Jon Stewart during the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles in 2024. Stewart plans to host Thursday’s episode of The Daily Show, one day after ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show indefinitely.Jae C. Hong/The Associated Press
Jon Stewart plans to host Thursday’s episode of The Daily Show, one day after ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show indefinitely following comments he made about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Stewart’s featured guest will be Maria Ressa, the journalist and author of How to Stand Up to a Dictator. Ressa also shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her fight for freedom of expression in her home country of the Philippines.
Stewart normally hosts only on Mondays. The Emmy winner helmed The Daily Show from 1999 through 2015, delivering sharp, satirical takes on politics and current events and interviews with newsmakers. He returned to host once a week during the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Opinion: Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension is a chilling moment for free expression in the U.S.
Kimmel made several remarks about the reaction to the Kirk’s killing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Monday and Tuesday nights, including that “many in MAGA land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk.”
ABC suspended Kimmel’s show after a group of ABC-affiliated stations said it would not air the show, and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said his agency had a strong case for holding Kimmel, ABC and network parent Walt Disney Co. accountable for spreading misinformation.
Kimmel has not commented on the suspension. His supporters say Carr misread what the comic said and that nowhere did he specifically suggest that Tyler Robinson – the man Utah authorities allege fatally shot Kirk – was conservative.
In July, CBS said it would cancel The Late Show With Stephen Colbert next May. The network said it shut down the decades-old TV institution for financial reasons. But the announcement came three days after Colbert criticized the settlement between President Donald Trump and Paramount Global, parent company of CBS, over a 60 Minutes story.
David Letterman, Colbert’s predecessor on The Late Show, lamented the cancellations.
“I feel bad about this, because we all see where see this is going, correct? It’s managed media,” Letterman said during an appearance Thursday at The Atlantic Festival 2025 in New York. “It’s no good. It’s silly. It’s ridiculous.”
He added that people shouldn’t be fired just because they don’t “suck up” to what Letterman called “an authoritarian” president.