The US ABC network has announced that it will pull new episodes of late night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! from broadcast after comments made by its host about the politics surrounding the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
On Monday night’s episode, Jimmy Kimmel joked in his monologue: “The MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”
The announcement by the Disney-owned ABC to drop new episodes of the show came soon after a statement from Nexstar that it had axed the show across the 32 ABC affiliate stations it owns. ABC is broadcast across 200 stations nation-wide, making the loss of 32 of those significant.
Earlier in the day, the Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr appeared on Benny Johnson’s podcast The Benny Show where he slammed Kimmel’s comments, threatening action by the FCC: “There are avenues here for the FCC, so there are some ways in which I need to be a little careful, because I could be called wholly to become a judge on some of these claims that come up.”
As a business, Nexstar’s corporate management is non-partisan and largely veterans of local broadcasting.
In July, rival broadcaster CBS made the decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, citing financial concerns about the profitability of the program. It was met with claims that the cancellation was political. That show represented a concern that US networks were retreating from costly late night shows with declining revenue.
It is still too early to know whether Jimmy Kimmel will issue an apology and see the show return to the air, or whether ABC will replace the show with another late night talk show. If the show isn’t replaced, from May next year, NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon will be the last remaining talk show on US free-to-air broadcast television.