Brendan Carr lit the skies with a clearcut, dazzling lie the day Jimmy Kimmel returned to the air. “And what I’ve been very clear [about] in the context of the Kimmel episode, is that the FCC, and myself in particular, have expressed no view on the ultimate merits had that sort of thing [a news-bias complaint] been filed, [or] what our take would be one way or the other,” the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission told a conference audience in New York. But he did have a take and he’d expressed it five days before: “Frankly I think it’s past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney, and say, ‘We are going to preempt—we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out, because we—we licensed broadcasters—are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.’”
Comcast owns NBC, which has nothing to do with Kimmel. But Disney owns ABC, the network that broadcasts his show. Carr thought stations showing ABC programs ought to strongarm the network’s owner into straightening out Kimmel. The FCC chairman expressed his view on a podcast. Less than a week after doing so, he pretended that he hadn’t said anything. He also asserted that Kimmel was suspended for poor ratings, nothing to do with broadcast licenses and threats by regulators. But you saw the quote just above.
It belongs to the now infamous “easy way or the hard way” interview, given by Carr to a friendly conservative. Donald Trump’s choice for FCC head was unhappy that Kimmel, who delights in attacking Trump, had made an on-air remark that sounded as if the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk had been done by somebody loyal to MAGA. Kimmel’s implication defied the evidence, and Carr claimed it was part of a pattern of deception. The commissioner said something had to be done about Kimmel and he called on ABC’s affiliate stations to step up.
His interviewer, podcast host Benny Johnson, tweeted about the comments at 1:01 p.m. (“BREAKING”). A busy afternoon followed. Right-wingers on social media would talk of a revolt by the affiliates. But the revolt took the form of calls going back and forth between the headquarters of three corporations with revenues in the billions: ABC, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and Nexstar Media. Sinclair owns the most stations showing ABC programming; Nexstar owns the second-most.
Now that a fatwa had been issued, the three companies faced various pressures. ABC had a talk-show host who, according to reports, wanted to answer his critics in hard-edged fashion and wouldn’t back down. Nexstar had and still has important business before the host’s chief critic, since the company needs FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger and a rule change to make the merger’s results legal (the reach of the company’s TV stations would become roughly twice what’s currently allowed). Sinclair may well need merger approval soon. It announced in the summer that it’s undertaking a “comprehensive strategic review” of its properties, and any buying or selling of broadcast properties goes before the FCC.
By evening the results of the phone calls became clear. At 6:18 p.m., a tweet by CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that Nexstar wouldn’t let its stations show Kimmel’s program. Six minutes later, The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Flint tweeted that ABC said Kimmel was off the air “indefinitely.” Twenty-five minutes after that, Sinclair also announced that its stations wouldn’t be showing Kimmel.
No other stations would join the two big boys. Even so Kimmel was off. Benny Johnson tweeted a victory dance a little before eight: “We had FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on the show to announce investigations into ABC and Disney for letting Kimmel lie to millions about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Hours later, Kimmel was gone. It ain’t much, but it’s honest work.” Carr seemed to agree. The next day a critic on Twitter posted, “This was all in Project 2025, btw.” Carr, who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the FCC, responded with a gif of maniacal Jack Nicholson smiling and nodding. He was four days from saying he’d done nothing at all.
When Disney and ABC suspended Kimmel, they were either caving or punting. Perhaps they fully intended to fold, as they had when they paid $15 million to disappear a Trump nuisance suit about news coverage. Or perhaps they were playing for time. From the start, unnamed executives placed warm sentiments about Kimmel in the stories about the standoff between him and his employers (“Kimmel has always been incredibly well-regarded within ABC,” talks were aimed at getting Kimmel back on air “as soon as possible”). Official comment was restricted to the very circumspect text announcing the suspension (“Jimmy Kimmel Live will be preempted indefinitely”).
Meanwhile, an unholy uproar played out. Threats by the government had driven a gadfly off the air, and now Barack Obama rang the alarm for democracy, as did Natalie Portman, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Aniston, Greg Ruffalo, and a collection of stars in late-phase Marvel movies, among hundreds of other figures. Social media burned up with declarations of boycott; when customers called in to cancel Disney Plus, the phone people took to asking if it was because of Kimmel. Big guys at Creative Artists Agency, William Morris Endeavor, and the United Talent Agency let it be known that they called Disney’s president to warn him that big stars were getting dubious about working for the company. And Disney’s stock fell. Closes for the stock were well above what they’d been a few months before, but Disney still lost $6.4 billion in market capitalization from the day it suspended Kimmel to the day it said he was coming back—a three percent drop.
