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Notes -
Jimmy Kimmel pulled indefinitely by ABC for Charlie Kirk comments.
Late night talk show hosts have waned from their glorious Letterman days, but boomers still care about then enough that they're still a scalp worth scraping off the skull. It's hard to think of a prominent figure on the right that would be equal in stature - Gina Carano? Piers Morgan? Roseanne Barr? nothing like him - if only for the fact that the entertainment industry is so aligned to the left. Indeed, even during the height of the progressive cancel culture era, it was liberal icons like Louis CK and JK Rowling that felt the heat.
If such a big figure can fall, who will be next?
With Colbert going off the air, and with the upcoming FCC hearings on Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and Steam, one can only anticipate the prizes that are coming. Destiny and Hasan are obvious trophies that the right would love to claim, but I have no doubt that the powerjanitors of Reddit are quaking in their boots. How many leftist/liberal commentators have made snarky comments on social media, as of late? This is the reddest of the red meat, dripping with blood, raw. The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.
Can’t quite pinpoint it - maybe a preference cascade or something more. The online left can’t imagine it, but for a non-negligible chunk - maybe even most - of the Professional Managerial Class, Charlie Kirk wasn’t beyond the pale. Justifying his murder as a “Nazi/fascist/white supremacist”? PMCs paused: “Wait, Kirk’s fine. I like him, or someone I know respects him. You’re okay with us getting brutally murdered?” It’s not exactly what Kimmel said, but the smear’s are everywhere. Kimmel spread an obvious lie. PMCs bought into the “motte” of woke, but now they see hundreds of thousands cheering the brutal murder of a normal family man. “The right lied about the election to steal it? These freaks lie to justify killing.” I’ve been preaching here and in real life: This isn’t the fight. Normies run on vibes, and the vibes are against the left on this one.
Are you referring to the following?
After the evidence published on the 16th, claiming that the shooter was MAGA would be at least a fringe view. One might claim that everyone from the FBI and state prosecution is blatantly partisan and obviously trying to blame the murder on the left, but that would leave the question how the FBI fabricated a MtF boyfriend. So personally, I think that the official narrative -- the killer acting to 'fight LGBT hate' is probably correct.
Still, the Kimmel episode was aired on the 15th, when none of these chat quotes were public (afaik).
And then you have the FCC statement:
So Kimmel was either spinning the truth very hard or outright lying. Bad, but mostly SOP -- Trump himself does the same whenever he opens his mouth. If Carr thinks that this is the "sickest conduct possible", he must live a very sheltered life indeed -- free from social media, for one thing. One wonders if he has ever watched Fox News. In short, his statement is as much of a lie as Kimmel's is.
I think that the right is reasonably upset by the social media celebrations of the murders by the far left. Kimmel was not guilty of that at all, he was just someone the FCC could cancel who had interacted with the topic in a way which did not please Trump, and was already on the cancel list, so he got got.
There was never any evidence whatsoever that pointed to Robinson being MAGA. It was quite reasonable to insist that rightwingers wait for data before calling the shooter a leftist - are we just declining to hold leftists to any evidentiary standards whatsoever?
Kimmel is straight up lying there to defame millions of people, including the president himself. That sounds like the sort of thing that might cost a network 10 or 11 digits in settlement money.
It’s not actionable, though. Even if a discrete class exists, how would they show measurable reputational harm from the lie?
It's not actionable in a tort case. But there certainly was action was taken.
But if it’s not an actionable defamation, where is the financial pressure on ABC to preempt the case by firing Kimmel? There wasn’t even a threat of an organized advertiser boycott yet. The affiliate revolt and threat from the FCC appear to be the only real pressure.
The affiliate revolt is obviously pressure in itself. If they feared it would piss off the audience, that's reason right there. And if the Kimmel show was already losing money (as has been widely speculated) and was kept around because it used to be politically useful to have him and it no longer is, that's reason right there.
Yep - the proximate cause of the firing is the affiliate revolt. The question is then whether the affiliate revolt is driven by spontaneous outrage among affiliates (notably, the Sinclair family are conservative and still own a lot of shares in Sinclair), FCC pressure on the affiliates (who are the directly FCC-licensed entities), or a desire by Nexstar to pre-emptively suck up to the administration to get the Tegna merger approved. "All of the above" is the way to bet.
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