This isn’t exactly sports media, unless you believe that Stephen A. Smith is being groomed to fill a Kimmel-sized hole made at ABC/Disney. ABC’s Wednesday suspension of Jimmy Kimmel from Jimmy Kimmel Live! is a broader media bombshell though, and I do have some sourcing as to the specifics of how it happened. First, here’s Kimmel’s Monday monologue comment that triggered his suspension:
We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it
People are debating whether this is Cancel Culture, which, well, sure. Kimmel made a comment about Charlie Kirk’s killer and now his show is potentially, literally, cancelled. Frequent cancellation target Dave Portnoy disagrees, though:
With Kimmel getting canned I’m seeing lots of people talking about the hypocrisy of cancel culture. To me Cancel culture is when people go out of their way to dig up old tweets, videos etc looking for dirt on somebody they don’t like in an effort to get them fired. Like if Kimmel got canceled for shit he did on the Man Show that would be cancel culture. But 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. That is consequences for your actions
I wouldn’t say it’s that tidy. This suspension wasn’t simply the market speaking in response to a statement beyond the pale. FCC Chair Brendan Carr wasn’t being subtle, going on Fox News to threaten ABC with, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” That’s pressure from the government. Complicating the standard free speech conversation (somewhat) is that the FCC has some discretion over TV network content, given the public utility of those scarce channels.
Here’s what a source says, and I’ll say, you can disagree with the interpretation or say my source is lying, but I can confidently tell you that this person knows exactly why the Jimmy Kimmel ouster happened, on a granular level. It’s as much about a Civil War within MAGA World as it is about MAGA’s war on Hollywood libs: