Jimmy Kimmel, winner of the Outstanding Host for a Game Show Award for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”, attended the 2025 Creative Arts Emmy Awards at Peacock Theater on Sept. 7, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. On Wednesday, ABC suspended Kimmel’s late-night present indefinitely after he made feedback about Charlie Kirk’s killing.
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As First Amendment scholar Evelyn Douek watched the information unfold of ABC yanking Jimmy Kimmel from air, she was aghast: “The hypocrisy is sufficient to give one vertigo,” she mentioned.
It’s surprising to Douek, as a result of she is a close-watcher of what is often known as “jawboning,” when regulators or authorities officers stress non-public actors, like a social media firm or broadcast community, to stifle speech. The libertarian Cato Institute calls the observe “censorship by proxy.”
For years, Republicans excoriated social media platforms over their perception that the Biden administration overly pressured Twitter and Facebook to take away Covid misinformation. It spurred a relentless drumbeat of on-line assaults, Congressional subpoenas and hearings in Washington.
Now, the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission seems to have bullied ABC into dropping Kimmel, mentioned Douek, a professor at Stanford Law School. She mentioned it makes social media firms’ removing of Covid-related posts on the request of presidency officers “mild by comparability.”
The Kimmel episode follows CBS’ cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, which regularly pilloried President Trump. Together, the incidents have intensified issues amongst free speech specialists that the Trump administration is utilizing the extraordinary powers of the federal authorities to muzzle political speech.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who in 2020 referred to as political satire one in every of “the oldest and most necessary types of free speech,” wrote on X on Thursday that broadcast stations have “lengthy retained the correct to not air nationwide applications that they consider are inconsistent with the general public curiosity, together with their native communities’ values.”
Gigi Sohn, a former senior advisor to the FCC underneath President Obama, mentioned Kimmel’s suspension is the results of many years of media consolidation, the place monetary determinations can override issues about free speech.
“When management of media and tech are within the arms of a handful of firms, it turns into simpler for authoritarian leaders to regulate them,” Sohn wrote.
What occurred precisely?
On Monday night time, Kimmel’s opening monologue included remarks concerning the suspect within the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Camera crews and onlookers collect in entrance of the Jimmy Kimmel Live studio on Hollywood Blvd. in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
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Chris Pizzello/Invision
He mentioned: “We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately attempting to characterize this child who murdered Charlie Kirk as something aside from one in every of them, and doing every little thing they will to attain political factors from it,” he mentioned. (It must be famous that authorities say the suspect within the taking pictures, Tyler Robinson, focused Kirk over his conservative political opinions, however the full extent of Robinson’s political ideology has not but surfaced in his authorized case. Kimmel’s feedback had been made earlier than prosecutors in Utah unveiled their prices towards Robinson.)
On Wednesday, Carr appeared on the podcast of MAGA influencer Benny Johnson. In the interview, Carr mentioned, “We can do that the simple approach or the onerous approach.”
He went on to say: “These firms can discover methods to vary conduct and take motion, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be further work for the FCC forward.”
Hours later, Nexstar and Sinclair, which personal greater than 60 native ABC stations, introduced that they might not carry Kimmel’s program “for the foreseeable future,” over his Monday night time feedback concerning the Kirk slaying.
Soon after, ABC, which has aired Kimmel’s late-night present since 2003, mentioned it was suspending him indefinitely.
The choice shouldn’t be taking place in a vacuum. Nexstar introduced lately that it’s within the strategy of attempting to amass its rival, Tegna, in a deal estimated to be price $6.2 billion that’s topic to the evaluation of Carr’s FCC.
A May 2025 file photograph of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.
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Nexstar additionally wants Carr’s help to loosen laws to finish the deal. Under present guidelines, nobody firm can personal stations that attain greater than 39% of U.S. households. The Nexstar-Tegna tie-up is estimated to increase the corporate’s mixed attain into 80% of American houses.
Carr celebrated the collection of occasions kicked off by Nexstar, thanking the corporate on X for “doing the correct factor.”
Carr wrote: “I hope that different broadcasters comply with Nexstar’s lead.”
First Amendment knowledgeable: Kimmel is “prime instance” of presidency censorship
Legal observers say the Kimmel saga might be organising a high-profile First Amendment case.
Government officers are legally permitted to attempt to persuade a non-public actor, like ABC, to vary speech, but they can’t coerce a broadcaster to take action, in line with Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
The delicate line between persuasion and coercion was on the coronary heart of a Supreme Court case final yr that examined whether or not the Biden administration broke the legislation in its communication with social media firms about Covid misinformation.
By a 6-3 vote, the court docket discovered that states didn’t have standing to sue the Biden administration as a result of there wasn’t sufficient proof exhibiting a direct line between authorities outreach and social media firms proscribing content material.
The court docket declared that to ensure that authorities affect to violate the First Amendment, there must be a “concrete hyperlink” between officers’ actions and the suppression of speech.
In the Kimmel case, in line with Abdo: “It’s as direct a line as you may dream up.”
He added: “An FCC regulator threatening authorized legal responsibility towards a media firm for Constitutionally-protected political speech. If the First Amendment was meant to stop censorship, that is the prime instance of it.”
Jennifer Huddleston, of the Cato Institute, mentioned if the Kimmel choice sticks, there might be a chilling impact, with community tv dialing down the tone of their political jokes and confrontational information protection, lest they wind up within the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
“That is among the biggest dangers,” Huddleston mentioned. “It’s not solely the influence on a selected scenario, however what sign does that ship to the broader discourse and to different networks watching?”
President Trump cheered Kimmel being pulled from the airwaves on Truth Social. He referred to as on NBC to cancel The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers.
“Do it NBC!!!” the president wrote.
For Kimmel, specialists say even when he has a robust authorized case, it doesn’t assure that he’ll battle his departure in court docket, particularly if he believes ABC reinstating him is unlikely.
“In some sense, it virtually would not matter in the event that they’re proper within the legislation, as a result of, on the bottom, they’re attaining the censorship of protected speech, which is their objective,” Abdo mentioned. “The fact is Kimmel’s voice is silenced and the voice of others will probably be silenced.”
