ABC pulls Jimmy Kimmel off air for Charlie Kirk comments after FCC pressure

By JOHN KOBLIN, MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and BROOKS BARNES

ABC announced Wednesday evening that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show “indefinitely” after conservatives accused the longtime host of inaccurately describing the politics of the man who is accused of fatally shooting the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

The abrupt decision by the network, which is owned by the Walt Disney Co., came hours after the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, assailed Kimmel and suggested that his regulatory agency might take action against ABC because of remarks the host made on his Monday telecast.

The network did not explain its decision, but the sequence of events Wednesday amounted to an extraordinary exertion of political pressure on a major broadcast network by the Trump administration.

Many Democrats immediately criticized the move, with Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, calling it “outrageous.” But President Donald Trump, in a social media post from Windsor Castle in Britain, where he is traveling, described it as “Great News for America.”

The decision to suspend “Jimmy Kimmel Live” was made by Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, and Dana Walden, the company’s television chief, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private process.

The comments at the center of this week’s firestorm came during Kimmel’s opening monologue on Monday night. “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,” the host said.

Conservative activists castigated those comments, saying they mischaracterized the political beliefs of Tyler Robinson, the accused shooter. Prosecutors said Robinson had written in private messages about Kirk’s “hatred,” but authorities have not identified which of Kirk’s views the suspect found hateful; his mother told prosecutors that her son had recently shifted toward the political left and had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.”

Carr, in a an interview on a right-wing podcast Wednesday, said that Kimmel’s remarks were part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people,” and that the FCC was “going to have remedies that we can look at.”

“Frankly, when you see stuff like this — I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr told the podcast’s host, Benny Johnson. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Carr’s criticism of Kimmel was the latest attack against the media by the president and his administration. Trump himself sued ABC last year in a case that the network paid $16 million to settle. On Monday, the president filed a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times and four of its reporters.

This summer, Carr’s FCC approved a major merger involving CBS’s owner, Paramount, days after CBS agreed to pay $16 million to settle a separate lawsuit filed by the president.

CBS also canceled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” ending a network franchise for more than three decades after next May. CBS said the cancellation was for financial reasons, but many in the media industry have speculated that it was done to curry favor with the Trump administration while Paramount’s merger was pending. Colbert, like Kimmel, is frequently critical of Trump and his policies.

Kimmel had planned to address the backlash to his comments during his Wednesday telecast, according to two people familiar with the program. But Disney’s executives made the decision to suspend the show before taping began. The company’s board was not involved, according to one of the people with knowledge of the discussions inside Disney.

As FCC chair, Carr wields power over the broadcast licenses that are granted to local TV stations by the federal government. In the podcast interview Wednesday, Carr encouraged local ABC stations to “push back” and preempt coverage that does not serve “their local communities.”

“Frankly, 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,’ ” Carr said. (Comcast is the parent company of NBC.)

Shortly after Carr’s remarks, Nexstar, an owner of ABC affiliate stations around the country, said that it would preempt Kimmel’s program “for the foreseeable future” because of the host’s remarks. Nexstar recently announced that it planned to acquire a rival company in a $6.2 billion deal, which will be scrutinized by the FCC.

In a social media post Wednesday, Carr expressed approval for Nexstar’s decision to preempt Kimmel, thanking the company “for doing the right thing.” He added: “I hope that other broadcasters follow Nexstar’s lead.”

Late Wednesday, Sinclair, another owner of many local TV stations, said that it would also suspend Kimmel’s program, and called on Kimmel to apologize and “make a meaningful personal donation” to Kirk’s family and the activist’s political group, Turning Point USA.

Schumer denounced the pressure on ABC from the Trump administration as “despicable, disgusting, and against democratic values,” and compared it to the playbook of autocratic Chinese and Russian leaders.

“Trump and his allies seem to want to shut down speech that they don’t like to hear,” Schumer said on CNN. “That is not what democracies do. That is what autocracies do. And it doesn’t matter whether you agree with Kimmel or not, he has the right to free speech.”

Late on Wednesday, after ABC pulled Kimmel, Carr went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program and described the actions by Nexstar and Sinclair as “unprecedented.”

“I’m very glad to see that America’s broadcasters are standing up to serve the interests of their community,” Carr said. “We don’t just have this progressive foie gras coming out from New York and Hollywood.”

He added: “This is an important turning point.”