After being removed from the air, Jimmy Kimmel’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! will be returning to ABC on Tuesday. This decision comes less than a week after Disney halted production of the program following criticism of Kimmel’s remarks about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. According to Variety, Disney CEO Bob Iger and co-chair of Disney Entertainment Dana Walden approved the decision to bring back Kimmel.
“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive,” Disney wrote in a statement released Monday. “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
Alan Mittelstaedt, an associate professor of journalism at Annenberg, believes this is an important step.
“I think it will send a signal to Donald Trump that we will fight back, and it’s the same way that The New York Times fought back from the bogus lawsuit from last week, and won, with the judge tossing it out,” said Mittelstaedt, who wrote an opinion about the situation calling for Iger’s wife, the dean of USC Annenberg, to publicly defend Kimmel in the name of free speech.
“This will send a really strong signal that it can’t even push around Disney. That’s a pretty significant development,” said Mittelstaedt.
On Wednesday, Sept. 17, Disney announced Kimmel’s show would be “preempted indefinitely” after the late-night host made comments about Tyler Robinson, the alleged shooter who fatally shot Charlie Kirk.
“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 in his monologue.
Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair, Brendan Carr, threatened to revoke ABC’s broadcasting license.
“There’s calls for Kimmel to be fired. You can certainly see a path forward for suspension,” Carr said on The Benny Show, a conservative podcast hosted by Benny Johnson.
“I think that it’s really scary to be in a country where you can’t express free speech, and I say that as somebody who wants to be a professor eventually and wants to go into the educational system,” said Bailey Pric, a graduate student at USC. “If we can’t even have free speech on television, which is supposed to be where we can kind of express what we want, then how are we going to have that in academics?”
Kimmel’s show is not the only instance where Trump and his administration’s FCC have had a run-in with media companies, with Trump also filing lawsuits against the L.A. Times, NBC, CBS and, most recently, the New York Times.
“A lot of implicit threats [were] made by FCC officials, which is a threshold different than we’ve ever witnessed before. This was just full-on extortion,” said David Craig, an Annenberg associate professor of communication. “It’s another thing for the government to so explicitly, publicly say, ‘we’re here to shut down speech’[...]That just seemed to be just one step over the line.”
Following the show’s break, Sinclair Broadcast Group, ABC’s largest affiliate operator, demanded that Kimmel issue a direct apology to the Kirk family and make a personal donation to the family and Turning Point USA, Kirk’s nonprofit that advocates for conservative politics on campuses. It is not known if he complied.
“I think it’s important to let Jimmy Kimmel speak however he wants to, because that’s what the person he was talking about did,” said Katie Nguyen, a business of cinematic arts student. “I don’t think it’s fair for people who have more power, especially in the cinematic business, to control who they want broadcasted and who they don’t want to because I think that gives too much power to them rather than the people who are watching.”
In response to ABC and Disney cancelling Kimmel’s show, the companies have faced backlash from the public, with a protest being organized outside of Kimmel’s studio at the El Capitan Entertainment Centre in West Hollywood.
“I don’t think that comedians should be censored in this way…I believe that free speech is one of the fundamental rights of all Americans, and also that laughter is the best medicine,” said Eileen Cheryl Weiner, who attended a protest on Monday in support of Jimmy Kimmel.
Eddy Patino, another protest attendee, believes that the return of Kimmel’s show is a victory for free speech.
“It shows the power of what people using their voice can actually do. Obviously, Disney and ABC realized that people are canceling their subscriptions,” Patino said. “People were actively stating that they wanted to boycott Disney and ABC. People’s voices change their mind.”