September 18, 2025 11:57 AM UTC

Jimmy Kimmel Shutdown Directly Related to Potential 9News Sale

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: As David Sims writes for The Atlantic, Kimmel’s indefinite suspension marks a significant escalation for Trumpland:

There have already been signs that President Donald Trump’s administration is intent on punishing perceived critics in the media, no matter what complaints about free speech might arise, but the chain of events that shut down Jimmy Kimmel Live feels particularly direct. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said on Benny Johnson’s podcast yesterday. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Within hours, Nexstar, a company that operates 32 of ABC’s 200 local affiliates, said it would not broadcast Kimmel’s show for the “foreseeable future.” Quickly after that, ABC announced its decision…

…What’s happened to Kimmel is an escalation in every way, a chilling precedent that could have further consequences if it isn’t swiftly undone. [Pols emphasis] How Kimmel himself reacts to the situation will be important—he’s a major celebrity, a multi-time emcee of the Academy Awards who’s been hosting TV shows since the 1990s. There’s a chance network television could become even more reticent to broadcast anything remotely provocative, which in turn could also inspire blowback from their audiences.

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Perhaps you haven’t been overly worried about government censorship under the Trump administration, even after “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” was cancelled in July. Perhaps you were hoping that the First Amendment of the United States Constitution was still important to MAGA Land given their regular protestations about “cancel culture” and their free speech right to say terrible things about minorities and the LGBTQ community.

Welp, it’s time to be overly worried.

As The Washington Post reports:

The right-wing campaign to shut down perceived detractors of the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk reverberated on Thursday after ABC announced it would indefinitely suspend late night host Jimmy Kimmel. The news, announced late Wednesday, rocked Hollywood, prompting many in the entertainment industry to accuse ABC of buckling to a censorship campaign.

ABC did not give an explanation for the move, which followed conservative backlash to comments Kimmel made in an opening monologue about MAGA reactions to Kirk’s fatal shooting last week. Nexstar, the biggest owner of ABC-affiliated stations, said it would replace “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” starting Wednesday night. Kimmel is a longtime critic of President Donald Trump and his conservative allies.

The show’s suspension also comes after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr criticized Kimmel and implied that the FCC could retaliate against the companies who aired him.

Trump reacted with glee to the news. [Pols emphasis] “Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done,” he wrote on social media, and called for the cancellation of two other late-night shows that have criticized him: NBC’s “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”

While on the surface this move is another step toward authoritarianism, where nobody is allowed to point out that the Emperor has no clothes, there’s more to Kimmel’s indefinite suspension…and it directly relates to the pending sale and likely dismantling of 9News in Denver.

From The New York Post, President Trump’s favorite right-wing rag from his former home city:

Jimmy Kimmel’s comments on the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk weren’t just noxiously offensive and seemingly misleading — their timing was also incredibly bad: They threaten to derail Nexstar’s $6.2 billion takeover of rival broadcaster Tegna, telecom insiders tell On The Money.

The already controversial deal — which would combine two of the nation’s largest owners of local TV stations — poses significant antitrust questions and needs a close review by the Federal Communications Commission and its conservative firebrand chairman, Brendan Carr. [Pols emphasis]

Kimmel’s comments made that approval even dicier. That’s why Nexstar publicly announced Thursday that its stations would no longer carry the show, telecom insiders tell On The Money. Ditto for ABC, which produces and distributes “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” to broadcasters like Nexstar — and likewise has business before the FCC.

Nexstar is hoping to finalize a $6.2 billion merger with Tegna that would allow Nexstar to add 64 new television stations to the 200 it already owns across the country. If that sale goes thorough in early 2026, it would almost certainly mean the end for 9News, which has been Denver’s top news station for more than four decades.

The reason Nexstar is even able to contemplate such a merger is because Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr — one of the authors of the infamous “Project 2025” document — is ramming through a regulation change that long prohibited (on anti-trust grounds) a single company from owning more than one of the top television stations in a given market. Nexstar CEO Perry Sook praised President Trump in the very first sentence of his statement about the proposed merger in August because the company needs the Trump administration’s help in order to get this deal across the finish line.

Of course, there is no right or wrong time to speak out about the government. The First Amendment is not the first amendment by accident; the ability to speak truth to power was a primary reason that British colonists formed a new country across the Atlantic Ocean. But in 2025, freedom of speech is only guaranteed so long as it doesn’t impact a big corporate merger supported by the President of the United States. For that merger to happen, even formerly outspoken supporters of free speech — like Carr himself — have changed their tune:

As Lily Loofbourow elaborates in a separate column for The Washington Post:

Billionaires are accelerating their efforts to consolidate control over media platforms and the president is eager to help them do so, provided they shut down his critics. If they don’t, he threatens to use the levers of government — particularly those designed to remain independent — to financially punish them. None of this is secret; the brazenness is, at least partly, the point. [Pols emphasis]

News broke yesterday that Disney-owned ABC — following a similar announcement from Nexstar, the largest owner of television stations in the United States — was pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s show, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” off the air. The shocking move was ostensibly in response to a remark Kimmel made Monday night, which Nexstar and Sinclair, its biggest competitor, have characterized as so beyond the pale that the late-night comic’s show could not be permitted to air.

Here is that remark: “We had 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.”

The ordinariness of the statement is what unsettles the most. [Pols emphasis] Accusations of political opportunism are hardly exceptional or unwarranted in this polarized landscape. Sure, Kimmel’s implication that the alleged shooter was “one of them” appears now to be inaccurate; based on the charging documents prosecutors submitted Tuesday, suspect Tyler Robinson was not a Trump supporter. As jabs go, it was a miss. But the outrage is so bizarre it almost seems (dare I say it?) opportunistic.

Colorado elected officials should be doing everything in their power to challenge this entire disgusting process. There is still time to push back against the FCC’s attempt to eliminate the rule on owning more than one top television station in a given market, and this might be the best place to start; without that relaxed regulation, it’s hard to see how Nexstar’s merger with Tegna can still go forward while including stations such as 9News. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser may take legal action to prevent the Nexstar merger; Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper have also been outspoken in their opposition, but now need to be pulling whatever levers are available to them in order to prevent the further dismantling of objective journalism in Colorado.

The killing of Charlie Kirk has given the Trump administration a pretext to be more aggressive in stifling opposition and inserting themselves further into the affairs of American corporations. Attempting to cancel Jimmy Kimmel should serve as a new rallying point to protect free speech and journalism in general. If it also saves Colorado’s most popular local news station — all the better.