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The Journal.

Jimmy Kimmel’s Suspension and Trump’s FCC

The Journal.

The Wall Street Journal

Daily News, Business News, News

4.25.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Earlier this week, ABC’s late-night show "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" was suspended indefinitely by parent company Disney after Kimmel made remarks about Charlie Kirk's death. The announcement came after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, suggested the FCC could pull the broadcast licenses of ABC-owned stations, and the owners of some of these stations said they were dropping Kimmel's show. President Donald Trump has said that broadcast networks that are “against” him might have their licenses taken away. WSJ's Maggie Severns reports on Carr's approach to the FCC and how it has led to Kimmel's suspension. Ryan Knutson hosts. Further Listening: - What Killed 'The Late Show'? - Will Paramount Settle With Trump?Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

From Hollywood, it's Jimmy Kimmel Live.

0:08.6

Monday's episode of the late night show Jimmy Kimmel Live started off like most other days.

0:18.4

Kimmel took the stage in front of a live audience and launched into a monologue.

0:23.5

Kimmel delivered what a lot of people would expect to be kind of a normal Jimmy Kimmel

0:28.3

monologue, right, which included criticism of Trump.

0:31.8

That's our colleague Maggie Severn's.

0:33.6

But it was happening at this extraordinary moment where people are grieving the death of Charlie Kirk.

0:38.8

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the Maga Gang desperately trying to characterize

0:43.4

this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can

0:48.8

to score political points from it. In between the finger pointing, there was grieving on Friday the...

0:54.5

Kimmel was also critical of President Trump's grieving process.

0:57.4

This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old

1:01.6

mourns a goldfish, okay?

1:04.4

Kimmel goes after Trump almost every day on his show. But this time, conservatives felt

1:09.4

that his monologue took things too far.

1:12.2

This is a crowd that has already been offended many times by Jimmy Kimmel, and this became

1:17.2

the straw that broke the camel's back. On Wednesday, Disney said it was suspending Kimmel's show

1:23.5

indefinitely. On its face, it looked like a straightforward case of a company responding

1:28.9

to public pressure. But Maggie says there was actually a lot more to it than that.

1:34.1

There are questions in here about what is free speech. There are questions about what is

1:41.1

Trump doing to wield the federal government's power?

1:50.5

And it all kind of leads to this, right now, this one agency and this one bureaucrat,

...

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