Jimmy Kimmel, Broadcast Media, and Free Speech

No president likes criticism. However, Donald Trump may be the only president who has found a commercial way to suppress it.

In refusing to enjoin The Washington Post and The New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black, ever a guardian of our liberties, stated his position with characteristic eloquence: “In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.”

Black missed the point. There is a path, however, where the press can serve the governors “by indirections, find directions out.” And it’s called money.

The televised media are in rapacious consolidation mode, and Trump is a necessary player in their achieving the objective. Trump, seasoned in making a deal, is willing if they muzzle his critics. He threatens to use the formerly independent agencies to block their expansion if they don’t.

Disney-owned ABC reminded us of this the other day when it decided to take its late-night show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, off the air following conservative backlash to comments Kimmel made on air in the wake of the despicable murder of right-wing advocate Charlie Kirk. However you want to slice it, murder is the most heinous of crimes.

A network spokesperson did not say the show would be preempted “indefinitely.” The most prominent owner of ABC-affiliated stations, Nexstar, said earlier that Kimmel’s program would be replaced, linking the move to statements the late-night show host made about the prior week’s killing of Kirk.

“Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located,” Andrew Alford, president of Nexstar’s broadcasting division, wrote. Nexstar owns ABC stations in more than 30 markets.

Kimmel’s sin was that on his show, he said:

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. 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.

Kimmel then played a clip of Trump’s response to a reporter who asked how the president was holding up after Kirk’s death. Trump answered: “I think very well. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years, and it’s gonna be a beauty.”

Tyler Robinson, the suspect in Kirk’s shooting, does not appear to be ideologically conservative or a supporter of President Donald Trump. Kimmel got it wrong there. According to charging documents from prosecutors released earlier this week, Robinson sent a message to his transgender roommate revealing the twisted motive that he “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred.” The motive may not have been political at all. From all that appears, it was a crime of pathological passion.

Kimmel’s contract with ABC was set to expire next year, and there was speculation about whether it would be renewed, particularly after the announcement in July that CBS owner Paramount would cancel its top-rated late-night show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Trump had a dubious precedent. Nixon sought to pull broadcast licenses of affiliates of The Washington Post, which was threatening him on Watergate. As Nixon learned, removing the license of a national network for political reasons is no easy matter, not only because of the First Amendment but because there is no single license for a national television network. Licenses are granted to individual local stations, and ABC doesn’t even own most stations that broadcast its content across the country. It is highly unusual for any station’s license to be taken away for any reason, much less for a political vendetta.

But, in the last analysis, it’s all about money. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr criticized Kimmel earlier Wednesday, suggesting the federal agency could pull broadcast licenses owned by parent company Disney.

Carr said on a right-wing podcast that Kimmel’s words were part of a “concerted effort to try 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,” he said, “I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there will be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Carr elaborated: “There’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters. And 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…’ We’re not gonna run Kimmel anymore…because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.’”

Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns ABC affiliates in about 30 markets, including Washington, was soon to read the handwriting on the wall, criticizing Kimmel and calling upon the comedian to apologize to Kirk’s family.

The largest operator of ABC affiliates, Nexstar, said it would stop airing Kimmel’s show on its stations, and then ABC suspended it.

The FCC is set to review Nexstar’s proposed $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna, another local television behemoth. That deal, which is expected to close by the second half of 2026, would also require the FCC to relax the national ownership cap that limits how many stations one company can own in the United States. Carr has suggested that he is willing to raise or eliminate the cap.

Trump has been spoiling for Kimmel. When CBS pulled Stephen Colbert off the air in July, Trump told reporters that comedians Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel would be “next. They’re going to be going. I hear they’re going to be going.”

On July 18, in a Truth Social post celebrating Colbert’s cancellation. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert!” His reaction to Kimmel’s firing last week bristled with relish: “Great News for America! The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible.” Having tasted blood, he then savored more: “That leaves Jimmy [Fallon] and Seth [Meyers], two total losers, on Fake News NBC.” Then, his coda, “Do it NBC!!!”

It’s not a bridge too far. CBS and ABC have “bowed and sued for grace with suppliant knee,” and NBC may be next.

Trump said Kimmel was fired because of poor ratings during a news conference on Sept. 18 in Buckinghamshire. In fact, Chris Hayes of MSNBC pointed out that Kimmel has one of the top late-night television shows, attracting younger viewers in the 18–49-year-old demographic. He delivers Trump-skewering monologues. His YouTube channel has more than 20 million subscribers.

ABC’s capitulation is likely to be seen by the network’s critics as another display of cowardice. In December, the company agreed to put $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit involving a statement by George Stephanopoulos about Trump that channeled one made by a federal judge.

Libel suits, that potent weapon against press freedoms, abound. Trump filed a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times for what he said was its “decades-long method of lying about your Favorite President (ME!), my family, business, the America First Movement, MAGA, and our Nation as a whole.” Trump has had it in for the Times for decades, and the Times has returned the compliment.    This is but another foray by Trump to take a major media organization to court, following his lawsuits against ABC and CBS that led to favorable settlements and his action against The Wall Street Journal, arising out of the Epstein scandal. A judge tossed out the suit, and the Times is unlikely to cave if an appellate court overrules them. The Supreme Court precedent, New York Times v. Sullivan, argues that proving libel against a public official is a heavy lift. But Clarence Thomas and some of the other hard-right justices have suggested that the Court take another look at the Sullivan case. If they could overrule the super-precedent Roe v. Wade, Sullivan should be easy peasy.

George Orwell famously critiqued the misuse of the word “fascism” in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, stating it had “now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” His concern was not that real fascism ceased to exist, but that the term was so carelessly and widely applied that it became a meaningless term of abuse. 

Trump has, through artifice, shredded the First Amendment, and this is more troubling than “not desirable.” Political satire on late-night television is one of the most effective counters to autocracy. Satire gets under Trump’s skin. The country’s Founders anticipated that someday someone might try to abridge press freedoms, so they gave us the First Amendment. What they did not expect was that in a more technologically advanced society, someone might get away with it.    

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