Last Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr urged ABC affiliates to “take action” on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, threatened their broadcasting licenses and warned them, “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.” Tonight, Jimmy Kimmel returned to television and reminded Carr that real mob bosses don’t illegally intimidate their targets on podcasts.
Despite Carr’s best efforts to strong-arm the Walt Disney Company, ABC, the Nexstar Media Group and the Sinclair Broadcast Group into kicking one of President Donald Trump’s most prominent critics off of television, Jimmy Kimmel Live! is back on ABC, so long as your local channel isn’t owned by the lattermost two of Carr’s targets. During an appearance on a right-wing podcast, the FCC chair made an unprecedented and completely unconstitutional open call for ABC affiliates to remove Kimmel from the schedule, warning, “Licensed broadcasters are running into the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if (they) continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion” before gloating on Twitter when Nexstar and Sinclair immediately caved to his pressure.
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In the following days, prominent politicians and media members from across the divided political landscape spoke out against Carr and his attempts to subvert the First Amendment, including Republican Senator Ted Cruz who compared Carr to a “mafioso” shaking down a small business. Well, tonight, Kimmel thumbed his nose at Carr and excoriated the FCC chair’s egregious abuse of power while enlisting some A-list help to show Carr how a true don gets it done:
In his powerful opening monologue, Kimmel called Carr out by name, quoting the exact comments from the FCC boss that led to the brief suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! while pointing out Carr’s complete hypocrisy as a past, self-professed champion of freedom of speech. In 2022, when a not-yet-owned-by-Elon-Musk Twitter temporarily suspended the right-wing satire publication Babylon Bee, Carr tweeted in protest, “Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people in to the discussion. That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.”
But as Kimmel pointed out, Carr’s public threats to ABC affiliates as he called for Kimmel to be silenced weren’t just hypocritical and illegal — they were also hilariously stupid. By publicly intimidating Nexstar and Sinclair into doing his bidding instead of issuing his threats privately, Carr was exposing his misdeeds for the world to see, when real mob bosses know not to leave a paper trail during a shakedown.
At the same time, perhaps Kimmel was also unwise to have Robert De Niro show Carr how a real (fake) mafioso would run the FCC — the whole “pay by the word” program is right up Trump’s alley, and Kimmel, De Niro and Disney may pay dearly for joking that the President is “so fat he needs two seats on the Epstein jet.”
