Yesterday, Disney-owned ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live “indefinitely” for a comment Kimmel made about the response to Charlie Kirk’s death. The response from Republican commentators has been predictably gleeful. They’ve positioned the suspension as a reversal of “cancel culture,” a “deplatforming” that’s simply fair retaliation for antagonizing them. “Jimmy Kimmel does have Free Speech, he is free to speak just not on ABC,” posted comedian Terrence Kentrell Williams on X.
This framing is transparently false. ABC’s suspension of Kimmel was the result of an explicit threat from President Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, aimed at Disney and companies that worked with it. The move was effective because of the FCC’s authority to regulate broadcast TV and, perhaps more importantly, to approve communications mergers in a hyper-consolidated landscape. It was repeating a playbook Carr recently used on Disney’s fellow media giant Paramount. And it’s an unabashed attempt at the government dictating the speech of private TV networks and entertainers, as objectionable and un-American as a McCarthyist blacklist.
The starting point of all this is a pretty tame late-night show monologue. On Monday, Kimmel said the following:
“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 line led into a clip from last week in which Trump responded to Kirk’s death by bragging about the new White House ballroom — “he’s at the fourth stage of grief: construction,” Kimmel quipped.
Carr and other Republicans loudly interpreted the remark as claiming Tyler Robinson, who’s charged with killing Kirk, was part of MAGA. (An indictment released Tuesday says Robinson believed Kirk was spreading “hate”; at the time of Kimmel’s monologue, the evidence was mostly confusing and speculation was rife.)
On Wednesday, Carr appeared in high dudgeon for an interview with conservative commentator Benny Johnson. “It appears to be some of the sickest conduct possible,” Carr intoned over a clip of Kimmel’s statement. It was also, he said, legally actionable. Broadcasters “have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with an obligation to operate in the public interest,” he said. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Carr and Johnson walked out the threat a little further. They noted that Disney and ABC aren’t issued a central license to broadcast; licenses are granted to individual TV stations, owned in small numbers by Disney but mainly by separate companies that broadcast ABC and other networks’ programming. “FCC regulatory action focuses on these individual stations,” Carr noted. “The public interest means you can’t be running a narrow partisan circus and still meeting your public interest obligations.”
Citing rules against “news distortion” and “broadcast hoaxes,” Carr repeated that “there’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters. And frankly, I think it’s really past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, ‘Listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out, because we, a licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.’”
This is not how any pre-Carr FCC in recent memory (or arguably before that) has defined the “public interest” requirement. If the issue is a “narrow partisan circus,” the highly partisan Fox — whose news division settled a massive defamation suit for lying about voting machine companies in 2023 — has been a stolid fixture on TV stations across the country for decades. Carr invoked rules against “news distortion” and “broadcast hoaxes,” neither of which makes logical sense as a charge against Kimmel. The bar for stripping a license is typically high — a rare example is the 1989 revocation of aggressively pro-segregationist station WLBT, which among other things, blacked out broadcasts involving civil rights.
Some commentators on the left have pushed for the FCC to do what Carr threatened, just with Fox instead of ABC, particularly after the defamation settlement. But the FCC has never pulled a station’s license as a result of this urging, and in 2019 Carr decried even Democratic commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel’s suggestion they crack down on TV and radio e-cigarette ads, saying the FCC “does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.’”
Carr’s statement on Wednesday was unambiguous: ABC-affiliated TV stations needed to stop airing Kimmel’s show ASAP, or they could be fined or lose their license. And the stations’ parent companies were listening. Nexstar, which owns around 200 stations and reaches roughly 39 percent of US households, said quickly that it would no longer air Jimmy Kimmel Live. So did fellow giant Sinclair Broadcast Group.
Those companies, particularly Nexstar, have reasons beyond station licensing to keep Carr happy. Nexstar is pushing for a $6.2 million merger with broadcaster Tegna that would require the FCC to loosen the rules on TV station consolidation, something CEO Perry Sook has expressed hope that Trump’s “deregulatory moment” will enable.
Carr has shown himself willing to slow-walk deals with companies that earn his ire. A merger between Paramount and Skydance was not approved until Paramount subsidiary CBS agreed to pay $16 million to resolve a blatantly frivolous lawsuit filed by Trump. It proceeded on the grounds that Skydance promote a “diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum” and employ an ombudsman who would “receive and evaluate any complaints of bias or other concerns involving CBS.” CBS also ended the show of Kimmel’s fellow late-night host Stephen Colbert, a decision CBS called financial that was nonetheless widely seen as a concession to Trump — and that was celebrated by Carr.
The pressure from Carr, Sinclair, and Nexstar quickly reached ABC, which made a terse announcement it had pulled Kimmel’s show off the air. Outlets with inside sources have indicated this wasn’t because of public outrage or because Kimmel’s bosses found the remarks inappropriate — Rolling Stone reports that “multiple execs felt that Kimmel had not actually said anything over the line.” Instead, they were “pissing themselves” over the threat of Trump administration retaliation, one source said.
Disney, too, has pressure points beyond broadcast license fines. The FCC chair has previously threatened to investigate it for having (non-“ideological,” of course) diversity programs. And as Oliver Darcy of Status notes, the company is “working to complete a high-stakes deal with the NFL, one that is crucial to the future of ESPN” and requires regulatory approval from the Department of Justice. Trump incidentally told an ABC journalist this week that the DOJ might “come after ABC” for “hate” offenses, responding to questions about a “hate speech” crackdown declared by Attorney General Pam Bondi after Kirk’s death.
Under the First Amendment, a government official like Carr is allowed to call Kimmel talentless or unfunny. He’s allowed to say Kimmel shouldn’t be on the air. He’s not allowed to accompany this with a clear threat backed by government authority. “The easy way or the hard way” isn’t healthy debate, it’s gangster talk. Or more precisely, government jawboning.
Even the substantially Trump-picked, overwhelmingly conservative Supreme Court has condemned something very similar to Carr’s conduct. Mike Masnick at Techdirt points out that a ruling last year, in the case NRA v. Vullo, declared flatly that “the First Amendment prohibits government officials from relying on the ‘threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion . . . to achieve the suppression’ of disfavored speech.” That’s true even if they do so through intermediaries like Nexstar rather than attacking the speaker directly.
Disney, of course, didn’t have to bow to a clearly unconstitutional threat. CEO Bob Iger and Disney Entertainment chief Dana Walden, according to Status, were among the latest powerful figures who made a cowardly decision to appease Carr and Trump rather than stand up for themselves and their employees in public and, if necessary, in court.
But even if there’s plenty of blame to go around, Carr’s threat is impossible to ignore — and the implicit comparisons to conservative provocateurs being banned on social media, or commentators being fired after outcry for a hateful statement, or any other example of alleged “cancel culture,” off-base. Whatever the underlying offense, this isn’t a private company independently making a business judgment about its public image and financial interests. It’s a government official inserting himself into the process of making entertainment, decreeing what a comedian is allowed to say.
Carr and Johnson aren’t denying the pressure campaign. Carr responded to a request for comment from Status with a grinning emoji and thanked Nexstar on X for “doing the right thing.” Johnson crowed on X that he had “ended Jimmy Kimmel’s career” by bringing Carr on to “announce investigations into ABC and Disney.”
It’s unclear whether Kimmel will come back on the air at some point — but either way, the Trump administration’s war on free speech is still going strong.
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