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Jimmy Kimmel didn’t read the electronic room.
And it cost him his job.
Now that Disney and ABC executives, after huddling all day, pulled the plug as Kimmel was preparing for Wednesday night’s show, it’s hard to see him returning. The brass said he’s suspended “indefinitely,” meaning “lose our number.”
There are serious free speech concerns here, especially against the backdrop of government pressure.
Nexstar, an ABC affiliate that owns NewsNation, also said it would preempt the show on its stations.
DISNEY PULLS JIMMY KIMMEL’S SHOW AFTER COMMENTS ON CHARLIE KIRK’S ASSASSINATION AND MORE TOP HEADLINES
With Stephen Colbert confined to a final season at CBS, that would mean two of the three late-night hosts on broadcast networks would be banished. Both are social commentators, of course, and fervently anti-Trump.
One happy camper is Donald Trump, who has been feuding with Kimmel. (I played a small role in that, as we’ll see in a moment.)
Trump congratulated ABC on having the “courage” to boot Jimmy. When the Colbert news broke, the president predicted that Kimmel would be next.
What Kimmel said, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, isn’t that awful. It’s about the killer, not, as some early headlines had it, Charlie himself.
Right after the shooting, in fact, Kimmel offered a somber, respectful reaction, sending his love to Kirk’s family.
But then he was tone-deaf about the sensitivity of the situation and the widespread anger – especially among young conservative activists, but also those who disagreed with Kirk. The atmosphere right now is like a tinderbox that only needed a single match.
These are the words from Monday that got him in trouble:
“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.”
That’s it.
I don’t agree that the killer was part of the Trump movement. I don’t think he was part of any movement, just a crazed madman with a transgender partner who had sympathy for gays but not “fascists.” As with all these nutjob murderers and school shooters, the media’s search on a “motive” is futile.
A month from now, maybe Kimmel’s sentence wouldn’t have caused an uproar. But he should have sensed that this was not the time.
Now let’s look at what the other side has been saying.
Trump, who was close to Kirk, says left-wing radicals are to blame for his killing and that investigations are under way. Elon Musk has labeled “the left” as “the party of murder.” Pam Bondi said she would prosecute those guilty of “hate speech,” apparently missing the point that the First Amendment is meaningless unless it protects vile speech – as long as it doesn’t include threats of violence.
Against that ocean of rhetoric, Kimmel’s comment was a small trickle.
And that brings us to the Federal Communications Commission, which has the power to revoke broadcast licenses.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who I recently interviewed, said this on a podcast:
“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’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Sounds pretty ominous.
TRUMP EYES REMARKS AT CHARLIE KIRK MEMORIAL IN ARIZONA, BLAMES LEFT FOR SUSPECT’S RADICALIZATION
But Carr kinda sorta walked it back at a Politico conference. “I think you can draw a pretty clear line, and the Supreme Court has done this for decades, that our First Amendment, our free speech tradition, protects almost all speech.”
Even Laura Ingraham said Carr should have stayed off TV.
Trump, meanwhile, urged NBC to fire “two total losers,” Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, which would mean a clean sweep of the late-night landscape.
It’s worth reminding everyone that Charlie Kirk was engaging in free speech – and advocating non-violence – as he toured the country and built his Turning Point organization.
Celebrities, Democrats and some journalists are denouncing the Disney/ABC decision to blow up “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” That makes me wonder whether, as in the case of Colbert’s “Late Show,” it was losing money – or making relatively little money – and the comments provided the pretext for getting it off the books.
Now to the backstory. When I sat down with Trump at Mar-a-Lago last year, it was right after the Oscars, hosted, as it turned out, by Kimmel.
And he made a joke about Trump: “Isn’t it past your jail time?”
So let the record show that Jimmy started it – at least this round.
So I asked the candidate if he had a response.
“Every night he hits me, I guess,” said Trump. “His ratings are terrible… So I figured I’d hit him, because I thought he was a lousy host.”
Referring to reports that some Kimmel confidantes had begged him not to make the jail joke, Trump told me: “This guy’s even dumber than I thought.”
Oh, but that wasn’t the end of it.
In his inevitable pushback, Kimmel said of course Fox had picked a guy to interview Trump “that no one’s ever heard of.”
Well! I’d only hosted the No. 1 cable show in its time slot for a dozen years, but I guess that didn’t matter to the wealthy La-la-land elite.
I shot back that while I wasn’t a heavily hyped network star like him, my Sunday ratings almost matched his. I used my higher-than-normal rating from the Trump interview, but let’s not get bogged down in details.
TURNING POINT USA ELECTS ERIKA KIRK AS NEW CEO, CHAIR OF THE BOARD FOLLOWING CHARLIE KIRK’S ASSASSINATION
I’ll give the final word to Outkick founder Clay Travis, the conservative radio host and frequent guest of mine:
“I like Jimmy and his family and have known them for years now. I don’t like the concept — as someone who talks for a living — of any person in any creative industry losing their job for any one thing they say.”
Travis says there have been frequent attempts to cancel him, adding: “If your principle shifts based on who has power, you actually have no principles.”
Footnote: I wish most media people, except for those covering hard-news developments, would stop using the name of the suspect in the Charlie Kirk case.
For many years, I have refused to name assassins, would-be assassins, mass shooters and school shooters, because that would give them the attention they crave. Just not gonna go there.
Do you remember the name of the killers at Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, the Orlando nightclub, the Las Vegas music festival, the Charleston church, Buffalo, Uvalde, or even the Colorado school a couple of weeks ago? I don’t either. The faster we can consign them to the dustbin of history, the better.
Lavishing attention on them may inspire other would-be gunmen to take action, thinking it’s a way to turn nobodies into somebodies.
And here’s the absolute proof from the alleged Kirk killer.
The 22-year-old texted his roommate, his romantic partner, about what he had inscribed on the bullet casings.
If those messages wound up “on fox new[s] I might have a stroke.”
That’s why I say it’s dangerous to reward these heinous figures by making them household names.
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