Jimmy Kimmel’s Suspension and Trump’s FCC

0:03From Hollywood, it's Jimmy Kimmel Live! Monday's episode of the late night show Jimmy Kimmel Live started off like most other days.

0:18Kimmel took the stage in front of a live audience and launched into a monologue. Kimmel delivered what a lot of people would expect to be kind of a normal Jimmy Kimmel monologue, right? Which included criticism of Trump. That's our colleague Maggie Severns. But it was happening at this extraordinary moment where people are grieving the death of Charlie Kirk. 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. In between the finger pointing, there was grieving on Friday.

0:54Kimmel was also critical of President Trump's grieving process. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish, OK? Kimmel goes after Trump almost every day on his show. But this time, conservatives felt that his monologue took things too far. This is a crowd that has already been offended many times by Jimmy Kimmel, and this became the straw that broke the camel's back. On Wednesday, Disney said it was suspending Kimmel's show indefinitely. On its face, it looked like a straightforward case of a company responding to public pressure.

1:30But Maggie says there was actually a lot more to it than that. There are questions in here about what is free speech. There are questions about what is Trump doing to wield the federal government's power. And it all kind of leads to this right now, this one agency and this one bureaucrat, Brendan Carr, who feels like he has these legal and bureaucratic tools to really carry out Trump's agenda.

2:01Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Friday, September 19th.

2:14Coming up on the show, Jimmy Kimmel's suspension and Trump's escalating campaign against the media.

2:36among the many conservatives calling for jimmy kimmel to be reprimanded for his comments was brendan carr the head of the federal communications commission brendan carr who's the chairman of the sec went on benny johnson's podcast benny johnson being a big right-wing media figure uh mr chairman thank you so much for being on our program um and he said this is a very very serious issue right now for Disney. Disney owns ABC, the network that makes Jimmy Kimmel's show. Here's Carr. You know, when you look at the conduct that has taken place by Jimmy Kimmel, it appears to be some of the sickest conduct possible.

3:18On the podcast, Carr said that Kimmel was misleading the public by suggesting that the Charlie Kirk shooter was a Trump supporter. The shooter's mother has told investigators that her son had grown more left-leaning over the last year. Appears to be an action by Jimmy Kimmel to play into that narrative that this was somehow a MAGA or Republican motivated person. If that's what happened here with his conduct, that is really, really sick. Carr's criticism carried a bit more weight than other conservative critics because his agency, the FCC, has regulatory oversight over broadcasters like ABC. And he said, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.

3:57I mean, look, 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, you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. Let's talk about Brendan Carr for a moment. Who is he? So on the one hand, Brendan Carr is this kind of Trump warrior who says that he can wield this huge power over broadcast and network news. On the other hand, he is a Washington bureaucrat who's been working at the FCC for more than 10 years. He's taken a very different approach from people before him, and he has been very vocal online.

4:40He's not afraid to be seen as political, and he's not afraid to be seen as very closely allied with the president. Carr is all in on Trump. He's even been seen wearing a golden lapel pin to Trump's face. And he also wrote a chapter in Project 2025, that controversial Republican blueprint on what the FCC should be doing. Yeah, he did. He wrote a chapter on what the FCC should be doing that outlined a much more kind of muscular FCC. One of the ways Carr has sought to flex the FCC's muscles is by using its power over granting broadcast licenses. Can you explain what broadcast licenses are and why they matter to a TV network?

5:27Yeah, they matter because a broadcast license lets you use the airwaves, right? The airwaves are out there and someone needed to, just like with radio, kind of regulate who gets them. And there's this idea written into the law by Congress that if you have a license to use the airwaves, there are certain responsibilities then that you carry, right? Right, because the government is basically giving these companies a slice of the airwaves. And so the command is that they ought to be using that piece, that public resource that nobody else can use in the public interest. Yes. And for decades, that public interest idea has basically kind of sat on the sidelines.

