What do people think of the firing of Jimmy Kimmel?
Well, not a firing exactly, as Paul Jacob mentioned yesterday, but, let’s agree, Kimmel’s exact employment status is not quite the issue. What’s at issue is what he said, and to what extent was the government influential in removing Kimmel from his on-air position even if only temporarily.
Dave Smith took, generally, Paul’s position: what Kimmel said was odd, dumb; and the FCC should not pressure a media corporation to remove on-air talent:
Joe Lancaster, at Reason, addressed the Kimmel FCC problem:
This week, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr criticized TV host Jimmy Kimmel for comments made about Kirk during his show. Carr openly intimated that ABC should take action or potentially face reprisal; within hours, the network suspended Kimmel’s show indefinitely. (Trump later praised Carr as “outstanding. He’s a patriot. He loves our country, and he’s a tough guy.”)
Of course, when the opposing party was in power, Carr recognized the error of such a threat. In 2022, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that during the 2020 election, Facebook artificially decreased the spread of a story about Hunter Biden in response to a request from the FBI.
“The government does not evade the First Amendment’s restraints on censoring political speech by jawboning a company into suppressing it — rather, that conduct runs headlong into those constitutional restrictions, as Supreme Court law makes clear,” Carr posted on X in response. Now that government power is in his hands, Carr apparently has fewer qualms about wielding it like that.
As for the influence of the FCC, one major player in the cancellation out-right denies any such influence: “‘The decision to preempt ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ was made unilaterally by the senior executive team at Nexstar, and they had no communication with the FCC or any government agency prior to making that decision,’ a Nexstar spokesperson told CBS News in an email Thursday.”
But, of all the reactions, The Babylon Bee aimed for a wider perspective:
