ABC announced on Wednesday evening that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show “indefinitely” after criticism of comments he made on his Monday program about the motives of the man who is accused of fatally shooting the conservative activist Charlie Kirk last week.
The abrupt decision by the network, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, came hours after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, assailed Mr. Kimmel’s remarks and suggested that his regulatory agency might take action against ABC because of them.
In his opening monologue on Monday, Mr. Kimmel had addressed the killing of Mr. Kirk by saying: “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.”
Conservative activists described those comments as mischaracterizing the political beliefs of Tyler Robinson, the accused shooter, who wrote in private messages that he objected to Mr. Kirk’s “hatred.” The authorities have not identified which of Mr. Kirk’s views that the suspect found hateful, but his mother said that her son had shifted toward the political left over the last year and had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented,” according to prosecutors.
Mr. Carr, in an interview on a right-wing podcast on Wednesday, said that Mr. Kimmel’s remarks about the suspect were part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people” and said his agency was “going to have remedies that we can look at.”
“Frankly, when you see stuff like this — I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Mr. Carr told the podcast’s host, Benny Johnson. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the F.C.C. ahead.”
During his Wednesday interview, Mr. Carr also encouraged media companies that own local television stations to “push back” and pre-empt coverage that does not serve “their local communities.”
“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, ‘Listen, we are going to pre-empt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out,” Mr. Carr said. (Comcast is the parent company of NBC.)
One broadcasting company, Nexstar, appeared to heed Mr. Carr’s encouragement. Shortly before ABC announced the suspension, Nexstar said that it would air other shows on its local ABC affiliates in place of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” for the “foreseeable future.”
“Nexstar strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets,” the company said in a statement.
Mr. Carr expressed approval for Nexstar’s decision, thanking the company in a post on X “for doing the right thing.” He added: “I hope that other broadcasters follow Nexstar’s lead.”
Nexstar is among the largest operators of TV stations in the United States. Its chief executive, Perry Sook, has struck a series of audacious deals over the decades to knit together a sprawling network that stretches across the country.
Mr. Sook and Nexstar may soon have a major piece of business before the federal government, having just announced a deal to acquire Tegna, one of its biggest rivals, for $6.2 billion. The deal is sure to receive scrutiny from the Trump administration, particularly the F.C.C., which has in recent months put media mergers under a microscope.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Benjamin Mullin contributed reporting.
John Koblin covers the television industry for The Times.
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.
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