A remark about a politically charged event by an ABC late night host draws backlash from conservatives, including the White House. Affiliates say they’re dropping the show.
That happened this week with Jimmy Kimmel Live!, over comments he made about the alleged killer of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. It also happened 24 years ago when Politically Incorrect host Bill Maher made remarks about the 9/11 hijackers less than a week after the attacks. ABC’s response was quite different then.
On Wednesday, after threats from FCC head Brendan Carr and an announcement that station owner Nexstar would pre-empt the program, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! “indefinitely.” Another station group, Sinclair, announced after ABC’s action that it would also keep Kimmel’s show off the air “until formal discussions are held with ABC regarding the network’s commitment to professionalism and accountability.”
The comments that drew the ire of Carr, Nexstar and others came in Kimmel’s monologue on Monday. “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.” Before Carr’s appearance on right-wing media personality Benny Johnson’s show Wednesday, some social media users claimed outrage at the line, but station owners and ABC made no public statements.
The reaction to something Maher said on Politically Incorrect in the wake of 9/11 was swifter — but notably different. The panel show was among the first late night programs to go back on the air after the attacks on New York and Washington, airing Sept. 17, 2001 (The Late Show With David Letterman and Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn also returned that night).
During the broadcast, one of Maher’s guests, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, pushed back on the notion that the hijackers who crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (a fourth aircraft crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers tried to thwart the hijacking) were “cowards.”
“One of the themes we hear constantly is that the people who did this are cowards,” D’Souza said. “Not true. Look at what they did. First of all, you have a whole bunch of guys who are willing to give their life. None of them backed out. All of them slammed themselves into pieces of concrete. These are warriors. And we have to realize that the principles of our way of life are in conflict with people in the world. And so — I mean, I’m all for understanding the sociological causes of this but we should not blame the victim. Americans shouldn’t blame themselves because other people want to bomb them.”
Maher replied, “But also, we should — we have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”
The day after the episode aired, Dan Patrick — then a conservative radio host, now the lieutenant governor of Texas — urged his listeners to call advertisers FedEx and Sears and tell them to drop their ads. They did so, and some ABC affiliates dropped the show. Asked about Maher’s comment during a briefing, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, “People have to watch what they say and watch what they do.”
The parallels end there, however: ABC did not pull Politically Incorrect off the air in 2001. Maher issued an apology the next night, saying he was criticizing U.S. military policy but not service members. ABC issued its own statement in support of the show, saying that Politically Incorrect “celebrates freedom of speech and encourages the animated exchange of ideas and opinions. While we remain sensitive to the current climate following last week’s tragedy … there needs to remain a forum for the expression of our nation’s diverse opinions.” Affiliates who had dropped the show began airing it again a week later.
Current Disney CEO Bob Iger, who reportedly made the call (along with Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden) to pull Jimmy Kimmel Live!, was the company’s president at the time. Then-CEO Michael Eisner criticized Maher’s comments but didn’t act to pull Politically Incorrect off the air.
Politically Incorrect didn’t fully bounce back from the controversy; some advertisers stayed away, and the show was canceled after the 2001-02 season. Maher now hosts HBO’s long-running Real Time (and will likely address the Kimmel situation on Friday’s show). A few months after Politically Incorrect ended, ABC announced that it would air a new late night show — hosted by Jimmy Kimmel.