By Staff Reporter

Copyright maltatoday

American television network ABC announced on Wednesday evening that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show “indefinitely” following comments made on the death of Charlie Kirk.

Conservatives in the US accused the longtime host of inaccurately describing the politics of the man who is accused of fatally shooting the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

The abrupt decision by the network, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, came hours after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, assailed Kimmel and suggested that his regulatory agency might take action against ABC because of remarks the host made on his Monday telecast.

The network did not explain its decision, but the sequence of events on Wednesday amounted to an extraordinary exertion of political pressure on a major broadcast network by the Trump administration.

Many Democrats immediately criticiSed the move, with Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, calling it “outrageous.” But President Trump, in a social media post from Windsor Castle in Britain, where he is traveling, described it as “Great News for America.”

The decision to suspend “Jimmy Kimmel Live” was made by Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, and Dana Walden, the company’s television chief, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private process.

The comments at the centre of this week’s firestorm came during Kimmel’s opening monologue on Monday night.

“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,” the host said.

Conservative activists castigated those comments, saying they mischaracterised the political beliefs of Tyler Robinson, the accused shooter.

Prosecutors said Robinson had written in private messages aboutKirk’s “hatred,” but the authorities have not identified which of Kirk’s views the suspect found hateful; his mother told prosecutors that her son had recently shifted toward the political left and had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.”

Carr, in an interview on a right-wing podcast on Wednesday, said that Kimmel’s remarks were part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people,” and that the F.C.C. was “going to have remedies that we can look at.”

“Frankly, when you see stuff like this — I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr told the podcast’s host, Benny Johnson. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the F.C.C. ahead.”

Schumer, the Democratic leader, denounced the pressure on ABC from the Trump administration as “despicable, disgusting, and against democratic values,” and compared it to the playbook of autocratic Chinese and Russian leaders.

“Trump and his allies seem to want to shut down speech that they don’t like to hear,” Schumer said on CNN. “That is not what democracies do. That is what autocracies do. And it doesn’t matter whether you agree with Kimmel or not, he has the right to free speech.”

Late on Wednesday, after ABC pulled Kimmel, Carr went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program and described the actions by Nexstar and Sinclair as “unprecedented.”

“I’m very glad to see that America’s broadcasters are standing up to serve the interests of their community,” Carr said. “We don’t just have this progressive foie gras coming out from New York and Hollywood.”

He added: “This is an important turning point.”