Jimmy Kimmel’s comments on the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk weren’t just noxiously offensive and seemingly misleading – their timing was also incredibly bad: They threaten to derail Nexstar’s $6.2 billion takeover of rival broadcaster Tegna, telecom insiders tell On The Money.
The already controversial deal – which would combine two of the nation’s largest owners of local TV stations – poses significant antitrust questions and needs a close review by the Federal Communications Commission and its conservative firebrand chairman, Brendan Carr.
Kimmel’s comments made that approval even dicier. That’s why Nexstar publicly announced Thursday its stations would no longer carry the show, telecom insiders tell On The Money. Ditto for ABC, which produces and distributes “Jimmy Kimmel Live” to broadcasters like Nexstar — and likewise has business before the FCC.
Bob Iger, the CEO of its parent, Disney, was also quick to suspend the show indefinitely.
On Thursday, Sinclair Broadcasting — a rival local TV giant with a conservative bent — upped the ante even further, saying ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel was insufficient and announcing it will yank “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” from its stations until the host apologizes directly to Charlie Kirk’s family and donates to his political activist group.
The backdrop to all this is Carr, a longtime telecom lawyer who is the new sheriff of the broadcast industry. Carr has been warning networks large and small that he’s taking one of the most expansionary views of the agency’s regulatory edict to make sure programming is in the “public interest,” First Amendment concerns be damned.
His impact has been nothing short of dramatic; Paramount settled a suit with president Trump over CBS’s controversial interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign fearing that the FCC wouldn’t approve its $8 billion sale to independent studio Skydance.
It also cancelled the late-night show of the money-losing and politically charged comic Steven Colbert.
Other broadcast networks have been settling various lawsuits with Trump – ABC forking over $16 million to settle a suit with the president over comments made by news host George Stephanopoulos – to stay on Carr’s good side.
Unlike cable, the FCC has the authority to throttle content that airs on “public airwaves” – aka local TV networks – by withholding broadcast licenses. That includes local stations owned by the likes of NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox, as well as those that have agreements to run their programming, like Nexstar.
In the past, the FCC has given wide latitude for broadcasters to air anything except obscenity; that’s why people like Steven Colbert, Kimmel and even alleged straight news broadcasts like “60 Minutes” could get away with left-wing commentary despite wide swaths of the country hating those views.
Kimmel’s odd comments on Monday riled Carr not only for mocking conservatives as they mourned Kirk’s assassination, but also seeming to imply a misleading narrative that his assassin was conservative himself: “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.”
Yes that too would have been considered First Amendment protected speech during previous administrations. Carr would argue the constitution’s speech clause isn’t absolute. It only means the government can’t jail Kimmel or Colbert for their opinions.
“Cleary Nexstar is sucking up to Carr,” one telecom lawyer told me Wednesday just after the show’s cancellation. “Kimmel’s comments are noxious but from a First Amendment standpoint they would have been protected in the past. He’s a comedian, so how is he distorting the news unless you have a deal to be approved by the FCC?”
Either way, it doesn’t mean that the FCC has to grant you a license when it can make a case – which is what Carr is doing now in the broadcast industry – that one-sided politics is anathema to the public interest.
As Carr put it in a Wednesday interview with my Fox colleague Sean Hannity: “running a narrow partisan circus, whatever the public interest means, it’s not that.”
Nexstar is particularly vulnerable to Carr’s public interest interpretation given its plans to expand. It is already one of the biggest owners of ABC affiliate stations carrying Kimmel’s show, controlling more than 30 around the country.
The deal to buy Tegna announced in August would extend the company’s reach even more. Both companies combined would cover 80% of households, operating 265 stations in 44 states. In some markets the new company will control three or four stations.
All of that needs FCC approval.
Reps for Nexstar and the FCC didn’t return a request for comment.
