ABC’s Decision to Pull Jimmy Kimmel Live! Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

 

By Stacy Lee Kong

 
 

Image: Disney/Mark Seliger

 

During Monday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Jimmy Kimmel made a fairly standard joke about the MAGA reaction to right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk’s murder: “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. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving,” he said. “On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this.” 

Then, the show cut to a clip of a scrum at the White House, where a reporter offered their condolences and asked U.S. President Donald Trump how he was doing. Trump replied, “I think very good, and by the way, right there where you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House.”

Back to Kimmel to deliver his punchline: “Yes, he’s at the fourth stage of grief: construction. Demolition, construction. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish, OK?”

It was… anodyne? At most? But the American government wasn’t a fan of Kimmel’s ribbing, mild as it was. On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr threatened to “take action” against ABC and its parent company, Disney, over the joke, which he described as “the sickest conduct possible.” (By comparison, last week a Fox News anchor said homeless people experiencing mental illness should be executed. Oh, and Kirk himself variously referred to queer people as freaks, called Islam “the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America” and referred to Muslim communities as “a threat to America.” He said, hypothetically, that if his daughter became pregnant after being raped, he’d want her to deliver the baby, even if she was as young as 10. He had lots to say about how “Jewish donors” control cultural institutions and non-profits. And of course, he loved invoking the spectre of “Black crime,” claimed Haitian immigrants were “raping your women and hunting you down at night” and characterized Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson as  not having “the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. [They] had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.” Just, you know, as we’re thinking about conduct.)

@mokoab Collectively these station groups have more viewers across the country than the networks. Studies also show people trust local news more than network news. #jimmykimmel #kimmel #abc ♬ original sound - Mona Kosar Abdi

ANYWAY. Then, two major owners of local news stations across America—Nexstar Media Group Inc. and Sinclair Broadcast Group—released statements criticizing Kimmel’s language. Within hours, ABC announced that the show would be pulled from the airwaves indefinitely, a move Trump praised on Truth Social, saying, “congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.” He also called for more censorship, urging NBC to pull Seth Myers and Jimmy Fallon from the air, too. 

And then… we all kind of freaked out. Because there’s no denying it now, right? We’re at the stage of fascism where the U.S. government can threaten and intimidate a media organization into silencing a comedian for saying something they didn’t like. Well actually, I think we’re past that stage. So yeah, it is scary to see state actors and ultra-wealthy conservatives join forces to exert control in this way. But is it new? Not really.

Right-wing politicians and ultra-wealthy moguls have long been colluding to do exactly this

There has literally been a decades-long conservative ‘master plan’ to dismantle the ‘American welfare state,’ which was largely established via the New Deal (Franklin D. Roosevelt’s post-Great Depression economic, social and political reforms) and the Great Society (Lyndon B. Johnson’s own set of reforms, which were intended to build on the New Deal), and by extension reverse as many civil rights protections and progressive policies as possible. As Guardian columnist David Sirota explained last year, in 1971, future Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce imploring “corporations and oligarchs to be ‘far more aggressive’ in influencing the political system,” Sirota wrote. And wouldn’t you know, executives from some of the country’s biggest companies, including General Electric, Phillips Petroleum, Amway and United States Steel, listened! But it’s possible no one had as big an impact as Joseph Coors, the former president of Coors Brewing Company. Inspired by Powell’s advice, he provided seed funding to establish the Heritage Foundation, the publisher behind Project 2025 and a similar document published in 1981 called Mandate for Leadership, which became a “policy blueprint” for Ronald Reagan’s administration. He also funded other think tanks, and a legal non-profit that tackles what it sees as examples of government overreach. (That is, laws that spell out protected groups that should be shielded from discrimination, and restricting corporations’ ability to engage in unethical practices.)

Coors also exerted control in other ways; according to a 2024 article in indie news outlet Colorado Newsline, he would advocate  for “the same policies pushed by Heritage in the original Mandate… through what The Guardian termed ‘backstairs influence.’ Coors was a member of Reagan’s ‘kitchen cabinet’ of advisors, and he engineered the appointment of a fellow Coloradan, Anne Gorsuch, mother of a future Supreme Court justice, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, which she set out to dismantle from the inside. ‘The conservative movement simply would not exist in the form it does today without the profound influence of Joe Coors,’ the Wall Street Journal said in an obituary when Coors died at 85 in 2003.”

And he’s just one example. Similar backchannel machinations happen across industries—and yes, that means they happen in media, too. In fact, remember Sinclair Broadcast Group? Well, that conservative-leaning conglomerate owns the Tennis Channel and owns, operates or provides services to 178 local news stations, including 38 local ABC affiliates. Over the past 20 or so years, it has steadily, strategically bought up local news stations across the country, then imposed a conservative political agenda on their coverage. You might remember when the company went viral in 2018 for forcing its anchors to read a statement condemning ‘fake news,’ which said in part, “We’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.” (Here’s a very dystopian supercut; thank you Deadspin.) Well, it’s actually so much worse than that. Also in 2018, a study published in American Political Science Review found that, when the company buys a new station, coverage of national news increases, and there’s a clear rightward shift. The strategy only became more evident in 2021, when it created a ‘National Desk’ that produces national and regional news segments, which it syndicates across its channels. According to The Guardian, “the company distributed stories to its local news websites based on videos manipulated by the Republican National Committee to, in one case, make it look as though President Biden soiled himself… Sinclair stations also promote misleading concerns about migrants committing crime. In June, Fox-28 Savannah, a Sinclair-owned station, ran a National Desk story that reported, without attribution: ‘New government data shows that the number of migrants with criminal records crossing the border has spiked in the previous three years.’” 

