Op-Ed: Jimmy Kimmel, the FCC, and the Fight for the 1st Amendment

Natalie Lifson
Sep 29
7 min read

Updated: Sep 30

By Natalie Lifson, Agent Trainee and Executive Assistant at Buchwald and your co-Editor-in-Chief at THA

Note: This is a letter written by your co-Editor-in-Chief, but this is not a “Letter From The Editor.” This is an Op-Ed, and any opinions expressed in this article are my own, NOT THA’s official stance.

I have been reporting on current events in the entertainment industry for THA for the past two and a half years, motivated by a mission:

to give ALL Hollywood Assistants equal access to information, framed in a way they understand.

In service of this mission, I have tried to keep my journalistic reporting as politically neutral as possible. I state the facts, I share quotes from different perspectives, and I leave readers to establish their own informed opinions.

We have now reached a point, in both the United States and in Hollywood, where staying politically neutral no longer serves this mission.

Our ability to share information with you is now at risk, because our First Amendment Right - which includes FREE SPEECH and FREEDOM OF THE PRESS from government control - is at risk.

In a shocking act of censorship, on September 17th, 2025, Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show Jimmy Kimmel Live! was suspended indefinitely by ABC after Jimmy made controversial statements about the assassination of right wing political activist Charlie Kirk. After days of intense backlash from the public - both people on the left, and people on the right who value free speech - ABC reinstated the show.

Despite the show’s return, its initial cancellation was a wake up call - We live in a country that no longer values The First Amendment as sacred. We have a government that wants to control the media people create and consume, and media conglomerates who are willing to conform to their threats.

A timeline of the controversy:

During his opening monologue on his 9/15 show, Kimmel accused MAGA supporters of trying to distance themselves from the shooter despite possible MAGA ties (an unconfirmed theory that was circulating at the time, but has since been debunked, as the shooter had no official political ties), and of politicizing the tragedy. He also mocked Donald Trump’s callous response to Kirk’s death, joking about an interview President Trump gave in which a reporter asked him how he was coping with the shooting, and he replied “very good” and shifted topics to the $200M ballroom he was constructing at the White House.

There was immediate backlash from conservative commentators, lawmakers, and the general conservative public. The pressure intensified when Nexstar, which owns 32 ABC-affiliated stations, announced it would pull Kimmel’s show, saying the monologue was not in the public interest. This created serious concerns at Disney, ABC’s parent company, especially as advertisers grew nervous and staff received threats.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who Trump appointed in January, publicly condemned Kimmel’s remarks as “sick” and hinted at potential regulatory consequences for ABC. He said the FCC has “remedies we can look at,” and stated:

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way. 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.”

“You could certainly see a path forward for suspension over this.”

Right before taping the Wednesday, 9/17 episode, Disney announced that Jimmy Kimmel Live! was suspended indefinitely.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr praised ABC for their decision and slammed Late Night TV as an institution.

“Something’s gone seriously awry [with late night shows]. They went from being court jesters that would make fun of everybody in power to being court clerics and enforcing a very narrow political ideology. And Nexstar stood up and said, ‘We have the license and we don’t want to run this anymore. We don’t think it serves the interest of our community.’ Sinclair did the same thing. There’s more work to go, but I’m very glad to see that America’s broadcasters are standing up to serve the interest of their community. We don’t just have this progressive foie gras coming out from New York and Hollywood.”

President Trump celebrated the show’s suspension, calling it “great news for America,” and urged other networks to follow suit and cancel their late night hosts. In a statement to a group of reporters on Air Force One on 9/18, he expressed a desire to shut down other news sources that criticize him too.:

“They're 97% against ‒ they give me only bad publicity or press. I mean, they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away. … It will be up to Brendan Carr.”

The decision to cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live! was met with outrage from Hollywood, lawmakers, and much of the general public - not just Democrats, but people of all political affiliations who value free speech.

WGA, SAG-AFTRA, DGA, and other Hollywood unions condemned the suspension as a threat to free speech and artistic expression. Over 400 artists, including Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, signed a letter via the ACLU defending Kimmel and opposing political interference in media.

A group of Democratic senators sent a letter to Carr warning against using FCC power for political retribution.

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez accused Carr of using Kirk’s assasination “as a justification for broader censorship and control.” She wrote:

“This Administration is increasingly using the weight of government power to suppress lawful expression. And it is doing so not because speech glorifies violence or breaks the law, but because it challenges those in power or reflects views they oppose. We must stand firm against every attempt to silence dissent, punish satirists and government critics, and erode individual liberty.”

Conservatives who publicly stood up for Kimmel’s First Amendment right, despite disagreeing with him, include Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz.

In response to the backlash, ABC reinstated Jimmy Kimmel Live! However, two of the biggest owners of ABC-affiliated stations, Nexstar and Sinclair, refused to resume airing Kimmel.

Kimmel returned to television on Tuesday, 9/23.

The show drew 6.3 million viewers, tripling its normal audience despite some affiliates blocking the show, and 16 million YouTube views.

Kimmel acknowledged that his comments might have come off as poorly timed or unclear but said he never intended to trivialize the death of a young man.

In a bold move, Kimmel slammed FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and President Trump for their attempts to silence him:

“A government threat to silence a comedian the president doesn’t like is anti-American.”

He called out Carr for his threats to ABC and accused him of violating the First Amendment.

“Should the government be allowed to regulate which podcasts the cell phone companies and Wi-Fi providers are allowed to let you download to make sure they serve the public interest? You think that sounds crazy? Ten years ago, this sounded crazy. Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, telling an American company, ‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way’ and that ‘These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead,’ in addition to being a direct violation of the First Amendment, is not a particularly intelligent threat to make in public.”

He accused Carr of hypocrisy, sharing past statements in which he vocally stood against censorship of political satire.

“The FCC has a tradition of meddling where they shouldn’t under many administrations, but it wasn’t always like this. There was an FCC commissioner back in 2022 who worked under Joe Biden who was spot on. He wrote:

‘Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people into the discussion. That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.’

You know who wrote that? FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who later was appointed chairman of the FCC by this former crusader for free speech (Trump video plays): ‘If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. It’s as simple as that. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple just like dominoes. One by one, they’ll go down.’”

He called out Donald Trump for his attempts to shut down Late Night TV as an institution.

““The president of the United States made it very clear he wants to see me and the hundreds of people who work here fired from our jobs. Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke. He was somehow able to squeeze Colbert out of CBS. Then he turned his sights on me, and now he’s openly rooting for NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers and the hundreds of Americans who work for their shows who don’t make millions of dollars. And I hope that if that happens or if there’s even any hint of that happening, you will be 10 times as loud as you were this week. We have to speak out against this because he’s not stopping.”

He accused Donald Trump of targeting journalists and trying to control the media.

“And it’s not just comedy. He’s gunning for our journalists, too. He’s suing them. He’s bullying them. Over the weekend, his Foxy friend Pete Hegseth announced a new policy that requires journalists with Pentagon press credentials to sign a pledge, promising not to report information that hasn’t been explicitly authorized for release. That includes unclassified information. They want to pick and choose what the news is. I know that’s not as interesting as muscling a comedian, but it’s so important to have a free press, and it is nuts that we aren’t paying more attention to it.”