On a podcast Wednesday, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, complained about remarks that Jimmy Kimmel had made about Tyler Robinson, the man accused of shooting the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, and about President Trump’s MAGA political movement. Mr. Carr described a couple of paths toward the consequences he wanted to see happen.
“We can do this the easy way,” he said, “or the hard way.”
Later that day, ABC did it for him the easy way.
ABC did not explain its decision to pull Mr. Kimmel’s late-night show “indefinitely.” But the sequence of events was easy to follow, and the dynamics are chillingly familiar.
Mr. Carr, who holds power over local stations’ broadcast licenses, called on ABC affiliates to “push back.” Quickly, an owner of affiliate groups — which is planning an acquisition deal that will be scrutinized by the F.C.C. — did just that, announcing that it would pre-empt Mr. Kimmel’s show.
By Wednesday night, Mr. Kimmel was on hiatus.
What did Mr. Kimmel say to end his show (at least for now)? In his Monday night monologue, he said, “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.”
You could call Mr. Kimmel’s framing tendentious, uncharitable, unfair, slanted, off base. (Prosecutors said Mr. Robinson had written in private messages about Mr. Kirk’s “hatred,” without specifying what he found hateful; his mother told prosecutors that her son had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.”)
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The post The F.C.C. Threatened to Punish Kimmel ‘the Hard Way.’ ABC Made It Easy. appeared first on New York Times.
