Tim Graham continued the Media Research Center’s war on Jimmy Kimmel — and complaints that the suspension of his late-night show by ABC was criticized — in his Sept. 19 column:
ABC stunned the media world on Wednesday by announcing they were suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live! indefinitely after several ABC station groups withdrew their support for the show. It was a similar shock to CBS setting a cancellation date for Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
The Left went into conniption fits, grieving both festivals of partisan propaganda. We heard a thousand cries of the “First Amendment” being despoiled and the old reliable screech about Trump’s “authoritarian playbook.” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos mourned the assault on “independent media,” and he’s the last person in America who would qualify for that label.
[…]It was especially instructive that some of Kimmel’s most ardent defenders came on CNN, which used to make commercials boasting its motto was “Facts First.” Facts came last in defending Kimmel. Brian Stelter quoted Trump-hating On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder: “He said the general pattern in regime change is that the comedy gets better, and then it gets banned.”
Nobody banned Kimmel, and no one should call 92 percent of what he does “comedy.” It’s not getting better. It has all the appeal of year-old milk.
Looks like Graham is no greater a judge of comedy than the MRC’s resident comedy cop, Alex Christy. Graham then played whataboutism:
Leftist journalists have supported conservative actors and celebrities being punished. Kimmel celebrated Tucker Carlson and Rosanne Barr being cancelled. Now they equate a suspended TV show to fascism. No one has a constitutional right to a TV show. When CBS canceled So Help Me Todd, it wasn’t fascism. It was a routine cancellation. It happens all the time.
They cannot see how offensive they are to the Trump-voting half of America. Just like Kimmel, they offer nothing but contempt for Trump voters, who Kimmel “joked” after the 2024 election they voted for a “criminal.” He has zero class.
Pompous leftists in our media elites endlessly equate themselves with democracy and with freedom of speech, no matter how aggressively they advocate that the opposing side should be censored as “misinformation.” Even now, they seem more upset about Kimmel being suspended than about Charlie Kirk being murdered. But canceling a show is much less than cancelling a life.
Not that Graham would likely be all that opposed to the latter. Jorge Bonilla also played comedy cop:
While in the process of explaining the comedic process to his debate table interlocutor on CNN’s NewsNight with Abby Phillip, comic and filmmaker W. Kamau Bell did the classic “clown nose on/clown nose off” that is the hallmark of the left-regime comic. That he did it while explaining Jimmy Kimmel’s mendacious Monday bit is pure poetry.
What started this whole controversy is Kimmel’s misrepresentation of the shooter as a diehard MAGA supporter, despite emerging evidence to the contrary that was made public well in advance of the show taping.
[…]The problem over the course of the past couple of decades and beginning, perhaps with Jon Stewart, is this entire crop of clown nose-on comics trying to moonlight as newsmen, or at least play a parody version of them on TV.
When they want to give some verbose Olbermannesque speech, they’’ll act very serious. Super serious, even. But when they want to crack a joke they’ll switch back. Clown nose on, clown nose off. And when they get seriously challenged on some point or another they’ll say “I’m a comic.”
Kamau’s explanation of what Kimmel was trying to accomplish is the textbook definition of clown nose on/off. This motte-and-bailey style of commentary has severely damaged our political discourse.
Many are trying out some form of a defense of Kimmel’s remarks by saying that what Kimmel said was a joke. If so, nobody got it and worse, it inflamed the entire political landscape. Kamau tried it and ended up doing the meme.
Ironically, Graham spent last year trying to jokesplain something Trump said that absolutely nobody recognized as a joke, so it seems like both Graham and Bonilla need to figure out exactly what a joke is. And MRC writer Joseph Vazquez once failed to get a Colbert joke so severely that he wrote an entire post about it.
The original comedy cop, Christy, weighed in by whining that, yes, Kimmel’s suspension was criticized by another late-night host:
All of the late night comedians addressed ABC suspending Jimmy Kimmel on Thursday shows, but CBS’s Stephen Colbert’s reaction on The Late Show was especially bad. Not only did Colbert not see any problem in what Kimmel said, but he also teamed up with CNN host Jake Tapper and The New Yorker editor David Remnick to warn about the decay of press freedom in the Trump era.