6:05There was one time that one of our reporters could find that that's actually been used. And it was a station in the South in the early 1970s that had its broadcast license revoked over promoting segregation, right? And so, you know, for a year, more than a year, Brendan Carr has said, we should be looking at this. Like, these licenses, he would say, are not sacred cows. We can take away someone's license if they aren't acting in the public interest. The question then is, what is the public interest? Maggie and our colleague Joe Flint recently interviewed Carr at his office in Washington, D.C. Carr told them about what he thinks is and is not in the public interest.

6:43Well, it's not going after them for favorable or unfavorable coverage. There's lots of favorable coverage that they do as well. It's holding it to that public interest standard. And one of the elements of that public interest standard is news distortion. The FCC has a rule against news distortion, which says broadcasters aren't allowed to use the public airwaves to knowingly spread blatantly inaccurate information about a major news event. The rule has rarely been applied. Local stations that carry ABC need a license to broadcast over the airwaves, so losing those rights would be very detrimental to their business.

7:19Those broadcast licenses also give Carr another point of leverage, over mergers. In order for a broadcast license to be transferred to another company, like in the case of a merger, the FCC has to sign off. Take, for example, earlier this year, when Skydance wanted to merge with Paramount. Carr's FCC got to oversee that. And before the deal was approved, Paramount agreed to pay$16 million to settle a Trump lawsuit against CBS, one of Paramount's networks. The company also hired a Trump ally to keep an eye out for signs of bias in its coverage. Here's Carr talking about the merger on CNBC. The thing that was really important to me in all of this was that the new owners of CBS came in and said, it's time for a change.

8:02We're going to reorient it towards getting rid of bias, to looking at fact-based reporting. They said they're going to get rid of invidious forms of DEI discrimination. Well, so getting back to this Kimmel situation, it seems like when Carr said we can do this the easy way or the hard way, he's implying that there's a lot the FCC can do to put pressure on ABC. The implication there is, hey, I have all these levers and I'm not afraid to use them. So these large companies have to interact with the FCC, and I don't think it's a stretch to interpret that as a threat from Carr saying, hey, I can make your life much harder.

8:47Carr didn't end up needing to do things the hard way. Coming up, Inside Disney's decision to pull the plug on Kimmel.

9:09The FCC wasn't the only player with leverage over Disney, ABC's parent company. Two of its biggest affiliate partners were also dialing up the pressure. You have these national companies, ABC, NBC, CBS, but when you think about what actually happens when you're watching network news, you're watching your local affiliate, right? And those local affiliates are actually carrying the national broadcasts. And so there's a company that owns that local affiliate. And then there's a national company like NBC or CBS that's being carried on the local channel. One of the affiliates that started pressuring Disney is called Nextstar.

9:44It operates more than 30 ABC stations around the country. Nextstar said that it was not going to carry Kimmel's show. So the president of Nextstar came out and said, Mr. Kimmel's comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national discourse. Nexstar is currently seeking approval from the FCC to acquire another network of local stations, and a deal valued at$6.2 billion. The company said it had no communication with the FCC or any government agency prior to making the decision to pull Kimmel's show. The other affiliate to take action was Sinclair, which owns another 30 ABC stations.

10:26Sinclair said that instead of airing Kimmel's show, it would air a special during that time slot in remembrance of Kirk. Carr, at the FCC, later applauded these moves during an interview on Fox News. Nextar, as you noted, stood up and said, look, we have the license and we don't want to run this anymore. We don't think it serves the interests of our community. Sinclair did the same thing. So there's more work to go, but I'm very glad to see that America's broadcasters are standing up to serve the interests of their community. We don't just have this progressive foie gras coming out from New York and Hollywood.

