GOP Sen. and Trump ally Ted Cruz warns conservatives will regret it.
By Paul Bean
Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Becca Balint took to their social media platforms to blame the Trump administration’s FCC Chair, Brenden Carr for ABC’s removal of Jimmy Kimmel from the late night comedy slot.
Announced yesterday, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show is returning to ABC tonight (9/23) after a tense standoff from remarks he made about the Trump administration’s response to the killing of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. About a quarter of the ABC stations in the United States won’t be airing it.
“I don’t often agree with Ted Cruz, but he’s right about this,” wrote Sen. Sanders on X Saturday in respobnse to a statement made by Ted Cruz to the Washington Post.
“It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel,” said Cruz. “But when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it.”
The controversy began after Kimmel said on his show last week that “the MAGA gang” was “desperately trying” to characterize the suspect in Mr. Kirk’s killing, Tyler Robinson, as “anything other than one of them.” The situation escalated when FCC chairman Carr said during an interview with podcaster Benny Johson that Mr. Kimmel’s remarks were part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people.
Carr said on the podcast that “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” in reference to ABC and their affiliates. “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..Frankly I think it’s past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney, and say ‘We are going to preempt – we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out,’” he finished.
Rep. Becca Balint also responded with her own criticism of the firing of Kimmel posting this video with the caption, “This is what’s really behind ABC removing Jimmy Kimmel. Corruption.”
“I know a lot of you are very alarmed by what you saw yesterday with Jimmy Kimmel being pulled off the air by ABC…I need you to follow the money,” said Balint in the video. “So you’ve got a situation right now where companies that have mergers before the FCC are trying to please Trump in order to get their mergers approved, and that’s sort of, I believe, at the heart of what’s going on here. You’ve got Nexstar that’s trying to acquire another media company called Tegna, and they’re the ones that put out that message that they were going to drop Jimmy Kimmel from their TV stations.”
Yesterday, Disney announced that Kimme’s late-night show is returning to ABC on Tuesday night but about a quarter of the ABC stations in the United States won’t be airing it. The local stations Nexstar and Sinclair, two major owners of local ABC stations who combined own 60+ stations, said they would be ending Kimmel’s segment indefinitely. Nexstar said it would replace the comedy show with news programming for the time being.
Vermont’s ABC affiliate, WVNY, is not owned by either Nexstar or Sinclair. The station is owned by Mission Broadcasting
Balint continued in her video posted to X explaining, “They then pressured ABC to fall in line because they want to curry favor with the Trump administration through their FCC chair, Brendan Carr…All of us in Congress have to keep our eyes on these mega mergers and how they are being used to stifle our First Amendment rights of freedom of speech. This is dangerous, and we’re going to investigate.”
Last week while in the UK on an official state visit President Trump said, “Well, Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings, more than anything else…And he said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk…Jimmy Kimmel is not a talented person. He had very bad ratings, and they should have fired him a long time ago. So, you know, you could call that free speech or not. He was fired for lack of talent.”
Senator Sanders also posted the following image to his X page over the weekend with the caption “Here’s a radical idea.”
Many commenters were quick to remark that Sanders was not as concerned about the first amendment when his political opponent, Donald Trump, was censored and removed from social media back in 2020. “Bernie, where were you when the deep state was pressuring social media companies to shadow ban your political opponents?” wrote user @rallywithgalli. “Everyone has free speech. But if you have an FCC license and violate the rules you may have consequences. Get the issue straight,” wrote user @getthefact999.
Former US president Barack Obama responded to the incident, writing on X, “After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like. This is precisely the kind of government coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent, and media companies need to start standing up rather than capitulating it.”
FCC Chairman Carr has denied claims that Kimmel was initially fired because of direct pressure from the Trump administration and him specifically. “Jimmy Kimmel is in the situation that he’s in because of his ratings, not because of anything that’s happened at the federal government level,” said Carr.
Carr also cited CBS’s cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” which the network claimed was “a purely financial decision.”