FCC Chairman Warns ABC Over Jimmy Kimmel Comment About Charlie Kirk Assassination Suspect
Brendan Carr and Jimmy Kimmel Getty Images

UPDATE, 8:23 p.m. PT: The chairman of the FCC warned of potential action over a comment that Jimmy Kimmel made during a monologue on his ABC late-night talk show about the suspect in the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Watch Kimmel’s comments here.

Brendan Carr‘s comments on Wednesday afternoon were followed by a chain of events, with Nexstar, the largest station owner in the country, announcing that it would pull Kimmel’s show, and ABC then dropping it from its lineup indefinitely.

Carr’s attacks were only the latest on the content of traditional broadcast networks, even though the agency has expressly said its authority over programming is limited.

Kimmel said on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Monday, “We had 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 with everything they can to score political points from it.”

On Tuesday, authorities charged Tyler Robinson, 22, in Kirk’s killing, along with a series of other charges. Utah County Attorney Jeffrey Gray said that Robinson’s mother said her son “had become more political and had started to lean more to the left, becoming more pro-gay and trans rights oriented.” Gray said that when Robinson’s father asked his son why he did it, Robinson “explained that there was too much evil, and the guy, referring to Charlie Kirk, spreads too much hate.”

In the days after Robinson was taken into custody, there has been rampant speculation on social media about the suspect’s motives, with one baseless theory that he was a member of the alt-right. On Sunday morning, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said on Meet the Press that there “clearly was a leftist ideology with this assassin.”

The suspect was raised in a conservative family, and Gray told reporters that was a source of tension with his father.

On Benny Johnson’s podcast, Carr called Kimmel’s comment “some of the sickest conduct possible.”

“There are avenues here for the FCC, so there are some ways in which I need to be a little careful, because I could be called wholly to become a judge on some of these claims that come up.”

He added, “Frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean, we can do this the easy way, or these companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

In the interview, Carr suggested that he had authority over the programming content because broadcasters are held to a public interest standard. On Johnson’s podcast, he said that he wants to “reinvigorate the public interest,” and that “what people don’t understand is that the broadcasters … are entirely different than people that use other forms of communication. They have a license granted by is at the FCC, and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest.”

Carr’s comments got pushback from Anna Gomez, the sole Democrat on the FCC.

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She wrote on X, “An inexcusable act of political violence by one disturbed individual must never be exploited as justification for broader censorship and control. 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. We must stand firm against every attempt to silence dissent, punish satirists and government critics, and erode individual liberty.”

Carr later defended his remarks, writing on X, “Jimmy ‘Blackface’ Kimmel’s apparently outrageous conduct is the problem here, not the calling of it out.”

But the FCC on its website cites its limited legal authority. It refers to the provision of the Communications Act that says that nothing in the law “shall be understood or construed to give the Commission the power of censorship over the [broadcast] communications or signals transmitted by any [broadcast] station, and no regulation or condition shall be promulgated or fixed by the Commission which shall interfere with the right of free speech by means of [over-the-air] broadcast communication.”

The FCC says on its website, “Pursuant to these legal mandates, the FCC has long held that ‘the public interest is best served by permitting free expression of views.’ Rather than suppress speech, communications law and policy seeks to encourage responsive ‘counter-speech’ from others. Following this principle ensures that the most diverse and opposing opinions will be expressed, even though some views or expressions may be highly offensive.”

There are restraints on broadcasters, the FCC notes, including on indecency, obscenity, commercial content in children’s programming and broadcast news distortion.

The FCC typically launches investigations against a broadcaster after receiving a complaint. One group in particular, the Center for American Rights, has been filing FCC complaints over broadcast content, whether it be bias at broadcast news divisions or on late-night TV. For his part, Carr has kept open investigations, including a complaint against CBS News over the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris. As Skydance needed FCC approval for its merger with CBS-parent Paramount Global, it agreed to hire an ombudsman to take complaints over CBS News. Even though Paramount had previously called Donald Trump’s lawsuit over the 60 Minutes interview meritless, it ultimately agreed to a $16 million settlement, a move that was followed a couple weeks later by regulatory approval.

 

On the Johnson podcast, Carr seemed to suggest remedies for ABC, or ways that they could avoid a lengthy proceeding. “Look, there’s calls for Kimmel to be fired. You could certainly see a path forward for suspension over this. Again, the FCC is going to have remedies that we can look at. We may ultimately be called to be a judge on that.” Trump has been a frequent critic of Kimmel, predicting that he would be the next late-night host to have his show canceled after CBS dropped Stephen Colbert, citing financial concerns.

Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said in a statement, “The FCC has no authority to control what a late night TV host can say, and the First Amendment protects Americans’ right to speculate on current events even if those speculations later turn out to be incorrect. Subjecting broadcasters to regulatory liability when anyone on their network gets something wrong would turn the FCC into an arbiter of truth and cast an intolerable chill over the airwaves.”

Carr himself has previously acknowledged that the FCC’s authority is narrow. In 2019, he wrote on Twitter, “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.’”

Earlier this week, Attorney General Pam Bondi received backlash, including from some commentators on the right, after she appeared on Kate Miller’s podcast and said the Justice Department would go after those who engage in “hate speech” in the wake of Kirk’s killing. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything, and that is across the aisle,” she said.

The First Amendment has no carve out for “hate speech,” but Bondi later clarified her remarks.

“Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment,” she wrote on X. “It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over.”