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On Wednesday, Daniel Suhr did something he’s been doing a lot lately: he filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission over something he saw on TV. Suhr is the president of the Center for American Rights, a nonprofit law firm based in Chicago. For months, his organization has been urging the FCC to revoke the licenses it grants to the major broadcasters, often over the perceived “leftist” bias of their news and opinion hosts.
Wednesday’s filing was over the monologue from Monday’s episode of The Jimmy Kimmel Show, on ABC. Kimmel, who often delivers harsh critiques of Donald Trump and his allies, had addressed the assassination of the right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk by saying that the “MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” The remarks created an uproar; in conservative media circles, they were interpreted as evidence that Kimmel was saying the shooter was one of them. “It was right in our sweet spot,” Suhr told CJR. “All we did was provide the facts and the law that matched with the public outrage.”
Around the same time, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, went on The Benny Show, a podcast hosted by the influential conservative activist Benny Johnson, to offer his thoughts about Kimmel’s monologue. “When you look at the conduct that has taken place by Jimmy Kimmel, it appears to be some of the sickest conduct possible,” Carr said. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct…or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Soon, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group—which collectively own dozens of local ABC affiliates throughout the country—were saying they would preempt the show. By the evening, ABC announced that it was suspending Kimmel’s show “indefinitely.”
Carr and his conservative allies have made no secret of their desire to use the power of the FCC to change what Americans see and hear on the radio and television stations that rely on public airwaves. Since January, Carr’s FCC has opened inquiries into Saturday Night Live, 60 Minutes, and the entirety of NPR. When Paramount, the parent company of CBS, sought to merge with the production company Skydance, the FCC required CBS News to appoint a conservative “bias monitor” before granting its approval.
But the rapid success of this week’s effort suggests that the campaign to remake network television is entering a new, more expansive phase. “This is a generational culture war victory,” Johnson wrote on social media Thursday. According to his post, he and his team had played an instrumental role in getting the show suspended: after the interview with Carr, he said, they spent “all day” contacting local stations to urge them to drop Kimmel. “Hundreds of stations with moral, patriotic audiences who love Charlie Kirk and are sickened by Kimmel,” Johnson wrote.
What really caused ABC to put the show on ice remains unclear. Sinclair, one of the first two companies to pull the show from local ABC affiliates, is open about its conservative leanings; the company put out a statement demanding that Kimmel make a “meaningful personal donation” to Kirk’s family and the political organization he founded, Turning Point USA. The other affiliate group, Nexstar, has a six-billion-dollar merger pending before the FCC. ABC’s parent company, Disney, also has business interests that could be harmed by a protracted fight with the Trump administration.
“A year ago this would have been shocking,” says Adam Steinbaugh, a senior attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “But after the capitulation of other media outlets facing bogus litigation, it’s hard to say I’m surprised. It is demoralizing: here we live in a country that’s supposed to be the leading light of free speech, and we have an enormous corporation succumbing to pressure from a government official who says ‘We’re going to violate your rights—or you’re going to shut up.’”
On Thursday, as Carr was taking a victory lap by hinting that late-night hosts on NBC could be next—and as Trump explicitly said, of networks that have historically been critical of him, “maybe their license should be taken away”—Suhr was also in a vindicated mood. Kimmel’s monologue was “part of a pattern of a deliberate hijacking of the airwaves to advance a liberal political agenda,” he said. “ABC needs to take a serious look at how long he went unchecked to reach this point.”
Asked if what happened to Kimmel could be a sign of things to come under a newly empowered FCC, bolstered and backed by activists like himself, Suhr answered emphatically. “Yeah!” he said. “We are not doing anything more than asking the FCC to enforce long-standing policies on the books. People getting a free pass—those days are over. This is the latest manifestation of a much larger shift. Maybe all the stations will take the hint and start doing better and put us out of business. But until they do, we’ll keep just being vigilant for viewers.”
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