I’ve known Jimmy Kimmel since 1999, when I moonlighted for two weeks from my job at Time magazine writing for The Man Show, which he co-created.
What I learned then, and in every other interaction I’ve had with him since, is that he has an enormous amount of integrity mixed with bravery. Which is a weird thing to get from someone whose answer to my question, “What are we trying to comment on by putting girls on trampolines?” was “Girls on trampolines!” But he has a backbone I’ve rarely seen in Hollywood.
Who else would continue to mock Trump despite regularly being threatened in public? Unlike some people’s offensive comments, Kimmel’s monologue wasn’t callous about Charlie Kirk’s awful murder. He seemed to get a fact wrong about the assassin’s politics, but he was, as his silencing proves, correct in his assertion that Trump was using the event as an excuse to shut down the free speech of his opponents.
It is easy to call ABC and its parent company, Disney, cowards operating under self-interest at the expense of our democracy. But Disney CEO Bob Iger and ABC president Dana Walden, whom I’m met with and worked for, are not only smarter than I am, but also know a lot more. They’re in contact with far more people at various nodes of power than I am. So are the people who run universities, law firms and huge tech companies. I think they’re capitulating to Trump because they know something that I don’t.
I believe they know that democracy as we know it is already over. They know that Democrats are a shadow national party, allotted only local power. They know that if we want a decent life in this country, we have to accept this fact and try to have whatever nice things we still can. Those things don’t include Jimmy Kimmel.
They might include Pixar movies and theme park rides, but not large news outlets. The networks and cable stations have a residual responsibility to air news. But they’re dying.
Meanwhile, why would Netflix, Amazon Prime or Apple start a news division? It’s like asking your enormous company to be either punished by the president, kicked out of China, or boycotted by the liberal elite. Apple starting a news division makes as much sense as JPMorgan Chase starting a new Christian denomination.
This isn’t just Iger’s decision. Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr – the man picked by the US president to regulate broadcasters – went on a podcast and threatened any company involved in airing Kimmel’s show. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said, surprisingly without a Sicilian accent. “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.”
Right after that podcast aired, Sinclair and Nexstar – the two largest companies that own local ABC affiliates that control what to air in all non-prime-time slots – announced they were yanking Kimmel indefinitely. Nexstar is seeking FCC approval on a £4.5bn acquisition deal. Sinclair also has deals pending FCC decisions. And both are run by conservatives.
Iger and Walden decided to pull Kimmel’s show hours before he was about to go on air, his audience was already lined up to enter the theatre. They did it because their employees were being threatened. They did it because affiliates weren’t going to air it. But they made their final decision after reading what Kimmel had planned to say on the show. It’s not that Kimmel doesn’t know they have the same information about where America is at. It’s just that he has more backbone than anyone left in Hollywood.
