I wanted to go to early (6 a.m.) prayer this morning, but schedules being what they are, I didn’t properly prepare last night, which led to me not have time to get to the church. So you, readers, get me this morning, and you’ll be my prayers.
The other day, I was disproved in my assertion that writing about Charlie Kirk’s killer in terms other than a sky-screaming, mentally-ill, Soros-employed libtard, while failing to hew to the Kirk hagiography, might get me canceled. Of course, some of the trolls came out in the comments, and I thank them for their effort. But I am still here.
Jimmy Kimmel is not here. I mean, physically, he’s not here. I have never met him, and it would be weird to write this with him sitting beside me at my desk while I sip my coffee. We all know the story of the day, that Kimmel’s late night show on ABC has been suspended, indefinitely. This was done at the red-stained hands of Disney, run by the Benjamin Netanyahu of American entertainment, Bob Iger.1
I do not grieve for Kimmel. He’s reportedly worth $50 million, and makes $15 to $20 million a year from his television and other gigs. He will do just fine, and I’m sure he’ll land on his feet from being sidelined. If he can’t do late night, Kimmel could have a career as a lobbyist, or a political activist. He could go back to pure comedy, or writing. He could get a gig playing bass clarinet. I do not worry for Jimmy Kimmel having some kind of fruitful career. He’s a talented guy.
He also knows his audience. On Monday night, Kimmel made a reference to the politicizing of Charlie Kirk’s murder, and the rush to establish the political bona-fides of his killer. Being a progressive himself, this was framed as a joke, how we’ve reached a new “low” because Republicans are pulling out all the stops to ensure nobody believes Tyler Robinson is one of “them.” As in some kind of MAGA-groyper-far-right drooling schmuck.
If you haven’t seen it, here’s the joke: “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.” Ha, ha, I don’t even think that was funny to Kimmel’s audience, but like the writers and talking heads who believe it, it’s worth a forced grin.
If the joke was a non-thing to Kimmel and his audience, then what happened? What caused the cancellation, making Kimmel the latest in a string of victims who remain alive, burying the news that Charlie Kirk is still murdered, his widow still without a husband, and his two young children without a father?
The narrative being pitched is that the Chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, threatened ABC with revoking its broadcast license. President Donald Trump also got in the act, throwing the “hate” word around in answering a reporter’s question regarding Attorney General Pam Bondi’s war on “hate speech.” The reporter was from ABC, which Trump said engaged in “hate,” and trolled the reporter, “maybe they’ll go after you.” Carr, for his part, warned “there are avenues here for the FCC,” adding “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.”
I suppose if ABC had not pulled the plug, brave affiliates and the network could be seen standing up to the jackbooted MAGA thugs, while Kimmel set his jaw, refusing to apologize for his poorly written joke. (Kimmel has refused to apologize.) But we can now either say that Bob Iger bowed to pressure from the Trump MAGA thugs, or that Iger is a MAGA himself. Either way, Kimmel becomes the victim.
Except none of it works this way at all. Are you surprised? I mean how many times does the media write about things they know nothing about, and gets it totally wrong. But this is something they know everything about, so if they get it wrong, we must presume they are being deliberately obtuse.
The FCC does not license television networks. It licenses individual stations. Those stations maintain broadcast licenses, which, yes, the FCC can threaten to suspend. But there are books filled with rules and regulations on how that happens. Chairman Carr can’t just wave a magic wand and poof, every ABC affiliate is off the air. There is a “hard way,” by threatening to non-renew or suspend broadcast licenses, which would take years, court cases, and likely lose on its merits as a heinous violation of First Amendment rights. Carr knows this. The stations know this. ABC knows this. Bob Iger knows this.
The FCC has no power to silence Jimmy Kimmel. If the audience likes him, he can say whatever political thing comes into his head, as long as he avoids pornography, obscenity, and calls for violent overthrow of the United States government (that last one might be protected by the First Amendment). He can publicly burn an American flag on his show if he wanted. He can drape himself in the Palestinian flag and shout “from the river to the sea!” live in front of a synagogue. He can do all kinds of provocative, pointless political things and the FCC is powerless to stop him.
No, friends, what Kimmel ran into is television business. The decision to remove Kimmel came from people who don’t watch his show, or even if they did, they are not part of his “audience,” as in the people he writes and performs for. But as many people who attain positions of cultural influence, Kimmel didn’t think he needed those people who don’t watch his show. Now he knows, he does, which everyone in television since Milton Berle already knew, if they had not forgotten.
Before Chairman Carr made his remarks, two syndicates that own a total of 46 ABC affiliate stations decided not to air Jimmy Kimmel because of viewer backlash over the remarks. These people probably didn’t watch Kimmel to begin with, but they are eyeballs at the stations where they live. Nexstar and Sinclair service markets heavy on rural and small-metro markets in the Northeast and Midwest, and the South, respectively. They also include some larger cities like Washington, D.C., Portland, Seattle, and St. Louis.
Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t care if people in Little Rock, Asheville-Greenville-Spartanburg, Birmingham-Tuscaloosa-Anniston (Alabama), Abilene and Amarillo (Texas), Tulsa, Chattanooga, or Rochester (New York) watch his show. But the ABC affiliates in those cities do care if their viewers vow not to watch ABC because of Kimmel. The stations survive on ratings, from their news, weather, sports and local shows. If viewers tune out from the late news, and watch the competition, or Newsmax, then their ratings decline, and they lose revenue, i.e. money.