Kimmel returned to the air. Having stuck his foot in his mouth about an assassination, he took it out on his own terms—no apologies, but humane words about the tragedy of Kirk’s death. The episode was watched on TV by 6.26 million people, about four and a half times his usual audience. Online more than 25 million people watched the monologue in the three days after he delivered it. The president’s man at the FCC had tried to force the president’s critic off the air, and viewers tuned in because they were watching a round in the fight for democracy. An unexpected round, a new sort of thing, since until now America hasn’t been a country where regimes punish dissident broadcasters.
Nexstar and Sinclair, having muscled the network and failed, hung on for two more days and then gave up. On Friday afternoon they each announced they’d no longer keep Kimmel’s show off their stations. Sinclair had been quite chesty the week before: “Sinclair will not lift the suspension of ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ on our stations until formal discussions are held with ABC regarding the network’s commitment to professionalism and accountability. Sinclair also calls upon Mr. Kimmel to issue a direct apology to the Kirk family. Furthermore, we ask Mr. Kimmel to make a meaningful personal donation to the Kirk Family and Turning Point USA.” All it got was the formal discussions, which resulted in no action except Kimmel’s return to Sinclair outlets. The company now spoke humbly of “proposals” that had been “suggested,” and it conceded that all was up to ABC and Disney: “Sinclair respects their right to make those decisions under our network affiliate agreements.”
The terms of specific affiliate agreements usually aren’t made public, but they tend to set limits on the power of stations to refuse network programs. Sinclair and Nexstar wanted an open-ended boycott of Kimmel’s show, and they were trying this even though Disney’s known for litigation and can employ far more lawyers than they can. Next to the federal government, Disney isn’t that massive. Next to Sinclair and Nexstar it is massive. The two smaller companies’ TV stations add up to 23 percent of ABC’s reach, a substantial amount. But Disney, according to one estimate, gets only nine percent of its revenue from broadcast television as a whole. Sinclair reported last year that 27 percent of its money from advertising came from its ABC stations. To make matters simple: if the companies’ stations want to keep showing Monday Night Football, Disney has the rights.
As Kimmel himself noted the night of his return, “I am a tiny part of the Disney Corporation.” Jimmy Kimmel Live! (live on tape) is the second-place ratings winner for late-night talk, and late-night talk has seen its ratings drop to less than a third of what they were 10 years ago. When the right took aim, it had some reason to think that Kimmel’s bosses wouldn’t fight back. But taking aim meant aiming at freedom of speech in its barest form: the ability to say the government stinks. Kimmel might not be the biggest celebrity, but he’s nationally famous and everyone knows his views on Trump. When he was threatened, enough others felt threatened for Disney to realize it was dealing with something very big.
Possibly everyone in this episode was just feeling their way. Carr didn’t know Sinclair and Nexstar would jump, he was just talking big for the gang. Sinclair and Nexstar didn’t know he was just talking; under the Trump way of doing things, maybe the FCC really would come at their licenses because of a joke. Disney didn’t know what to do, so it yanked Kimmel for now and played for time. That left the public. A section hates Kimmel and the liberals, but a greater section was terrified to see everybody in charge acting as if America was now under a regime, the kind of regime that drives critics off the air. Sinclair and Nexstar then found that Disney wouldn’t budge after all, and the two had to give up but slowly enough that perhaps MAGA and the Trump administration wouldn’t be mad at them. Only Kimmel seemed sure of where he was at.
If the above is true, it’s no wonder. This situation’s new to all of us; nobody really knows what the Trump administration might try or what could stop it. This time the tanks rolled into the town square and fell over. On social media Trump conceded defeat, which he spelled like this: “Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad Ratings.” But he continues to feel his way, and now the ex-director of the FBI’s going to be prosecuted for reasons visible only to Trump and his followers. On our dim horizon only one clear fact stands out: Brendan Carr sure says some stuff.