Colbert wasted no time getting to the news and condemning ABC for their decision, “Welcome one and all to The Late Show. I’m your host, Stephen Colbert, but tonight we are all Jimmy Kimmel. I still have a show, though, right? Okay, good! Yesterday, after threats from Trump’s FCC chair, ABC yanked Jimmy Kimmel off the air indefinitely. That is blatant censorship. And it always starts small. You know, remember like in week one of his presidency. Gulf of America. Call it Gulf of America. Sure! Seems harmless. But with an autocrat, you cannot give an inch. And if ABC thinks that this is gonna satisfy the regime, they are woefully naive. And clearly they’ve never read the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Kimmel.”
[…]Colbert then turned his outrage to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, “He went even further, sending a clear signal to broadcasters what their next move should be and throwing in a little implied threat.”
A clip of Carr showed him proclaiming, “I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, ‘Listen, we are going to preempt. We are not going to run Kimmel anymore, until you straighten this out.’ [jump cut] I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.
Colbert lamented, “It feels to me like shutting down this type of speech would represent a serious threat to our freedoms.”
While Christy was obsessed with what Kimmel said, he apparently had no problem with the implicit threats Carr made to ABC in an effort to force a punishment of Kimmel upon threat of broadcast licenses being pulled.
Christy returned a short time later to grouse that Kimmel did not have enough right-wingers on his show:
Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension was his own fault. The ABC late night host’s mean-spirited commentary disguised as comedy drove conservatives away. Kimmel was completely unconcerned with this development, but his desire to turn his show into a liberal echo chamber might prove to be his downfall because when he claimed that conservatives were desperately trying to “characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” ABC felt they had no choice but to take him off the air.
According to an aggregation of previous NewsBusters studies, 92 percent of Kimmel’s jokes since January 2023 have been about conservatives, and since September 2022, 97 percent of his political guests have been liberals.
Christy refused to make public his list of guests or jokes so that the rest of us can see how his classification system works. And it’s time for another reminder that he has never performed any such analysis of the guest or jokes of right-wing late-night host Greg Gutfeld.
This also reminds us of the time that the MRC worked to discourage right-wingers from appearing on CNN — then bashed CNN for not having enough right-wingers on. One has to think there’s a similar dynamic going on here.
Nicholas Fondacaro pretended there was no pressure on ABC by the Trump administration to punish KImmel:
Sensing an opportunity for exploitation Thursday night, the liberal broadcast networks went full bore with lying to their audiences about why late night “comedian” Jimmy Kimmel was put in timeout by Disney/ABC, choosing to instead claim the suspension was orchestrated by the Trump administration. CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and even ABC’s World News Tonight dismissed, downplayed, or twisted the fact that the pressure to suspend Kimmel came from inside the media’s house.
ABC News was in the best position out of the three to actually know what was happening in their camp with the pressure rising from their local affiliates to act, but World News Tonight anchor David Muir chose to blame ABC’s political opposition. “We move on now, to the fierce reaction tonight with Disney/ABC suspending late night host Jimmy Kimmel, quote, ‘indefinitely,’ after pressure from the Trump administration,” he lied.
Correspondent Elizabeth Schulze tonight echoed Muir’s false premise for the suspension. “Disney/ABC puling the late night show off the air last night, after pressure from the Trump administration,” she said.
Much like CBS and NBC, Schulze suggested the push back from local ABC affiliates were only spurred on by FCC Chairman Brendon Carr and by purported craven motives of one network affiliate owner[.] […]
NBC correspondent Liz Kreutz downplayed Kimmel’s lie to the masses that a MAGA supporter killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk as just “criticism from conservatives.” She also drew imaginary lines between Carr, the suspension, and Nexstar[.] […]
Far-left [CBS Evening news co-host John] Dickerson led into the segment by falsely blaming Carr: “The FCC is chaired by Trump appointee Brendan Carr, who pressured Disney/ABC to take Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night TV show off the air after Kimmel made controversial remarks about Trump ally Charlie Kirk.” He also lied about Kimmel’s comments being “about” Kirk, when they were about MAGA supporters.
Fondacaro never proved that Carr did not threaten broadcast licenses in order to force punishment of Kimmel, and left buried in a transcript Carr’s threat that “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Nor did he demonstrated that Nexstar did not have “craven motives” to suck up to Trump because it is seeking Trump administration approval of its proposed merger with fellow TV station owner Tegna. He also could not be bothered to prove his claim that Dickerson is “far-left,” which tells us that he’s lying, like he usually does.