By Dawn Chmielewski and Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -Jimmy Kimmel was due to return to ABC’s late-night television lineup on Tuesday after a nearly week-long suspension over his on-air remarks about conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s accused assassin that drew the ire of the Trump administration.
On his first night back, the comedian was expected to address his comments from last week that rankled some viewers, prompted threats of federal regulatory action and led to a boycott of the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show by two major television station groups.
While ABC parent Walt Disney announced on Monday that it was ready to restore Kimmel to the airwaves, station owners Nexstar Media and Sinclair have said they will continue to preempt Kimmel’s time slot with other programming on their network affiliate stations, which reach about 23% of U.S. households.
Still, Disney’s decision to cut short Kimmel’s exile from late-night television marked a high-profile act of corporate defiance in the face of an escalating crackdown by U.S. President Donald Trump on his perceived media critics through litigation and regulatory threats.
Kimmel, whose show has frequently lampooned Trump, sparked outrage from conservatives for saying that the president’s supporters were desperate to characterize Kirk’s accused assassin “as anything other than one of them” and for trying to “score political points” from his murder.
The comments came in the opening monologue of Kimmel’s broadcast on September 15, five days after Kirk, an influential Trump ally, author and radio-podcast host, was shot dead while speaking on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem.
Brendan Carr, head of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcasters, said on a podcast hosted by conservative commentator Benny Johnson on September 17 that Kimmel’s remarks were part of an effort to lie to the American public about the politics of the man accused of killing Kirk, and that he was looking at “remedies.”
He urged local broadcasters in ABC’s network to quit airing Kimmel and warned stations that they otherwise could face fines or the loss of licenses.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said then.
A short time after Carr’s remarks, Disney announced an immediate, indefinite halt to production of the Kimmel show, as Nexstar announced it would not carry the late-night program. Sinclair followed suit later that same day.
Trump, who has repeatedly pressured broadcasters and other media to squelch content that he has found objectionable, cheered the news of Kimmel’s suspension after it was announced and referred to it erroneously as an outright cancellation of the show.
In comments to reporters last week aboard Air Force One, the president raised the prospect of revoking FCC licenses as punishment for what he regarded as unfair treatment of him by broadcasters, saying, “It will be up to Brendan Carr.”
Carr’s attack on Kimmel marked his latest effort to rein in media companies for perceived bias against the Trump administration and Republicans, stoking fears among free-speech advocates who saw the FCC chairman as wielding the agency’s regulatory authority as a cudgel and drawing criticism from many Democrats and some Republicans.
Kimmel had planned to address the widening controversy on his show last Wednesday, but Disney executives feared the monologue would have further inflamed the situation – and suspended the show.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Kimmel had not commented publicly about his suspension. In announcing the show’s return, Disney said it found Kimmel’s comments about Kirk the week before “were ill-timed and thus insensitive,” but the entertainment giant stopped short of an outright apology.
(Reporting by Dawn Chmielewski and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
