Jimmy Kimmel is the latest late-night host to be pulled from a major network after the comedian made remarks about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, amid pressure from Donald Trump’s administration.
“Jimmy Kimmel Live will be pre-empted indefinitely,” an ABC spokesperson told Rolling Stone on Wednesday. The spokesperson did not clarify the reason behind the decision.
The news arrived shortly after Nexstar kicked his late-night show off its U.S. stations.
“Nexstar’s owned and partner television stations affiliated with the ABC Television Network will preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live! for the foreseeable future beginning with tonight’s show,” the company said in a statement. “Nexstar strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets.”
Andrew Alford, president of Nexstar’s broadcasting division, called Kimmel’s comments “offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse.” “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, adding, “We have made the difficult decision to preempt his show in an effort to let cooler heads prevail as we move toward the resumption of respectful, constructive dialogue.”
During Kimmel’s Monday night monologue, the comedian criticized right-wingers for trying to “score political points” off Kirk’s murder, after they spent the weekend attempting to blame the left broadly, and trans people more specifically, for the shooting, well before the public knew much — if anything — about the shooter’s motives.
“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,” Kimmel said on his show.
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Fox News, for its part, took those comments to mean that Kimmel had suggested the “Kirk shooter was part of [the] ‘MAGA gang,’” though that’s not really what he said.
Earlier on Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr publicly called on licensed broadcasters to stop airing Kimmel’s show.
“I think that it’s really sort of 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, we 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,’” Carr said Wednesday, speaking with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson.
The decisions by Nexstar and ABC to silence Kimmel, over relatively innocuous comments, is the latest sign of how terrified major corporations and media companies have grown of the second Trump administration. The president and his lieutenants have made clear that they’re willing to leverage the full weight of the federal government against networks and their parent companies, especially if TV personalities or comedians on the network say things that annoy Trump.
“They were pissing themselves all day,” one ABC insider tells Rolling Stone. In the hours leading up to the decision to pull Kimmel, two sources familiar with the matter say, senior executives at ABC, Disney, and affiliates convened emergency meetings to figure out how to minimize the damage. Multiple execs felt that Kimmel had not actually said anything over the line, the two sources say, but the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed.
Even before Trump won the 2024 election, he and some of his closest advisers had plotted how to use the FCC and other powerful federal organs to punish late-night comics who Trump has hated for years.
Late last year, as Trump was getting ready to retake the presidency, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to settle his lawsuit against the company. The lawsuit, which was widely seen as unlikely to succeed, revolved around claims made by ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos about how Trump had been found liable for “rape.” (Trump was found liable for “sexual abuse.”)
In order to end the lawsuit, ABC News agreed to deliver millions to Trump’s presidential library foundation. The move concerned the news company’s employees at the time — and presaged part of a much larger trend, in which big corporations have lined up to settle Trump’s lawsuits with multi-million-dollar payments to his library fund.
Carr’s demand that licensed broadcasters refuse to air Kimmel’s show — and Nexstar’s quick compliance with this request — comes as Nexstar prepares a corporate merger that will require FCC approval.
Last week, Kimmel, a vocal critic of the Trump administration, advised his audience to respond with empathy in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. “Instead of the angry finger-pointing, can we just for one day agree that it is horrible and monstrous to shoot another human?” Kimmel wrote on Instagram on Sept. 10. “On behalf of my family, we send love to the Kirks and to all the children, parents, and innocents who fall victim to senseless gun violence.”
From Rolling Stone US
