With Jimmy Kimmel Live! returning to the air Tuesday evening, the Federal Communications Commission chair who jawboned ABC and companies that own its stations into censoring Jimmy Kimmel can’t keep himself from weighing in on the affair.
While ABC on Monday reversed its decision to cancel the show, Sinclair Broadcast Group, followed by Nexstar Media Group, announced that they will not air the show on the roughly 70 ABC affiliates owned across the country between them.
The companies first pulled Kimmel’s show last week, after FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened those who platform the comedian following a joke he made about Trump and MAGA’s response to the death of Charlie Kirk. Both companies have business before the FCC, which helps explain their swift and ongoing capitulation to Carr. (Nexstar is pursuing a multibillion-dollar merger that would expand its reach to 80 percent of TV households in the country—a number so large that it would require the FCC to lift the existing 39-percent cap limiting companies’ reach.)
Carr, who has spent the past week trying to paint the incident as anything other than a patent instance of a government official applying pressure to influence private decision-making, was delighted by the news that Sinclair and Nexstar won’t change their stance.
Carr took to X to lash out against Democratic state Senator Scott Wiener, who reacted to the news of Sinclair’s decision to keep Kimmel censored despite ABC’s reversal by proposing breaking up the massive conglomerate. “Corporate media consolidation doesn’t jibe with democracy,” Wiener wrote, in a post published before Nexstar followed in Sinclair’s footsteps.
Carr argued that Wiener’s statement showed that it’s Democrats—not Republicans—who are the censorial ones. Nexstar and Sinclair, he claimed, had decided independently that suspending Kimmel “made sense.”
Wiener responded in disbelief at the FCC chair’s hypocrisy: “Do you people hear yourselves?? BREAK UP SINCLAIR.”
Carr fired off another tweet, in which he attempted to describe the incident—in which two of the country’s largest, and ever consolidating, media conglomerates, are truckling to an agency whose approval they need—as a heartwarming underdog story. Democrats, he said, “simply can’t stand that local TV stations—for the first time in years—stood up to a national programmer” in ABC.
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