" inspired and 10% were "Far left" inspired.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_Stat...

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gusgus01•6 days ago

Yeah, the GAO study was purely based on the U.S. Extremist Crime Database and that's clearly a limitation, although less of one than reading through a list of notable attacks on a wiki page. The page itself also is generally about terrorism, so it talks about both international and domestic throughout it which can be confusing. That's why I suggested looking at the actual studies linked to on the page, a lot of them do a better job of pointing out their time period and limitations than the brief overview on the page.

Also, the page only has pretty good resources up until like 2020, where it ends with a study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies which reviews data up to May 2020, and DHS which reviews data from 2018-2019. The CSIS one is pretty good because it includes graphs of data over time and really shows the worrying increase across the board but the staggering increase of "right-wing" violence since the mid 2010s.

CSIS has a few more studies more recently it looks like. There's https://www.csis.org/analysis/pushed-extremes-domestic-terro... from 2022, which shows that 49% of events were committed by far-right and 40% were far-left. However, the far-right were more likely to target people with guns and bombs and the far-left were more likely to target property with melee and incendiary weapons, so 28 of the 30 deaths were from the far-right while the far-left accounted for 1.

Then a few more years later, there's https://www.csis.org/analysis/rising-threat-anti-government-.... Which is more about the increase in "partisan political belief" based attacks, and then gives some examples instead of breaking it down further.

However, CSIS likewise uses their own database of attacks, and in between the other studies and the most recent one it appears they changed their methodology of what attacks were included to make it more strictly about an attempt or threat to kill (which would remove a lot of the property based attacks from the previous study), premeditation, and desire to strike fear broadly. I'd be interested in seeing a revisitation of their previous methods with their new datasets, or even to actually be able to see the dataset itself.