Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the FCC, on Sept. 17 called Jimmy Kimmel‘s remarks about the killer of Charlie Kirk “some of the sickest conduct possible.” But Carr says now that his comments about Kimmel had nothing to do with ABC’s decision to suspend the late-night host.
On a conservative podcast last Wednesday, Carr threatened ABC and its affiliates if they did not “take action” on Kimmel: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Carr implied the FCC would pursue “news distortion” allegations against local ABC broadcasters unless they dropped Kimmel. “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,’” he said.
Soon afterward, Nexstar Media Group, which has 28 ABC affiliates, said it “strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets.” Then Sinclair, which operates 38 ABC stations, followed suit in preempting “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” — and the company specifically thanked Carr for his remarks. After Nexstar’s announcement, ABC said it was indefinitely suspending Kimmel’s show. Carr celebrated the news about Kimmel’s benching, sending a CNN reporter a GIF of “The Office’s” Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute making “raise the roof” gestures.
On Monday, Carr disavowed playing a part in the Kimmel suspension. In an appearance at the 2025 Concordia Annual Summit in New York, Carr said, “Jimmy Kimmel is in the situation that he’s in because of his ratings, not because of anything that’s happened at the federal government level.” That echoed President Trump’s claims that Kimmel was “fired because of bad ratings.” Carr also cited CBS’s cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” which the network claimed was “a purely financial decision.”
But according to Carr, it wasn’t just “bad ratings” that prompted the pushback by ABC-affiliated station groups against Kimmel. To hear his explanation, Nexstar and Sinclair had independently decided Kimmel’s show was not in the “public interest.” Carr said his comment that “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” was a hypothetical point about what the FCC might do if there was a “news distortion” complaint filed against Kimmel and ABC — and that despite Carr having called Kimmel’s comments about MAGA trying to exploit the Kirk assassination to score political points “some of the sickest conduct possible,” the FCC chairman claimed he had “expressed no view on the ultimate merits” of such a complaint.
“What I’ve been very clear in the context of the Kimmel episode is the FCC and myself in particular have expressed no view on the ultimate merits had something like that been filed what our take would be one way or the other,” Carr claimed Monday.
After Carr’s comments at the Concordia conference, Disney said it was bringing Kimmel back starting Tuesday. (When Carr was asked for comment, he referred to his talk at the conference.) Sinclair said it would continue to preempt “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” with news programming and that “discussions with ABC are ongoing as we evaluate the show’s potential return.” Nexstar followed suit Tuesday morning, saying it will preempt Kimmel “pending assurance that all parties are committed to fostering an environment of respectful, constructive dialogue in the markets we serve.” Nexstar, whose $6.2 billion proposed acquisition of Tegna requires FCC approval, has denied that comments from Carr influenced its decision.
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Last week, critics accused the FCC’s Carr of improperly exerting pressure on ABC and local broadcasters to cancel Kimmel — and that his threats were tantamount to a First Amendment violation. For example, California Gov. Gavin Newsom accused the Republican Party of not believing in free speech, saying “they are censoring you in real time.” Following news that Kimmel is returning on Tuesday night, Newsom posted on X, “Thank you to everyone but @BrendanCarrFCC. This is a win for free speech everywhere.”
In his talk at the Concordia conference, Carr blamed Democrats for “completely misrepresenting the work of the FCC and what we’ve been doing. I saw there was a letter from some Senate Democrats that said the FCC threatened to revoke the license of Disney and ABC if they didn’t fire Jimmy Kimmel. And that did not happen in any way, shape or form.” President Trump, however, has — repeatedly — threatened to use the power of the federal government to revoke the licenses of TV broadcasters who displease him.
But it wasn’t just Democrats who objected to Carr’s posture on Kimmel. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) last Friday said he “hates what Kimmel said” and he is “thrilled that he was fired.” (Kimmel, of course, was not “fired.”) That said, Cruz likened Carr to a “mafioso” after the FCC chair threatened broadcasters. “That will end up bad for conservatives,” Cruz said. “There will come a time when a Democrat wins again, wins the White House. They will get rid of everything America that’s conservative. They’ll get rid of every podcast. They’ll get rid of everything. They will silence us. They will use this power and they will use it ruthlessly and that is dangerous.” (David Letterman also made a mafia reference: The late-night legend, speaking at The Atlantic Festival last Thursday, said about Carr’s comment, “Who is hiring these goons — Mario Puzo?”, referring to the author of “The Godfather.”)
Carr said what the Kimmel controversy highlights is the FCC’s goal “to empower local TV stations to serve the needs of the local communities. Again, you’ve got national programmers like Disney, like Comcast, like Paramount that aren’t licensed by the FCC, that have no public interest obligation, and they provide a lot of the primetime shows that the licensed TV stations put out over the air.”
Carr referred to a letter he sent to Disney CEO Bob Iger in November 2024. The FCC chair said he wrote in his letter that “one of the things that we’re trying to do is to re-empower those local TV stations because I just think things have gone way out of balance where the national programs have too much power. The local TV stations are sort of on the receiving end of all that TV content that, again, I think they would have a different perspective on what they want to run.”
At the start of his session at the Concordia conference, Carr commented, “I haven’t seen this much interest in the work of the FCC since the great net neutrality repeal of 2017 where we were told that the FCC’s work and is was going to result in the end of the internet. I think those claims have about as much factual basis as what we’re seeing right now with Jimmy Kimmel. I mean, look, the reality is there’s a lot of Democrats out there that are engaged in a campaign of projection and distortion.”
Carr expressed disapproval of left-leaning late-night TV hosts. But he framed his opinions as just his own musings, rather than a policy position of the FCC that would influence the market.
“I think part of that is a lot of late night programs went from going for laugh lines to going for applause lines,” Carr said. “They went from being court jesters that made fun of everybody. And people should. That’s what comedy is about, right? Make fun of Republicans, make fun of Democrats. But instead of doing the court jester role, they became court clerics where they were enforcing a very narrow sort of partisan view. That’s not for me ultimately to judge, that’s for the ratings in the audience to judge. And that’s what we’re seeing.”
From Variety US