By Aoife Walsh

Copyright bbc

Writers, actors, former US President Barack Obama and other prominent Democrats condemned Kimmel’s suspension.

Obama said the incident represented a new and dangerous level of cancel culture.

“After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like,” he posted on X.

Actor Ben Stiller said it “isn’t right”, while Hacks star Jean Smart said she was “horrified at the cancellation”.

“What Jimmy said was free speech, not hate speech,” she added.

The Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild, two Hollywood labour unions, condemned the decision as a violation of constitutional free speech rights.

But others argued Kimmel’s suspension was accountability, not cancel culture.

“When a person says something that a ton of people find offensive, rude, dumb in real time and then that person is punished for it that’s not cancel culture,” said Dave Portnoy, who founded media company Barstool Sports.

“That is consequences for your actions.”

Late-night Fox host Greg Gutfeld argued that Kimmel had “deliberately and misleadingly” blamed the killing of Kirk on the activist’s “allies and friends”.

British presenter Piers Morgan said Kimmel had “lied about Charlie Kirk’s assassin being Maga” and his comments caused “understandable outrage all over America”.

“Why is he being heralded as some kind of free speech martyr?” he added.

But one of Carr’s FCC leadership colleagues, commissioner Anna Gomez, criticised the regulator’s stance on Kimmel.

She said that “an inexcusable act of political violence by one disturbed individual must never be exploited as justification for broader censorship or control”.