FCC Chairman Brendan Carr Celebrates TV Stations That Won’t Air Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, is reacting to Disney’s decision to return Jimmy Kimmel Live! to air less than a week after ABC “indefinitely” pulled the show.

Carr shared a post to X on Tuesday, Sept. 23, about broadcast company Sinclair, which boasts the nation’s largest ABC affiliate group, after it vowed to continue preempting Jimmy Kimmel‘s late-night show on its stations. Carr reacted to a reply to Sinclair’s post from Democratic California State Senator Scott Wiener, who expressed his desire to “break Sinclair up.”

“And there it is. On Kimmel, the Democrats are engaged in nothing more than Projection and Distortion,” Carr wrote. “Projection because Democrats are the ones that spent years illegally weaponizing government to silence dissent. And it is Democrats that will do it all again — as they are openly telling you today. Distortion because Democrats want to blame anything other than Disney and their local TV stations for Kimmel’s suspension. Those businesses decided that, in their view, a suspension made sense. The reporting on this is clear.”

“Notably, this is the first time recently that any local TV stations have pushed back on a national programmer like Disney,” Carr continued. “And that is a good thing because we want want empowered local TV stations. After all, local TV stations — not the national programmers — have public interest obligations, and they should be making decisions that in their view meets the needs of their local communities.”

Shortly after Carr’s social media post, Nexstar, the largest local broadcast and digital media company in the U.S., also vowed to preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live! when it returns tonight.

Before ABC’s decision on Wednesday, Sept. 17 to put Kimmel’s late-night show on an indefinite hiatus, Carr warned that the FCC could take action against the network and its parent company, Disney, for recent remarks Kimmel made in the wake of late right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk’s death.

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel, 57, said in his monologue on Sept. 15. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this.”

Kimmel then showed clips of President Donald Trump being asked about Kirk’s death, with one reporter offering him their condolences and asking how he’s holding up, only for Trump to say “I think very good” and turn attention to the new ballroom being constructed at the White House.

The cameras then cut back to Kimmel. “Yes, he’s at the fourth stage of grief, construction,” the comedian said. “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish, okay?”

Prior to the episode, Kimmel offered his condolences on social media to Kirk’s family, saying, “Instead of the angry finger-pointing, can we just for one day agree that it is horrible and monstrous to shoot another human?” he wrote. “On behalf of my family, we send love to the Kirks and to all the children, parents and innocents who fall victim to senseless gun violence.”

During an interview on Benny Johnson’s podcast, Carr called Kimmel’s comments on his Sept. 15 show “truly sick” and said the FCC had a “strong case” to hold the host and the company he works for accountable if that company didn’t “take action on Kimmel.”

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said at the time. “There are calls for Kimmel to be fired. I think you could certainly see a path forward for suspension over this.”

Carr also addressed the “individual licensed stations” airing ABC content across the country, telling them “it’s time for them to step up” and take action as well.

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Nexstar and Sinclair also condemned Kimmel for comments he made about Kirk and refused to air Jimmy Kimmel Live! in their markets.

Nexstar recently announced plans to acquire Tegna, a rival broadcast company, for more than $6 billion, a massive deal that would further consolidate the local television landscape and put Nexstar in 80% of America’s TV-owning households, according to a press release, despite current law permitting no more than 39%. The acquisition will require final approval from the FCC, which Carr runs under President Donald Trump‘s appointment.

On Sept. 17, Carr praised Nexstar for “doing the right thing” and thanked Sinclair for “taking quick action” in posts on social media following the news that the late-night show would be pulled from their affiliate stations.

Hours after Nexstar and Sinclair’s announcements, ABC confirmed to PEOPLE that it was putting Jimmy Kimmel Live! on an indefinite hiatus.

On Thursday, Sept. 18, Carr appeared on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street and claimed that Kimmel was merely paying the price for attempting to “mislead” viewers on the political affiliation of Tyler Robinson, the shooter who killed Kirk, and that what Kimmel had said “was not a joke.”

Carr said he believed the U.S. is “in the midst of a massive shift in dynamics in the media ecosystem for lots of reasons, again, including the permission structure that President Trump’s election has provided. And I would simply say we’re not done yet with seeing the consequences of that.”

Despite Carr taking to X to defend his stance on the matter, explaining that TV stations were simply “serving the needs of their local communities” by pressuring ABC to take action against Kimmel’s show and “responding to their viewers as intended,” numerous users flagged some of Carr’s old posts in which he contradicted himself.

For instance, one 2019 post read: “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.'” He called political satire “one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech” in another resurfaced post from 2022, adding that “people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship” because it “challenges those in power.”

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Trump celebrated Kimmel being taken off the air and said he was “fired for lack of talent,” downplaying that it was a potential First Amendment issue.

While Kimmel has yet to address the matter, he has received support from Hollywood pals, industry unions and fellow late-night hosts — including Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, whose late-night show was canceled earlier this summer at CBS.