Sept. 23, 2025:
NEW YORK (AP) — Jimmy Kimmel is set to return to late-night television Tuesday (Sept. 23, 2025) after a nearly weeklong suspension that triggered a national discussion about freedom of speech and President Donald Trump’s ability to police the words of journalists, commentators and even comics.
But two groups of ABC affiliates that denounced Kimmel last week said they would not carry his return. Nexstar Media Group said Tuesday it would continue to preempt the show, “pending assurances that all parties are committed to fostering an environment of respectful, constructive dialogue in the markets we serve.” Sinclair Broadcast Group also said it would also keep Kimmel off its stations. The two corporations collectively control about a quarter of ABC affiliates.
ABC, which suspended Kimmel’s show last Wednesday following criticism of his comments about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, announced Monday that “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” would return after the network had “thoughtful conversations” with the host.
“Our long national late nightmare is over,” Stephen Colbert joked on his CBS show in response to Kimmel’s reinstatement.
Kimmel, who has been publicly silent since his suspension, posted Tuesday on his Instagram account a picture of himself with the late television producer and free speech advocate Norman Lear. “Missing this guy today,” he wrote.
ABC suspended Kimmel indefinitely after comments he made in a monologue last week. Kimmel suggested that many Trump supporters were trying to capitalize on Kirk’s death and were “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”
Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr last week said it appeared that Kimmel was trying to “directly mislead the American public” with his remarks about Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old Utah man charged with Kirk’s killing, and his motives. Those motives remain unclear. Authorities say Robinson grew up in a conservative family, but his mother told investigators his son had turned left politically in the last year.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said before ABC announced the suspension. “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Those remarks set a backlash in motion, with Republican Sen. Ted Cruz saying that Carr acted like “a mafioso.” Hundreds of entertainment luminaries, including Tom Hanks, Barbra Streisand and Jennifer Aniston, signed a letter circulated by the American Civil Liberties Union that called ABC’s move “a dark moment for freedom of speech in our nation.”
Some consumers punished ABC parent Disney by canceling subscriptions to its streaming services.
Trump had hailed Kimmel’s suspension, even inaccurately saying the show had been canceled. Kimmel has been a relentless Trump critic in his comedy.
Trump’s administration has used threats, lawsuits and federal government pressure to try to exert more control over the media industry. Trump sued ABC and CBS over news coverage, which the companies settled. Trump has also filed defamation lawsuits against The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and successfully urged Congress to strip federal funding from NPR and PBS.
How — or even whether — Kimmel would address the controversy on his first show back remained a mystery. Millions of people are likely to watch.
He will have at least one friendly guest. After pulling out of her planned performance at the premiere of Hulu’s Lilith Fair documentary in protest over Kimmel’s suspension, singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan will appear on Kimmel’s show, a representative confirmed to The Associated Press.
McLachlan had been booked on the show prior to the preemption, the representative said. The ticket site for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” listed only Glen Powell as a guest Tuesday. A representative for the actor did not respond to a request for comment from AP.
Disney and ABC executives reportedly negotiated the return for several days before announcing the resolution. The ABC statement said the suspension happened because some of Kimmel’s comments were “ill-timed and thus insensitive,” but it did not call them misleading.
Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Kirk and now headed by his widow, posted on X that “Disney and ABC caving and allowing Kimmel back on the air is not surprising, but it’s their mistake to make.”
The suspension happened at a time when the late-night landscape is shifting. Shows are losing viewers, in part because many watch highlights the next day online. CBS announced the cancellation of Colbert’s show over the summer. Kimmel’s contract with ABC reportedly lasts through May.
Colbert, in his opening monologue Monday, grabbed his recently won Emmy Award for outstanding talk series, saying, “Once more, I am the only martyr on late night!”
Sept. 19, 2025:
UNDATED-AP- Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon opened their late-night shows Thursday (Sept. 18, 2025) using a mix of humor and solidarity with suspended ABC host Jimmy Kimmel.
Stewart opted for satire to critique ABC suspending “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” indefinitely following comments he made about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Colbert took a more serious approach, calling his suspension “blatant censorship.” Fallon praised Kimmel and vowed to keep doing his show as usual. Then an announcer spoke over him and replaced most of his critiques about President Donald Trump with flattery.
Their guests the day after Kimmel’s suspension — which also came two months after CBS said it would cancel Colbert’s show — varied widely. Fallon’s guests were actor Jude Law, journalist Tom Llamas and actor and singer Jonathan Groff — none of whom addressed Kimmel’s situation.
