The American Federation Of Musicians is among the organisations to have criticised the decision by Disney-owned US TV network ABC to indefinitely suspend ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ over comments made on the late night talk show earlier this week about the murder of Charlie Kirk.
The union, which has members affected by the show’s suspension, says that ABC’s decision was the result of unprecedented political pressure from Donald Trump’s administration, with the US Federal Communications Commission pursuing Trump’s agenda by threatening the broadcasting companies it regulates. Which means Jimmy Kimmel and his team are the victims of “state censorship”.
The controversy began with Kimmel’s opening monologue on Monday night, which actually focused on how Trump and his allies have responded to Kirk’s death.
He criticised the immediate politicisation of the incident by Trump’s supporters, while the motivations of Kirk’s killer are still being ascertained. And he mocked how Trump himself responded to media questions about the murder, pointing to interviews where the President went on a bizarre tangent about a ballroom he’s having constructed at the White House.
The monologue prompted an angry response from the boss of US media regulator the FCC, the Trump appointed Brendan Carr, resulting in two broadcasting companies that carry ABC’s output - Nexstar Media and Sinclair - announcing they would no longer air Kimmel’s show. ABC itself then announced that the programme was being suspended indefinitely.
Many see this as part of Trump’s ongoing efforts to silence all criticism of the President within the mainstream media. AFM - which notes that a number of musicians are employed on Kimmel’s show in house band Cleto And The Cletones - says that its members are losing work because Trump is now using government agencies in order to attack his critics in the media.
“This is not complicated”, the union’s President Tino Gagliardi says in a statement. “Trump’s FCC identified speech it did not like and threatened ABC with extreme reprisals. This is state censorship. It’s now happening in the United States Of America, not some far-off country. It’s happening right here and right now”.
“This act by the Trump administration represents a direct attack on free speech and artistic expression”, Gagliardi continues. “These are fundamental rights that we must protect in a free society”.
To that end, he says, the union “strongly condemns the decision to take ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ off the air. We stand in solidarity with all those who will be without work because of government overreach”.
Responding to Kimmel’s monologue earlier this week, FCC boss Carr told right wing podcaster Benny Johnson, “we can do this the easy way or the hard way”, adding “these companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead”.
ABC relies on third party broadcasters to get its programmes to the majority of the US, including Nexstar and Sinclair. Both those companies are currently lobbying the FCC in a bid to get broadcasting regulations in the US relaxed. Nexstar is also seeking government approval of its acquisition of rival Tegna, which requires the FCC to change the rules around media ownership.
That makes it much easier for a politicised FCC to put pressure on the two companies over editorial issues. When Nexstar initially announced it would no longer carry Kimmel’s show on its stations, Carr thanked the broadcasting company for “doing the right thing”.
Carr’s intervention over Kimmel’s monologue has been criticised by one of his fellow Commissioners at the FCC, Democrat Anna M Gomez.
She said in a statement, “This administration is increasingly using the weight of government power to suppress lawful expression. And it is doing so not because speech glorifies violence or breaks the law, but because it challenges those in power or reflects views they oppose”.
She added, “We must stand firm against every attempt to silence dissent, punish satirists and government critics, and erode individual liberty”.