ABC has suspended “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” indefinitely after the late-night host’s on-air remarks about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk prompted a revolt by major station groups and public warnings from the head of the U.S. broadcast regulator. “Jimmy Kimmel Live! will be pre-empted indefinitely,” an ABC spokesperson said late Wednesday, confirming the network would pull the show from its schedule for the foreseeable future following Kimmel’s monologues on Monday and Tuesday.
The decision landed minutes after Nexstar Media Group, one of the largest owners of ABC affiliates, announced it would no longer air the program. Andrew Alford, Nexstar’s president of broadcasting, called Kimmel’s remarks “offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse,” adding that continuing to carry the show “is simply not in the public interest at the current time,” and that Nexstar would pre-empt the program “for the foreseeable future.” Sinclair Broadcast Group said it would also stop airing the show and would instead run “a special in remembrance of Charlie Kirk” in Kimmel’s time slot on Friday, urging the host to apologize to Kirk’s family and make a “meaningful personal donation to the Kirk family and Turning Point USA.”
The Federal Communications Commission’s chair, Brendan Carr, publicly pressed local broadcasters to drop the show before ABC acted. In a podcast interview earlier Wednesday, Carr called Kimmel’s commentary “some of the sickest conduct possible,” said “there was a path forward for suspension,” and warned there were “remedies we could look at,” while thanking Nexstar “for doing the right thing” once it moved. Carr later wrote that “local broadcasters have an obligation to serve the public interest” and encouraged peers to “push back” on programming “that they determine falls short of community values.”
Kimmel’s comments came less than a week after Kirk, 31, was shot dead during a campus event in Orem, Utah. In his Monday monologue on 15 September, Kimmel told viewers, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang 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.” On Tuesday he said, “Many in MAGA-land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk,” and criticized Vice President JD Vance’s argument that the political left bore blame, calling a statistic Vance cited “complete bullshit” and pointing to research asserting far-right groups account for most domestic extremist violence.