Stewart and Colbert interviewed guests who could address censorship concerns raised by Kimmel’s suspension. Journalist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Ressa spoke to Stewart.
When Stewart asked Ressa, the author of “How to Stand Up to a Dictator,” tips on coping with the current moment, Ressa recounted how she and her colleagues at the news site Rappler “just kept going” when she was faced with 11 arrest warrants in one year under Philippine then-President Rodrigo Duterte.
“We just kept doing our jobs. We just kept putting one foot in front of the other,” Ressa said.
Stewart makes special appearance to skewer Kimmel suspension
Stewart’s show opened with a voice-over promising adherence to the party line.
“We have another fun, hilarious administration-compliant show,” it said.
He lavished praise on the president and satirized his criticism of large cities and his deployment of the National Guard to fight their crime.
“Coming to you tonight from the real (expletive), the crime-ridden cesspool that is New York City. It is a tremendous disaster like no one’s ever seen before. Someone’s National Guard should invade this place, am I right?” Stewart said.
“The Daily Show” set was refashioned with decorative gold engravings, in a parody of gold accents Trump has added to the fireplace, doorway arches, walls and other areas of the Oval Office.
Stewart fidgeted nervously as though he was worried about speaking the correct talking points. When the audience members reacted with an “awww” he whispered: “What are you doing? Shut up. You’re going to (expletive) blow this for us.”
He took on a more stilted tone when he started describing Trump’s visit to the United Kingdom, calling the president “our great father.”
“Gaze upon him. With a gait even more majestic than that of the royal horses that prance before him,” he said.
Stewart normally hosts only on Mondays. The Emmy winner helmed “The Daily Show” from 1999 through 2015, delivering sharp, satirical takes on politics and current events and interviews with newsmakers. He returned to host once a week during the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Fallon opened his “Tonight Show” monologue addressing Kimmel’s suspension. “To be honest with you all, I don’t know what’s going on. And no one does. But I do know Jimmy Kimmel, and he’s a decent, funny and loving guy, and I hope he comes back.”
Swift suspension after remarks on Kirk’s assassination
Kimmel made several remarks about the reaction to Kirk’s killing on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Monday and Tuesday nights, including that “many in MAGA land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk.”
ABC suspended Kimmel’s show after a group of ABC-affiliated stations said it would not air the show, and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said his agency had a strong case for holding Kimmel, ABC and network parent Walt Disney Co. accountable for spreading misinformation.
Kimmel has not commented. His supporters say Carr misread what the comic said and that nowhere did he specifically suggest that Tyler Robinson — the man Utah authorities allege fatally shot Kirk — was conservative.
In July, CBS said it would cancel “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” next May. The network said it shut down the decades-old TV institution for financial reasons. But the announcement came three days after Colbert criticized the settlement between President Donald Trump and Paramount Global, parent company of CBS, over a “60 Minutes” story.
‘The Late Show’ hosts past and present address suspension
Colbert started his monologue on Thursday with the animated song “Be Our Guest” from Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” but replaced the lyrics with “Shut your trap. Shut your trap.”
He later addressed Kimmel directly, saying that he stands with him and his staff.
“If ABC thinks that this is going to satisfy the regime, they are woefully naive,” he said.
He also responded to remarks Carr made that it is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming “they determine falls short of community values.”
“Well, you know what my community values are, buster? Freedom of speech,” Colbert said to loud applause from his audience.
When Colbert talked with New Yorker editor David Remnick about Kimmel’s suspension, he said: “What we are seeing now is the government acting at the direction of the president of the United States to put pressure on, to manipulate, to silence and even to shut down institutions of the free word.”
David Letterman, Colbert’s predecessor on “The Late Show,” lamented the networks’ moves.
“I feel bad about this, because we all see where see this is going, correct? It’s managed media,” Letterman said during an appearance Thursday at The Atlantic Festival 2025 in New York. “It’s no good. It’s silly. It’s ridiculous.”
He added that people shouldn’t be fired just because they don’t “suck up” to what Letterman called “an authoritarian” president.
Sept. 18, 2025:
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has used threats, lawsuits and government pressure as he remakes the American media landscape, unleashing his long-standing grievances against an industry that has mocked, criticized and scorned him for years.
He’s extracted multimillion-dollar settlements, forced companies into costly litigation and prompted changes to programming that he found objectionable.