So, to recap: Sinclair has been consolidating ownership of American local news stations since the early 2000s, then subsequently seeding their coverage with conservative talking points and disinformation. They’ve also been lobbying the FCC to loosen the rules around media ownership alongside Nexstar; this would allow these companies to buy up even more local stations, reaching even more people in small and mid-sized markets, who tend to perceive those stations as more trustworthy than the big networks. Not great!

But, neoliberals are not that interested in protecting free speech, either

Here’s an important thing to note, though. As we (rightfully) point out all the many ways conservatives are infringing on freedom of speech, I’m seeing this tendency to position liberals as champions of freedom. That is not real life. Yes, I know a group of Democratic lawmakers just announced that they’d introduce a bill that would “bolster legal protections for people targeted by the government for speaking freely,” but unfortunately I also know that, over the past two years, ostensibly progressive companies, institutions and media outlets, not to mention the then-Democratic president, steadily infringed on Americans’ right to freely express their dissent when it came to naming Israel’s actions in Palestine as genocide. 

A short list: Post-secondary institutions literally called in riot gear-wearing cops to quash student protests. They installed snipers on the rooftops (snipers?!), and the general public was supposed to perceive that show of force as justified when their targets were largely young people holding signs. Our media outlets often refuse to even name Palestine and newsroom leaders don’t tend to acknowledge the death of our international colleagues, much less cover Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing. And, despite growing support for the Palestinian cause among their constituents, Democratic politicians still refuse to reflect that shift in their policies. At the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) summer meeting, the DNC Resolutions Committee voted against recognizing the State of Palestine and suspending military aid to Israel. If we look specifically at free speech, I haven’t seen many left-wing politicians speak out in support of Mahmoud Khalil, who has been targeted by the Trump administration for his advocacy around Palestine, including being detained by ICE and, as of this week, facing deportation.

Then there’s the 2024 bill that banned TikTok in America, which is different from Trump’s 2020 executive order that was blocked by a federal judge and eventually revoked by the Biden administration. The current bill had broad, bipartisan support. It was co-sponsored by a Democrat and Republican, passed by a Democratic Senate, signed into law by President Joe Biden in April 2024—and was explicitly connected to the amount of pro-Palestine content on the app. According to a Mashable article on the ban, “at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, former U.S. congressman Mike Gallagher, who introduced a TikTok ban bill in 2023, claimed the issue gained traction after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel. ‘People started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform, and our bill had legs again,’ Gallagher said, implying that the content in response to the attack was a driving factor behind renewed efforts to ban the app. And this isn't something the lawmakers have been hiding. ‘There have been multiple different instances where high-ranking U.S. officials or former-U.S. officials, like former-Governor Mitt Romney, made very explicit comments saying that the TikTok problem is closely related to the Palestine problem,’ Eric Sype, a national organizer for 7amleh, or the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, told Mashable.” 

Or, let’s look a little further back. In 2015, The Intercept reported that following anti-police protests in Ferguson, Missouri the previous summer, the Department of Homeland Security under then President Barack Obama began monitoring the Black Lives Matter movement and its activists via social media surveillance. And it wasn’t restricted to actual protests; the government also collected and circulated information about even the most innocuous events, including silent vigils, a funk music parade and a walk to end breast cancer. As the outlet notes, “the tracking of domestic protest groups and peaceful gatherings raises questions over whether DHS is chilling the exercise of First Amendment rights, and over whether the department, created in large part to combat terrorism, has allowed its mission to creep beyond the bounds of useful security activities as its annual budget has grown beyond $60 billion.”

I’m not pointing this out to downplay Republican censorship, or to imply that politicians and corporations continuing to exert control over what people can say is anything other an urgent threat to both American freedom and democracy, and also international stability. It’s definitely not okay that this is happening. It’s just, this has been happening for so much longer than Vhris Hayes and other liberal commentators seem to want to acknowledge, or even understand. But I guess that makes sense, because it has been happening to marginalized people, and now white men are realizing they are also subject to authoritarianism, and the politics of civility won’t protect them.

I’m not sure how useful it is to think about what could have been, but I do wish they’d been paying attention earlier, because the warning signs have been right there. So no, ABC pulling Kimmel’s show wasn’t the canary in the coal mine that indicated the poison of authoritarianism and infringements on free speech. That canary passed out at least a decade ago.

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Politics, MediaStacy Lee KongJimmy Kimmel, Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Palestine, Israel, Gaza Strip