Jimmy Kimmel’s Charlie Kirk remarks that led to ABC suspension
Jimmy Kimmel’s comments on the Charlie Kirk shooting sparked backlash and led Walt Disney’s ABC to suspend his show indefinitely.
When we were kids, we used to talk about life in “scary” places like Russia. “You can’t even say anything critical there,” we’d exclaim, “or the government will throw you in jail!”
It seemed like such a frightening, faraway idea, a country where merely speaking could bring on government persecution.
Years later, in 1986, I went to Russia on assignment and witnessed this life firsthand. I had a translator who warned me not to speak English to her when we were in public. On a train, she rolled her eyes in the direction of a man, and later whispered to me, “KGB.”
I also traveled extensively in East Germany, then part of the Communist bloc, where people refused to engage in conversation about politics for fear of reprisal — even though we were in restaurants or sporting venues.
“Come on,” I would say, “there’s nobody listening.” But they stayed silent.
That’s what fear of government does. It chills expression. It freezes thought.
Jimmy Kimmel fallout
We are coming off a week where even some conservatives were stunned at the sudden suspension of ABC’s long-running “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show after the host made disparaging remarks about President Donald Trump and his supporters in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder.
““We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang,” Kimmel said. He went on to suggest that Trump supporters were “working very hard to capitalize on the murder.”
It was a callous, insensitive and unfunny comment — it was also inaccurate — in other words, like a lot of things you hear on the airwaves and the internet these days.
But remember, cable TV and social media are not governed by the Federal Communications Commission.
Network TV — like ABC — is.
So once Kimmel doubled down the following night — and reportedly planned to defend his position again on the next show — the Disney company, which owns ABC, got nervous.
Then, when FCC chairman Brendan Carr suggested the government might take action if Disney didn’t, “nervousness” jumped to a whole new level.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said on a podcast Wednesday. “These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
The easy way or the hard way? All that was missing was the baseball bat.
Disney got the hint. So did Sinclair and Nextar, the two biggest TV station owners in the nation. Both of them are considering huge acquisitions that would require FCC approval. They promptly announced they would be preempting Kimmel’s show for the foreseeable future.
Then Disney suspended the show indefinitely.
Kimmel, who had been on the air for 23 years, was gone in less than 24 hours.
You may cheer that. You may boo that.
Either way, it should worry you.
Nobody wins this battle
Remember, what goes around comes around. Liberals can’t be shocked by the Kimmel deal. It wasn’t long ago that Democrats under the Biden administration were encouraging social media to shut down critics of their policies. People lost their platforms if they said the wrong thing about COVID-19 vaccines. People were fired for comments regarding George Floyd that were no more insulting than things being said about Charlie Kirk today.
One NBA announcer was fired from a radio job he’d held for 32 years for tweeting a message of “All Lives Matter …”
Conservatives back then were loudly critical of this behavior. As recently as last February, Vice President JD Vance was saying such cancel culture days were gone.
“Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth,” Vance said at the Munich Security conference. “… the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite.”
Instead, it’s taking it further. Carr’s comments clearly had an effect on Disney’s decision, whether they want to say so or not. And we’ve already seen what approval for a multibillion merger might do to a corporation’s behavior (witness suspicions over Paramount’s merger with Skydance and the decision to dismiss Stephen Colbert).
Look, folks, this is bad on the left and bad on the right. We are all smart enough to ignore dumb comments on TV. We all have remote controls. We shouldn’t have to worry about lightning bolts coming from the government sky if someone criticizes it. Kimmel’s comments were awful and misplaced. But considering you hear far worse on cable TV with no repercussions, erasing someone like him almost seems pointless.
But it’s not harmless. Those happy with Kimmel’s suspension hoist the argument that it was strictly a business decision. But it was a business decision made under a subtle threat of retaliation (“The easy way or the hard way”) and a general “You better watch it” atmosphere of a government.
And when the government starts threatening the speech of the people, you know what it looks like? It looks like those countries we used to whisper about as kids. And we were right. It is scary.
Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him @mitchalbom.