Jimmy Kimmel will be back on ABC tonight — but not in every market.
With Sinclair refusing to air Kimmel’s show on its ABC-affiliated stations, and Nexstar not yet commenting on its plans, this free speech tug-of-war is far from over.
And as CNN’s Jake Tapper told Seth Meyers on Monday night, “it doesn’t end” with Kimmel.
MAGA media commentators are raging against ABC’s parent Disney, with some influential pundits publicly pressing the Trump administration to take action against the company, calling to mind FCC chair Brendan Carr’s “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” line from last week.
Any such action would stretch well beyond the usual bounds of government regulation, but President Trump has been crossing those lines ever since returning to the Oval Office, as Disney CEO Bob Iger well knows.
That’s why I am keeping a close eye on the simmering MAGA anger about ABC as Kimmel returns to the airwaves. The anger is palpable on sites like X, where Fox News contributor and The Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway told her fans last night that “DISNEY LOATHES YOU.”
Hemingway’s posts showed how pro-Trump media figures have adopted a very different interpretation of Kimmel’s September 15 monologue than other viewers. Kimmel’s “malicious lie” was “designed to protect left-wing violence and further harm Americans and our values,” Hemingway wrote.
Kimmel actually said the MAGA movement was trying to score political points by trying to prove that the suspect accused of killing Charlie Kirk was not a Trump supporter. Then the host ridiculed one of Trump’s comments in the wake of Kirk’s murder.
Conservative media watchdogs clipped the moment from ABC’s air and publicized it, leading Carr to publicly condemn Kimmel and invoke the FCC’s power over local station licenses. We all know what happened next. ABC’s decision to sideline Kimmel was a momentary triumph for the right-wing activists who want to win cultural as well as political victories during Trump’s term.
Kimmel’s return is thus a rebuke to those same activists — while also, in the words of PEN America, a “vindication for free speech.”
MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson, who egged on Carr last week, wrote on X that Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization “views Jimmy Kimmel’s false claims about Charlie Kirk’s assassin as an open and vicious attack on the organization and its activists.”
Disney’s not done with politics
Shortly after ABC announced Kimmel’s comeback, OutKick founder and Trump ally Clay Travis said on Fox that the government should flex its muscles to Disney.
Noting ESPN’s pending deal with the NFL, Travis said, “I think the Trump administration needs to look aggressively at that potential acquisition of the NFL Network and say, ‘Wait a minute, is Disney/ABC really trying to speak to all of America? If they won’t do it on a late-night show, will they do it with sports? I think those are real questions that deserve to be asked.”
The NFL deal requires the Trump DOJ’s sign-off, but that’s supposed to be an antitrust matter, not a review of whether ABC is “trying to speak to all of America.”
However, for pro-Trump influencers who have resented the liberal bent of late-night TV for years, and despised Kimmel for just as long, the use of government power to punish perceived enemies is not something to be condemned; it’s something to be exploited.
Ryan Faughnder of the Los Angeles Times said it best this morning: “Disney wanted to be done with politics. But politics wasn’t done with Disney. It never is.”
‘I don’t think it ends with Kimmel’
That’s what Jake Tapper said during a visit to “Late Night with Seth Meyers” Monday night.
Tapper called last week’s domino effect “the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
“We’ll see what happens when they come for Comcast,” NBC’s parent, “and we’ll see what happens when they come for Warner Bros. Discovery,” CNN’s parent, Tapper said to Meyers. “Maybe you and I will be drawing comic books.”
What will Nexstar do?
Nexstar was the first station group to come out publicly against Kimmel last Wednesday. Nexstar is also the best example of a media company that feels compelled to curry favor with Trump right now, as it needs the FCC to approve its pending merger with Tegna.
So will Nexstar air Kimmel’s return on Tuesday night? That’s to be announced.
Nexstar’s local ABC-affiliated stations are in the dark; some of the company’s local newsrooms struggled to figure out how to cover ABC’s announcement yesterday, since they didn’t know if their own stations were going to air the show or not.
More broadly, I view this moment as yet another example of the slow unspooling of broadcast TV, which is becoming less and less “broad,” and another example of the red-blue divide, which is fracturing seemingly everything, even TV schedules.