Late-night cockroach Jimmy Kimmel is expected to crawl back onto the broadcast airwaves Tuesday night, nearly a week after ABC parent Walt Disney Company “indefinitely” suspended the leftist “comedian” for hitting a new low on his show.
While his liberal late-night pals and Democrat Party allies inanely hail Kimmel’s return as a triumph over speech suppression, a prominent conservative civil rights attorney tells The Federalist that Kimmel put himself and his employer between a rock and a hard place. Kimmel’s nightly bacchanal of leftist partisan politics puts Disney, ABC, and its affiliates in regulatory peril under long-standing broadcast laws.
“Welcome to the Cracker Barrel club,” Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights, told The Federalist in an interview Monday shortly after ABC announced the return of Jimmy Kimmel Live! to its late-night lineup.
Suhr was referring to the popular down-home themed restaurant that faced significant backlash after announcing a radical change to its famous decor and logo. Feeling the heat from loyal customers, Cracker Barrel eventually retreated.
But Disney is retreating from its retreat.
‘Emotional Moment’
Disney yanked Kimmel from the airwaves after he crudely and falsely attempted to link conservative icon Charlie Kirk’s assassin to “the MAGA gang.”
“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 claimed last week in his opening monologue. Kirk’s accused killer, as has been roundly documented, is a far-left ideologue who was shacking up with a man pretending to be a woman.
Disney said it suspended production “to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country.” Apparently, a day after millions tuned into Kirk’s packed-stadium memorial service, the “emotional moment for our country” has passed in the eyes of the amusement giant.
It seems Disney believes poor Jimmy has suffered enough. Kimmel will “address the matter” during the taping of his Tuesday show, a “person familiar with the matter” told CNBC. He does not intend to apologize, sources told The New York Post.
Disney chloroformed Jimmy Kimmel Live! in the wake of Nexstar Media Group’s decision to preempt the late-night show. Nexstar, the largest broadcast TV station owner in the U.S., owns and operates 200-plus stations nationwide, including 28 ABC affiliates. Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation’s largest ABC affiliate owner, also took Kimmel off the air. The media giant said Monday that it will preempt the late-night show on its 36 ABC stations.
As of Monday night Nexstar had not announced its plans.
‘Uniquely Pervasive Presence’
Hundreds of leftie celebrities sprang to Kimmel’s defense in an open letter penned by the far-left American Civil Liberties Union. They called Disney’s decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel Live! “a dark moment for freedom of speech in our nation.”
Democrats and mashed potato spine Republicans have wagged their fingers at Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr. The Trump appointee has “threatened” to enforce federal communications laws.
At an event in New York City Monday, Carr said broadcast television is bound by stricter operational standards than cable TV and other communication forms. Local broadcast licenses come with conditions, a longstanding public interest standard. A lot of Americans don’t believe Kimmel met that standard — and hasn’t for some time.
Suhr said media companies that operate on publicly-owned airwaves can — and have — paid the price for crossing the line. The attorney noted comedian George Carlin’s famous monologue on the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” East Coast radio station WBAI-FM aired a version of the filthy bit on an early afternoon in 1973. The FCC ruled that the segment was indecent and threatened sanctions on the station’s owner.
Five years later, in July 1978, The U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in the landmark Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation, which reversed a lower court opinion and upheld the FCC’s authority to set language guidelines. Justice John Paul Stevens, the author of the majority opinion, noted the necessity of such regulation because of broadcast media’s “uniquely pervasive presence in the lives of all Americans.”
‘Years of Unchecked Excesses’
Following Disney’s suspension of Kimmel’s show, the Center for American Rights issued a two-page report titled, “Myth-busting on the FCC and Jimmy Kimmel.”
Carr’s critics in particular have pushed the assertion that the FCC chairman has been engaging in unconstitutional “jawboning” of ABC in the Kimmel affair. The accusation is that Carr’s comments about potential license violations amount to implicit threats against speech that the Trump administration doesn’t like.
Beyond the fact that the FCC has the authority to enforce FCC laws, the Center for American Rights asks why the same critics didn’t speak up when former Democrat New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration actually jawboned financial services companies to debank the National Rifle Association. In that instance, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the head of the New York State Department of Financial Services abused his power in threatening enforcement actions against third-party financial companies “to punish or suppress the NRA’s gun-promotion advocacy.”
One of the more dubious charges levied by Kimmel’s defenders is that the FCC’s public-interest standard violates the First Amendment. As the center notes, the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently said, “No one has a First Amendment right to a license or to monopolize a radio frequency; to deny a station license because ‘the public interest’ requires it ‘is not a denial of free speech.’”
And while Kimmel’s cheerleaders say the FCC should ignore the host’s blatantly false assertions as an isolated incident, the two-pager notes the latest cause célèbre was no accident or one-off matter.
“It was the outgrowth of years of unchecked excesses by Kimmel as he hijacked the airwaves for his personal agenda,” the report states. Kimmel and his fellow leftist late-nighters have turned their comedy shows into comms centers for the Democratic Party and its leading politicians.
‘Unlawful Politicking’
Recently, the Center for American Rights filed a complaint against Kimmel for hosting multiple Democratic politicians on his show without revealing that he had raised funds for or personally donated to their campaigns. The center accuses Kimmel of “unlawful politicking” in violation of the FCC’s long-standing conflict-of-interest standard.
Astoundingly, the Media Research Center found that 105 out of 106 late-night comedy show guests talking politics in the first six months of this year were liberals, with 98 percent of their jokes during the 2024 campaign favoring Harris over Trump.
Weak-kneed Republicans, insisting they are standing on principle, have sounded the alarms that Carr’s efforts to hold egregiously biased broadcast networks accountable will only spur liberals to “go after” conservative media outlets when Democrats are back in power. As the center notes, and dunce Republicans should get by now, liberals have repeatedly used the government and the FCC to target and stifle conservative voices. According to the center:
- In 2023, the Biden-era FCC opened an unprecedented public comment period on whether to deny a license to a Fox affiliate in Philadelphia based on complaints from liberal activist groups about Fox News Channel.
- In 2018, a dozen Democratic U.S. senators sent a letter to the FCC requesting administrative action against Sinclair Broadcasting, charging that it had violated the FCC’s news distortion doctrine.
- In 2004, 20 Democratic U.S. senators sent a letter to the FCC requesting action against Sinclair Broadcasting for its desire to run a documentary on John Kerry’s controversial Vietnam war service.
- More broadly, the Obama and Biden Administrations used government to target conservative speakers on a range of issues, from pro-life FACE Act prosecutions to Covid-19 and J-6. “
“If we stand down when we are in power, the Left is not going to respect that precedent and stand down in the future when it returns to power. They’re going to come after us again regardless,” the report warns.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