Now Trump is escalating his campaign of censure and retaliation, invigorated by successful efforts to push ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air for his commentary on conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One while returning from Great Britain on Thursday (Sept. 18, 2025), Trump said federal regulators should consider revoking broadcast licenses for networks that “give me only bad publicity.”
“All they do is hit Trump,” he said. “They’re licensed! They’re not allowed to do that. They’re an arm of the Democrat Party.”
Brendan Carr, Trump’s handpicked head of the Federal Communications Commission, issued a similar warning the previous day while criticizing Kimmel’s remarks about the political ideology of the suspected assassin.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
ABC suspended Kimmel hours later.
It was the kind of brute force response that Trump and his loyalists have routinely flexed since the Republican president returned to the White House with a vow to retaliate against critics and political opponents. Trump’s reach has extended deep into the private sector, using the apparatus of the federal government to pressure companies to make changes that can reshape the public dialogue.
Critics fear crackdowns on free speech
Trump has already reached settlements with ABC and CBS over their coverage. He has filed defamation lawsuits against The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Republicans in Congress stripped federal funding from NPR and PBS. At the FCC, Carr has used his influence to target diversity, equity and inclusion programs and to root out what he describes as liberal bias.
In the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, Trump has clamped down more firmly, with broader implications for the future of free speech protections that have been a bedrock of the American political system.
Attorney General Pam Bondi recently said that “we will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Her words alarmed advocates who fear an elastic definition of the term could be used to criminalize dissent.
The First Amendment is widely viewed as protecting even the most disparaging remarks, and the Supreme Court said in an unanimous opinion last year that “government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.”
Bondi later revised her comments to say she was focused on “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence.”
Todd Blanche, Bondi’s deputy, suggested that protesters could have violated the law by yelling at Trump while he visited a restaurant near the White House.
“Is it sheer happenstance that individuals show up at a restaurant where the president is trying to enjoy dinner in Washington, D.C., and accost him with vile words and vile anger?” Blanche said. He said authorities could investigate whether it’s “part of an organized effort to inflict harm and terror and damage to the United States.”
Politics and comedy collide on late-night shows
The latest saga with Kimmel began Monday night with the comedian’s commentary about last week’s shooting of Kirk, which took place on a college campus in Utah.
“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 said. He also compared Trump’s grief to “how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
Trump allies said Kimmel was falsely suggesting that the shooter was right-wing. Authorities have not formally presented a motive for the killing, but evidence indicates that he held liberal beliefs. Gov. Spencer Cox, R-Utah, has said “there clearly was a leftist ideology,”
On Wednesday, Carr appeared on a podcast hosted by Benny Johnson, a conservative commentator, and accused Kimmel of the “sickest conduct possible.” Carr said “you could make a strong argument that this is sort of an intentional effort to mislead the American people about a very core fundamental fact.”
Carr placed the move against Kimmel in the broader context of Trump’s efforts to undermine the power of legacy media companies.
“He smashed the facade that they get to control what we say, what we think, the narrative around events,” Carr said. “And we’re seeing a lot of consequences from President Trump doing that.”
Reminding affiliates that their broadcast licenses come with an “obligation to operate in the public interest,” Carr said “it’s time for them to step up” and say Kimmel’s content “isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities.”
Kimmel faces corporate backlash
It didn’t take long for Nexstar Media Group, the country’s biggest operator of television stations, to echo some of Carr’s language.
“Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time,” Andrew Alford, president of Nexstar’s broadcasting division, said in statement.
The controversy landed at a sensitive time for Nexstar, which needs FCC approval for its $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna.
ABC soon announced that Kimmel would be taken off the air. It is unclear when or whether he will return. Kimmel has not commented publicly.
Later in the evening, the television company Sinclair said its stations would carry “a special in remembrance of Charlie Kirk” on Friday during Kimmel’s usual time slot. The company also asked Kimmel to apologize to Kirk’s family and donate money to Turning Point USA, the conservative group that Kirk turned into a political powerhouse.
House Democratic leaders, in a statement, accused Carr of “bullying ABC” and “forcing the company to bend the knee to the Trump administration,” and said a “war” on the First Amendment by Trump and the GOP “is blatantly inconsistent with American values.”
The news of Kimmel’s suspension broke after midnight in Britain, where Trump was traveling for a state visit. But the president soon posted on Truth Social, his social media platform, to celebrate what he called “Great News for America.”
CBS had already announced the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s show over the summer, and Trump said more dominoes should fall, calling for the cancellation of shows by Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.
“Do it NBC!!!” he wrote.
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