If two syndicates that own 46 ABC stations decide to bring a message to ABC, and ABC snubs them, then the next time ABC wants something (money) from them, the stations will be looking for other arrangements, networks, or relationships. Kimmel may not care about viewers in those cities, but ABC certainly does, because ratings on other shows is what brings in the moola.
Many people in politics sort of know this, but don’t understand it apart from dealing with media specialists and consultants. You know who does know it? Donald Trump.
Trump understands and even obsesses over ratings. Many times he’s roundly dismissed and criticized for doing so, because it ignores the message to troll the messenger saying they have poor ratings. But Trump is not wrong, in that’s the way entertainment works. It’s a business, and if a performer angers people who don’t even watch the show, it can lead to the show being yanked, and the performer along with all the people on the show who don’t make $15 million getting pink slips. Jimmy Kimmel’s decision to not apologize has consequences, if not for him, for all the people he just ensured have no paychecks. I hope he does what David Letterman did, and pay them from his pocket.
It’s wrong for the FCC to play crass politics with a business decision that Nexstar and Sinclair had already made because their viewers had simply had it with having figures like Jimmy Kimmel show their personal progressive politics down their throats. Again, these people probably don’t watch Kimmel, but they have to read about what he does and says in the fawning media. Well, they probably don’t read the fawning media, but they hear about it from Newsmax and whatever podcasts they do watch.
Being sick of it, they complained to their local stations, and the stations heard them. Many of the stations are staffed and run by people who agree, because, you know, those folks behind the cameras, and even some in front of the camera, live in the community and share the values of their neighbors.
Here’s the point. The First Amendment protects Jimmy Kimmel, the local stations, ABC, and all the networks from having the government threaten them or shut them down for political speech, or even “hate speech.” But in America, broadcast television is (mostly) a business. If Kimmel wants to not bow to advertisers, ratings, money, and Bob Iger-types, he can go on PBS. Wait a minute, PBS lost its federal funding for being too liberal. Oh well, he can go on donor-supported PBS and people can send cash to pay the light bills. I’ll tell you what he won’t get from donors: $15 million.
The Jimmy Kimmel effect is to make him a victim, when he has really lost nothing but a daily gig to share mid jokes and pump liberal causes, while he gets paid a lot of money to do so. The real victim is Charlie Kirk, who was murdered for his own political speech, and made money (a good amount—he was a millionaire—but not nearly what Kimmel earned) doing it. Kirk’s family will do fine, financially, but they won’t have him. Meanwhile, everyone at Turning Point USA will continue to have a job, while the production, writing, promotions, staff and producers at Jimmy Kimmel Live likely won’t get paid.
Possibly, Kimmel could agree to “lower the temperature” of his show (like he demanded on social media right after Kirk’s assassination), and apologize on air, as Bob Iger would like. That would probably get him back on the air. But now he’s backed into a corner, having become the victim who spoke truth to power. Not that the folks without a job who worked with him care about that, but the omelet must be made, damn the broken eggs.
Kimmel is no victim here. The FCC is meddling in politics, which it should not do, but this is Trump’s administration, so should we expect different? The decision was not due to government pressure, regardless of what quotes CNN manages to dredge up by a producer calling his drinking buddy, about how television stations fear FCC fines. Yes, they do fear it, but it’s not as easy as you think to get one. I personally witnessed an assistant director leave his console mic hot (which is used to communicate with the talent via IEM) and mistakenly routed to the broadcast utter the F-word on air during a newscast with no delay cutoff. That will catch the station a fine, guaranteed. It also cost said assistant director their job.
The Jimmy Kimmel effect is the opposite. He says what he wants, and everyone else loses their job.
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By that Netyanyahu remark, I mean that Bob Iger keeps going out to pasture, only to be brought back in by popular demand, and the inability of Disney to grow a useful CEO. Israelis understand this problem in their politics, hence they’ve had Netanyahu again, and again, and again.
Good explainer of the business aspects of broadcast TV and how the FCC can affect it.
Colbert was a more “plausible deniability” case as there was no temporal correlation with overt interference. You can plausibly accept that was (mostly) a business decision (give or take the merger deal that needed federal approval).
And you make a fair point that stations in maga areas were going to take heat and may have needed to act individually to not risk local boycotts. It’s cancellation at a local level (much like how lefties cancelled in the last decade). It’s stupid now as it’s been stupid for the last decade, but stupid is what is expected.
Nonetheless, this is still imo an overt transgression of 1A. That the same ultimate business decision may have been made, is irrelevant. You kill a guy on his deathbed, that’s still murder. It was made now, literally immediately after a direct threat from the chair of FCC, an agency empowered by the Communications Act of Congress. If this is not flouting of 1A, I am not sure what flouting of 1 A needs to look like.
Thanks for the well written explanation of the whole matter. Licensing of individual stations, holding company profits and local audience preferences are what really matter.
I do not believe the lie Jimmy Kimmel told on air was a matter of national interest. The FCC Commissioner should have just left it to ABC and its affiliates to deal with. He might have thought he would please the President, but he just gave more ammo to the haters. President Trump should suggest he resign.
Kimmel would probably been canceled soon, depending on his contract. His viewership was slipping badly. https://www.businessinsider.com/jimmy-kimmel-suspension-fragility-late-night-tv-2025-9
The backlash from Kimmel's lies and biases has probably given ABC reasonable cause to get out of the contract relatively cheaply.