ABC has announced that it is suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live! following the eponymous host’s controversial statements about the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Kimmel incorrectly claimed in his Monday-night monologue that Kirk’s assassin, Tyler Robinson, was a conservative. “We hit 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,” Kimmel said.
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Utah’s Governor Spencer Cox has disclosed the results of a preliminary investigation that found Robinson to be motivated by left-wing ideology. “It’s very clear to us and to the investigators that this was a person who was deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology,” Cox told the Wall Street Journal on Saturday.
In the aftermath of Kimmel’s comments, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, suggested that action could be taken to strip ABC of its broadcasting license. The FCC has had a policy against “news distortion” in over-the-air broadcasting for over 50 years, prohibiting certain forms of deliberate obfuscation of factual information in news broadcasts.
Conservative commentators online also advocated for Kimmel’s show to be cancelled. The podcast host and writer Auron MacIntyre launched the campaign Wednesday morning in a post on X encouraging people to contact ABC and its owner, Disney. Kimmel was not alone on the left in claiming that Kirk’s assassin was not a leftist. For instance, Heather Cox Richardson, a prominent left-wing historian at Boston College, claimed that Robinson had been right-wing.
