In its stated desire to bring down the temperature, Disney and ABC’s response in sidelining their late-night host set the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” controversy on fire. Now the company seems to be relying on Kimmel — the guy who has deliciously skewered the network at its upfront presentations for years — to find the right words to get it out of a seemingly impossible situation.
Can Kimmel do that when he returns on Tuesday night in a way that will satisfy all of the interested parties, from the conservative-leaning station groups that pulled his show to the Trump-picked FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, who is now backpedaling away from the threat he leveled against it? Almost surely not.
But reinstating Kimmel comes after a stretch where even conservative voices, including Republican senators Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, expressed discomfort with the appearance of the government silencing a comedian because the president objected to his jokes, and after a parade of Hollywood heavyweights lashed out at Disney for caving to such pressure — seemingly putting its business interests ahead of the First Amendment.
The Kimmel dust-up, notably, comes amid a wave of efforts by Trump to silence critics, including 11-figure lawsuits against the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which have faced tough sledding in the courts. Disney already capitulated once, with ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos apologizing, and the company paying $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump.
Trump officials, notably, also wrongly referred to Kimmel as having been “canceled,” which is tantamount to spiking the football before crossing the goal line.
Trump has done little to help those seeking to defend the charge that he’s silencing critics by insisting that the overwhelmingly negative tone of the late-night shows against him should somehow be “illegal” — a line of thought rooted in the old Fairness Doctrine, which stated that broadcasters must provide programming representative of diverse voices and opinions. That rule was eliminated during the Reagan administration in the 1980s, helping pave the way for Rush Limbaugh and the rise of conservative talk radio.
Nevertheless, the 1980s are by all accounts the era that still defines Trump’s view of network television. He still sees ABC, CBS and NBC (perhaps less Fox Broadcasting) as the titans of TV, never mind that those networks continue to shrink in importance and audience as we move further into the streaming age.
Far from the days when “The Tonight Show” dominated late-night under Johnny Carson, hosts like Kimmel and Stephen Colbert play to smaller niche audiences, which has both blunted their economic viability and allowed them to speak to narrower tastes. When Carson’s successor, Jay Leno, suggested that hosts were sacrificing viewers by skewing too far left, what he missed was that the current crop of hosts were forging a bond with a loyal core of viewers in a fragmented marketplace by taking an ideological side.
Given that, Kimmel isn’t likely to have some Trump-friendly epiphany as part of his comeback. The logical response would be to acknowledge, again, that he meant no disrespect or offense to the slain conservative advocate Charlie Kirk, without buckling in his appraisal of how Trump and his supporters had sought to politically exploit the situation, which represented the main thrust of his remarks.
Whether that will mollify Carr, or Nexstar, the first affiliate group that dumped the show, remains to be seen (Sinclair said later Monday that it wouldn’t be carrying the show as discussions with ABC continue). But the FCC chief made clear Monday that he intends to continue seeking to prod station owners to push back against content provided by networks. Such a move provides the FCC cover to police speech, with its regulatory power over mergers, primarily, hanging over the industry’s collective head.
Still, as The Atlantic’s David Frum noted, Trump’s access to “the apparatus of state repression” ran into howls not just from Hollywood stars but also Disney aficionados voting with their pocketbooks, canceling Disney World trips and Disney+ subscriptions.
As MSNBC’s Ari Melber noted, while late night represents a small part of the Disney empire, anger over the Kimmel suspension turned the response into a “massive, righteous, very clear backlash” that threatened to impact other parts of the studio.
It’s worth noting that while Disney insiders said the company was guided by “the right thing to do,” the deafening roar of that backlash surely played a part.
Disney CEO Bob Iger also found himself dragged into an unflattering spotlight, criticized by industry figures — including his predecessor, Michael Eisner — and publicly dressed down by HBO’s John Oliver, who offered helpful hints in how to push back against Trump and Carr’s “ridiculous demands” and triumph against a bully.
“I’m glad to see that Disney found its courage in the face of these threats from the government,” Democratic FCC commissioner Anna M. Gomez said on MSNBC Monday. “But we need to continue, all of us, to speak out and push back.”
Disney’s wider calculations regarding its best interests will surely be lost on those who prematurely crowed about Kimmel’s demise. Indeed, like clockwork, people who argued that Disney was simply making a “business decision” in yanking Kimmel were suddenly attacking the studio for making the business decision to bring him back.
In a particularly famous episode from the early days of television, Carson’s predecessor Jack Paar walked off “The Tonight Show” when the network censored a slightly off-color story that he was telling, and stayed away for the next three weeks. When he returned, Paar brought down the house by beginning his monologue with, “As I was saying …”
Thinking of Paar’s example, it’s hard to see what else Kimmel can do, after some sort of acknowledgement, but essentially pick up where he left off.
While bringing Kimmel back should take some heat off Disney from certain quarters, the real question is how long the studio and network will stand behind him, especially with so many bad-faith actors determined to put a comedian at the center of this ginned-up mini-drama.
