Jimmy Kimmel. BBC/AFP/Getty.
Jimmy Kimmel has been taken off the air after lies about the motivation of the Charlie Kirk assassination. BBC. Kimmel said on Monday night's program "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." (emphasis mine). Kimmel also criticized flying flags at half staff and President Trump's mourning of Kirk's death. The comments caused withering criticism against Kimmel and spurred the FCC to comment that ABC's broadcast license could be at risk if it continued to act against "the public good". However, it was Nexstar media that ultimately pressured ABC into pulling the show after they announced that they would no longer carry the program. Nexstar is one of the largest owners of local television stations and said that Kimmel's comments were not in the public interest. Though a direct motive for the Charlie Kirk assassination has been found, he can be fairly described as a liberal given descriptions of his political beliefs by his parents and other sources.
My Comment:
The media is framing this as a free speech issue, and if this was just about how offensive Jimmy Kimmel was being, they would be right. Unfortunately, Kimmel wasn't just horribly offensive with his comments, he had crossed the line into defamation. That is why he got fired, not because he made offensive statements.
Some context is necessary. The program where Kimmel made these remarks aired after court documents revealed the political leanings of the killer, Tyler Robinson. Those documents clearly stated that Robinson was on the left and was in a relationship with a male-to-female transgender. Though Robinson hasn't given a clear statement about his motivations, other than the leaked chat that said he thought Kirk "spread hate". It's very factually wrong to say that he was conservative, let alone MAGA, with the information the court provided. The only way you can really argue it at this point is to go full conspiratorial thinking with it, but Kimmel didn't even do that. He just made the statement as if it was a fact in the public record when the exact opposite was true. And there is every expectation that he and his writing staff must have known about the documents release as it was the biggest story that day. That crosses the line from opinion to an out and out lie.
Free speech has never protected defamation and libel, and given the circumstances, his behavior is especially egregious. Disinformation about the motivations of the killer are rife on the internet and Kimmel was fanning the fires with a statement that he knew was false. The fact that he didn't retract it in the 48 hours since he made them when there has been no justification offered whatsoever for his false comments shows that he doesn't regret saying what he said, even though it's clearly false. This makes it look like he was lying about MAGA out of sheer malice and if MAGA was an individual they would have a case to sue the pants off Jimmy Kimmel. And if some nutjob out there does get radicalized by Kimmel's words and cites him as a motivation for some kind of attack, he could really be in trouble.
Kimmel's defenders cite free speech as a reason why he shouldn't have been fired, but it really doesn't apply here. His free speech rights aren't being violated. He lost his job, he didn't lose his voice. He is still more than capable of writing a blog post, printing a book, going on a talk show to speak or making a YouTube video or podcast. All that happened is that he lost his job, like so many other people that don't understand that downplaying and praising an assassination is not a good thing. He didn't get fired for his opinions either, he got fired because he was blatantly lying.
Some are citing the FCC threats a speech violation as well, but again, it's not an apt comparison. The FCC regulations do have a say over what folks can say over the airwaves and it has to be in the public interests. Clearly lying about a charged political event in a extraordinarily tense time is obviously not in the interest of the public, indeed, it's reinforcing false narratives about a terrible crime. That's exactly the kind of thing the FCC should intervene in.
Of course, it wasn't just the FCC that was putting pressure on ABC. It was Nexstar that pulled the plug and once that happened ABC had to cave. You can't have one of the largest media groups out there pull a show without it having major consequences for your bottom line. Kimmel was, at that point, not worth it and he was going to get fired no matter what.
Kimmel is the biggest scalp taken in the wake of the Kirk assassination but he's hardly the first or the last. As much as the left is whining about cancel culture now, the fact is that they are being forced to live by the rules they set, though this time instead of folks getting canceled for drawing a cartoon the wrong way or arguing that there are only two genders or any of the other dumb things folks have been canceled for, it's because folks are inciting violence or praising an assassin. Is it great? No. But nobody should shed a tear for folks that lose their job when they are acting this vile.
I think ABC might just be using this as an excuse to get rid of Kimmel. Late night TV is a joke now and I don't know anyone that watches it. It's not like like when I was younger when everyone watched Jay Leno or David Letterman. There are better options for late night viewing given the internet, but even then, Kimmel and his contemporaries had an extremely narrow draw of left wing viewers. Given that these shows are expensive, getting rid of them might have been a financial boon for ABC regardless.
As for Kimmel himself, I am not a fan. Like everyone in my age group, I did watch The Man Show when I was younger and it's amazing that the guy that was on that show ended up being the most smug and annoying of the late night hosts. He somehow avoided getting canceled by the left despite being in blackface and he had a long history of being one of the shrillest people on TV. I am not at all sad to see him go.
Finally, I really do think that the culture is absolutely shifting away from the left. That was already clear when Donald Trump was able to win his third election, but the assassination of Kirk and the backlash it has caused against the left makes it pretty undeniable. I don't know what is going to replace the woke left as the cultural force, they still control much of Hollywood, TV and the internet, but it's clear that their power is absolutely on the downslope.
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