10:59As complaints from Nextstar and Sinclair intensified the situation, inside ABC, executives were feeling the pressure. So my colleague, Joe Flint, who's been reporting on this, talks about how in one of his stories, this news really kind of shot up the ladder at ABC. scene, it was a conversation, you know, that the chief executive, Bob Iger, and others are having, and that, you know, Next Star's decision to stop carrying the show was one of the factors that really influenced their actions. Disney executives were worried that what Kimmel had planned to say for Wednesday's show might make things worse.

11:34According to people familiar with the matter, Kimmel had planned to tell the audience that his words on Kirk had been purposefully twisted by some members of the MAGA movement. The company was also growing concerned about the safety of the show's staff, who'd started receiving threatening messages. And so, Disney made the call. Kimmel's show was being suspended indefinitely. Kimmel has not publicly commented since his suspension.

11:59After Kimmel was taken off the air, Trump took to social media to celebrate. He said it was, quote, great news for America, and that Kimmel had, quote, zero talent. He also appeared to call in another network, NBC, to cancel two other major late-night shows, Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. That didn't stop Meyers and Fallon from weighing in, though. Meyers criticized Kimmel's suspension as part of a crackdown on free speech. Fallon said he hopes Kimmel comes back on air. An NBCUniversal spokeswoman declined to comment. Yesterday, Trump also told reporters that the FCC should revoke broadcasting licenses of networks that are, quote, against him.

12:42They give me only bad publicity or press. I think they're getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away. It will be up to Brendan Carr. This is something that Trump has talked about for a while. You know, when he was on the campaign trail, this, you know, railing at the media and railing at broadcasters like CBS and ABC is something he did often. And so as we move forward with this, in this case, the threat of action seems to have been enough when it came to Jimmy Kimmel. This also seems like something that in the first Trump administration, there were a lot of government officials who, if Trump would say something like this, that all the broadcasters should have their licenses revoked because they're against me, there'd be people in the administration and in other government agencies that would push back on that and wouldn't go along with that.

13:29But now with Brendan Carr, he has someone who seems to be also just as willing to do something like that. Yeah, we've talked about how this is historically very unprecedented from the FCC. And, you know, Brendan Carr, if you talk to him, he's someone who is subscribed to this theory of the unitary executive, this idea that the executive branch should all basically be under the control of the president, that something like the FCC or the Fed is not actually an independent agency. And here what we have is a person who runs one of these agencies that used to see itself as independent saying, I don't believe that.

14:05And I'm happy to work with the president and I'm happy to carry out his agenda and figure out what I can do. Kimmel isn't the only person to get in trouble at his job over making comments about Charlie Kirk's death. The Wall Street Journal has also reported that many people are being fired for making comments online. So a lot of my coverage has to do with this intersection between business and Washington. And since the start of the year, I've actually been quite surprised with the speed at which business has kind of fallen in line with things that the president asked or the speed with which people donated to Trump's inauguration.

14:41This is another iteration of that, another iteration of these kind of battles to remake American culture that we're seeing across the board. We're seeing them at universities, at law firms. And I wouldn't be surprised, given the way things are going, if the country looks very different two years from now as Trump finds other sectors that he wants to get involved in.

15:07Before we go, heads up that episode two of our new incredible series, Camp Swamp Road, is out on Sunday. The first episode is in our feed. That's all for today. Friday, September 19th. Additional reporting in this episode by Joe Flint, Isabella Simonetti, and Suzanne Vernizza. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Catherine Brewer, Pia Gedkari, Carlos Garcia, Rachel Humphries, Sophie Codner, Matt Kwong, Colin McNulty, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa Sarah Platt Alan Rodriguez Espinosa Heather Rogers Pierce Singhi Jivika Verma Lisa Wang Catherine Whalen Tatiana Zamis and me, Ryan Knudsen Our engineers are Griffin Tanner Nathan Singapak and Peter Leonard Our theme music is by So Wiley Additional music this week from Catherine Anderson Peter Leonard Bobby Lord Emma Munger Griffin Tanner and Blue Dot Sessions Fact-checking this week by Kate Gallagher thanks for listening see you on Sunday