Kimmel's cancellation confirms what many suspected after Colbert's
When “Last Week Tonight” won an Emmy on Sunday, Daniel O’Brien’s acceptance speech touched on something many intuited when Stephen Colbert’s show was canceled in July — at precisely the moment Paramount was trying to get the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission to approve its merger with Skydance. “We are honored to share [the Emmy] with all writers of late-night political comedy,” O’Brien said, “while that is still a type of show that’s allowed to exist.”
It won’t be allowed to exist for long. Sunday’s Emmy Awards were creepy and subdued for good reason: Broadcast television, as it has existed for decades, is coming to an end. The crisis is as obvious as it is grave, and it has implications far beyond late-night: Billionaires are accelerating their efforts to consolidate control over media platforms and the president is eager to help them do so, provided they shut down his critics. If they don’t, he threatens to use the levers of government — particularly those designed to remain independent — to financially punish them. None of this is secret; the brazenness is, at least partly, the point.
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Here is that remark: “We had 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.”
The ordinariness of the statement is what unsettles the most. Accusations of political opportunism are hardly exceptional or unwarranted in this polarized landscape. Sure, Kimmel’s implication that the alleged shooter was “one of them” appears now to be inaccurate; based on the charging documents prosecutors submitted Tuesday, suspect Tyler Robinson was not a Trump supporter. As jabs go, it was a miss. But the outrage is so bizarre it almost seems (dare I say it?) opportunistic. Particularly since Kimmel’s target wasn’t Charlie Kirk!
I say that not to condone the current rush to treat any criticism of Kirk, a right-wing activist, as a fireable offense; few things are more quintessentially American than obnoxiously criticizing public figures. My point is simply that Kimmel didn’t. His claim was that “the MAGA gang” — that is, Trump supporters — were trying to “score political points” by mischaracterizing Kirk’s alleged killer.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/2025/09/18/jimmy-kimmel-charlie-kirk-abc-off-the-air/