FCC chairman Brendan Carr appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to praise Nexstar and Sinclair for pulling “Jimmy Kimmel Live” from their ABC affiliate stations, after which ABC suspended production of the show indefinitely.
“Something’s gone seriously awry,” Carr said about late night shows like Kimmel’s. “They went from being court jesters that would make fun of everybody in power to being court clerics and enforcing a very narrow political ideology. And Nexstar stood up and said, ‘We have the license and we don’t want to run this anymore. We don’t think it serves the interest of our community. Sinclair did the same thing. There’s more work to go, but I’m very glad to see that America’s broadcasters are standing up to serve the interest of their community. We don’t just have this progressive foie gras coming out from New York and Hollywood.”
“Charlie Kirk set out to change the country, to change the culture,” he continued. “And the results of his work are continuing to produce results, and that’s a good thing.”
ABC indefinitely suspended “Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ on Wednesday after Nexstar, which owns 32 ABC affiliate stations throughout the country, announced that it would stop airing the late night series because of the host’s comments on the killing of Charlie Kirk. That news came after Carr threatened to take legal action against ABC for Kimmel’s words.
“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,” Kimmel said during his broadcast on Monday.
Nexstar said it “strongly objects” to Kimmel’s recent comments about the killing of Charlie Kirk, which the company’s broadcasting president Andrew Alford called “offensive and insensitive.” “Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time,” Alford said in a statement.
Shortly after the news broke, Carr responded on X by saying, “I want to thank Nexstar for doing the right thing. Local broadcasters have an obligation to serve the public interest. While this may be an unprecedented decision, it is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming that they determine falls short of community values. I hope that other broadcasters follow Nexstar’s lead.”
More to come…