Those living inside a liberal bubble surely heard overwhelming praise for Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue Tuesday after his suspension. Yet the most flattering reviews might have inadvertently come from Fox News Channel, not in terms of what its hosts said, but rather what they didn’t.
Fox seemed to spend all day Wednesday trying to decide on a line of attack over Kimmel’s return to ABC. By the time the primetime hosts hit the stage that evening, they seemed to settle on three: That Kimmel never formally apologized; the left had turned him into a “First Amendment martyr,” as Fox’s Will Cain put it; and never mind him, Democrats were hypocrites for Biden administration policies and all the people they allowed to be canceled without offering a “free speech” defense at the time.
“He wasn’t sorry, so he didn’t say ‘I’m sorry,’” Fox’s Laura Ingraham offered with customary disdain, addressing Kimmel to add, “The government did not get you suspended.”
Perhaps the biggest proof that Kimmel offered a compelling argument is Fox News didn’t spend that much time discussing it — certainly, not compared to CNN and MSNBC. Barely any of the clips on Fox News’ YouTube channel from after Kimmel’s return are about the late night host, with the network opting instead to focus on Kamala Harris’ book tour. Indeed, there was an almost obligatory quality to the coverage, which mostly reinforced Kimmel’s argument that if you didn’t like him before the controversy, very little he could say that would change your mind.
Only a few Fox hosts or pundits, like Jesse Watters, sought to echo Trump’s fairness complaint, and the question of the late-night shows heavily tilting against Republicans in their guest lineups and the targets they choose to lampoon.
Others, like Sean Hannity, swung back to the contention this was really just a business decision by ABC, unrelated to pressure from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. Hannity’s eager-to-please Fox News contributor, Joe Concha, went with the “Democrats as hypocrites” line, given that Disney had previously fired Roseanne Barr and “The Mandalorian” co-star Gina Carano in 2018 and 2021, respectively, for what were seen as offensive comments — the distinction being, just to close the loop, that the FCC played no role in those events.
All told, Kimmel received relatively little coverage on Fox, which has a habit, when a story isn’t particularly hospitable to President Trump, of simply changing the subject and zooming in on other matters.
Granted, part of that has to do with the vagaries of the turbo-charged Trump news cycle, and a story that felt more conducive to Fox’s habit of seizing on events to express outrage — in this case, a fatal shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas, which Republican politicians and Fox hosts directly linked to Democratic rhetoric.
Then again, the sad truth about the U.S. right now is coverage of a horrific act of gun violence is often pushed off home pages by some new violent event. (On the left, there was a different distraction: The renewed threat of Trump using the Justice Department to target his political enemies, with reports of a possible indictment of former FBI director James Comey).
Kimmel’s non-apology is something Watters acknowledged as recognizing from experience — a notable aside, given that some have seized on a joke the Fox News host made this week about bombing the United Nations building as the kind of comment that would merit a response from the network. While Watters hasn’t addressed that, “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade was forced to apologize after saying that homeless people should be given lethal injections.
The apology, or lack thereof, was also brought up on “Gutfeld!,” Fox’s late-night alternative, although host Greg Gutfeld’s vaguely coherent riff mostly kept coming back to mocking Kimmel for fighting back tears when he discussed Kirk’s death.
As for Kimmel, the second night of his show reflected a return to business as usual, which included skewering Trump for his low poll numbers, noting that Trump continued to threaten ABC and comparing the president to “An old-fashioned ‘80s movie-style bully.”
In a way, though, the most significant comments Wednesday might have come from an unexpected source in a different venue: Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who told CNN that in terms of Trump and Carr using the levers of government to exert leverage over late-night comics, “This isn’t an area that I think the FCC ought to be wandering into.”
Thune followed other GOP senators, as well as conservative podcasters like Joe Rogan, in expressing discomfort with Trump and Carr’s tactics in seeking to silence criticism.
Kimmel’s most significant line in his widely seen Tuesday monologue centered on the larger issues at play, saying, “This show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.”
Despite the huge audience that greeted his return, the ABC affiliate groups that are still balking at airing the show means Kimmel is hardly out of the woods in keeping “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” alive and viable. Yet if the larger fight isn’t over, Fox News’ muted response suggests he clearly won this round.