“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.”
We don’t know for sure if these are the words from Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue Tuesday night that got him taken off the air. But they couldn’t have helped him. ABC announced Wednesday that “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” would be suspended indefinitely, after its affiliate group Nexstar said it would preempt the show.
Nobody should be surprised at this news, least of all Kimmel. In July, CBS gently canceled “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” keeping his show on the air until next May, days after he had characterized parent company Paramount’s court settlement with President Trump as a “big, fat bribe” in the face of a corporate merger on his show. (CBS claimed Colbert’s words had nothing to do with what it called as a simple business decision). Colbert’s drumbeat of Trump criticism was soft compared with Kimmel’s Kirk musings.
It almost seems like Kimmel was daring his corporate overlords at the Walt Disney Company to take action. He’s not stupid. He knows the culture of fear, the “watch what you say” ethos, that now pervades mainstream political discourse. Lines are being toed everywhere, especially when it comes to public speech about Kirk, the right wing activist who was murdered last week at a speaking event in Utah.
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The formerly almost-anything-goes rules of late night TV no longer apply; we may soon reach a point where such TV no longer even exists. Kimmel isn’t one to toe the line, but he’s certainly been around long enough to know what he can and can’t get away with saying. Now cancel culture — or at least suspension culture — has claimed him.
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Chris Vognar can be reached at chris.vognar@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram at @chrisvognar and on Bluesky at chrisvognar.bsky.social.