FCC chairman Brendan Carr appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to praise Nexstar and Sinclair for pulling “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” from their ABC affiliate stations, after which ABC suspended production of the show indefinitely.
“Something’s gone seriously awry,” Carr said about late night shows like Kimmel’s. “They went from being court jesters that would make fun of everybody in power to being court clerics and enforcing a very narrow political ideology. And Nexstar stood up and said, ‘We have the license and we don’t want to run this anymore. We don’t think it serves the interest of our community.’ Sinclair did the same thing. There’s more work to go, but I’m very glad to see that America’s broadcasters are standing up to serve the interest of their community. We don’t just have this progressive foie gras coming out from New York and Hollywood.”
“This action today by Nexstar and Sinclair, frankly, is unprecedented,” Carr continues. “I can’t imagine another time we’ve had a local broadcasters tell a national programmer like Disney, ‘Your content no longer meets the needs and values of our community.’ So this is an important turning point.”
“Charlie Kirk set out to change the country, to change the culture,” he concluded. “And the results of his work are continuing to produce results, and that’s a good thing.”
ABC indefinitely suspended “Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ on Wednesday after Nexstar and Sinclair, which both own tens of ABC affiliate stations throughout the country, announced that it would stop airing the late night series because of the host’s comments on the killing of Charlie Kirk. That news came after Carr threatened to take legal action against ABC for Kimmel’s words.
“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,” Kimmel said during his broadcast on Monday.
Nexstar said it “strongly objects” to Kimmel’s recent comments about the killing of Charlie Kirk, which the company’s broadcasting president Andrew Alford called “offensive and insensitive.” “Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time,” Alford said in a statement.
Shortly after the news broke, Carr responded on X by saying, “I want to thank Nexstar for doing the right thing. Local broadcasters have an obligation to serve the public interest. While this may be an unprecedented decision, it is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming that they determine falls short of community values. I hope that other broadcasters follow Nexstar’s lead.”
Sinclair’s sentiments were similar. In addition to pulling “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” the company announced that it would replace Kimmel’s Friday timeslot with a Kirk tribute special and demanded that the host apologize to Kirk’s family and donate to them and Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA.
“Mr. Kimmel’s remarks were inappropriate and deeply insensitive at a critical moment for our country,” Sinclair vice chairman Jason Smith said in a statement. “We believe broadcasters have a responsibility to educate and elevate respectful, constructive dialogue in our communities. We appreciate FCC Chairman Carr’s remarks today and this incident highlights the critical need for the FCC to take immediate regulatory action to address control held over local broadcasters by the big national networks.”
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