Disney Decides One Week Of Giving In To Fascism Was All It Could Handle For Now
Sinclair stations to bravely do fascism on their own for now.
The suspense, or the suspension at least, is over: Jimmy Kimmel will return to his late-night talk show tonight (it’s Tuesday if you’re still not entirely awake), nearly a week after ABC suspended the show “indefinitely” last Wednesday. ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! after the entire far Right pretended to be horrified by a joke about the MAGA reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk. (Kimmel didn’t say anything bad about Kirk himself, but you wouldn’t have known that from the reactionary reactions.)
Outside the Trumpy right, however, the stifling of Kimmel by ABC and its parent company, Disney, was widely condemned as a capitulation to Trump. Lots of people — an exact number isn’t available yet — responded by canceling their subscriptions to the Disney+ streaming service, which also includes Hulu and ESPN. Big names in the entertainment industry said they wouldn’t work with Disney anymore, and there were demonstrations outside ABC and Disney corporate offices. Within days, Donald Trump himself was making it extremely clear that this wasn’t about one joke, and that he and his administration actually wanted to silence criticism wherever possible.
Disney apparently decided that it didn’t like being a pariah so much, and announced Monday that Kimmel would be back. In an very mealy mouthed statement, the company wrote,
Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive.
Not terribly specific or even all that accurate, and of course the “tense situation” had more to do with fears that affiliate stations could lose their licenses. But OK, there’s the Mouse’s fig leaf. Then the announcement added, “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
We’re sure the insider accounts on that decision will be fun, considering the report that in the hours leading up to last week’s decision to put Kimmel on hiatus, network executives were “pissing themselves all day,” according to Rolling Stone (archive link).
Just to review how we got here, last week, Kimmel made this joke about MAGA chuds insisting there was no possibility at all that Charlie Kirk’s murderer could possibly have been one of them, even though we didn’t know the killer’s motive then and we still don’t know it now.
“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 doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
You know, in case you had somehow not seen it yet. Not a joke about Kirk, and if you want to split hairs, Kimmel didn’t say the killer was MAGA, just that MAGA was frantic to say that “The Left” was wholly responsible before anyone actually knew anything.
Wednesday morning, Donald Trump’s FCC Chair Brendan Carr explicitly threatened to take regulatory action against ABC affiliate stations, saying on a rightwing podcast, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. 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.”
When even podcaster and sometimes-Senator Ted Cruz says that sounded like something a mafioso would say, you know that a really bad attempt at a New York/Italian accent is about to accompany an OK take on government overreach.
After Carr’s threat, two companies that own a bunch of ABC affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair Broadcasting, dutifully announced they would preempt the show themselves. Nexstar is trying to do a $6.2 billion merger with another media company, Tegna, that will allow it to own even more local TV stations, but it can’t go through with the merger unless the FCC issues a waiver to a rule intended to prevent too much consolidation of station ownership. And Disney has its own $2 billion merger deal between ESPN and the NFL Network that could also be blocked by regulatory agencies.
Why yes, the whole affair does seem like a really good illustration of why consolidation of media ownership can have unfortunate effects! Odd we aren’t talking more about that part of this!
Following Disney’s announcement that it would bring Kimmel back, Sinclair said it would continue to preempt the show on the 35 ABC affiliates it owns, saying it would be “replacing it with news programming,” and that the company was discussing with ABC the show’s possible return to Sinclair-owned stations.
Nexstar also announced this morning that it will continue preempting Kimmel, saying it stands by its decision, “pending assurance that all parties are committed to fostering an environment of respectful, constructive dialogue in the markets we serve.” But the company also included a little cheat code for viewers in its market, adding,
“In the meantime, we note that Jimmy Kimmel Live! will be available nationwide on multiple Disney-owned streaming products, while our stations will focus on continuing to produce local news and other programming relevant to their respective markets.”
Hey, guys, you forgot YouTube!
Sinclair didn’t say specifically what those talks were about, but last week, after Disney yanked Kimmel off the air, Sinclair demanded that Kimmel “issue a direct apology to the Kirk family,” despite Kimmel’s having already extended his sympathies to the family after the murder, and despite the joke having nothing to do with Kirk or his (awful) opinions. Sinclair went on to suggest that Kimmel “make a meaningful personal donation to the Kirk Family and Turning Point USA,” Kirk’s grotesquely reactionary political group. We don’t believe Ted Cruz has responded to that attempted shakedown with a bad mafioso impression, perhaps by rubbing his thumb across the tops of his fingertips in the universal “pay up” gesture. More to the point, we don’t know whether Sinclair is still insisting that Kimmel personally pay up for his alleged misdeeds. We suppose Sinclair might welcome public feedback on its programming choices, to help it get a sense of how it can best serve the public interest.
In conclusion, we’d suggest that if you’ve canceled Disney+, it might be a good idea not to rush back just yet, and to see how the next turn in this fuck-tussle turns out.
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DISNEY: "OK, we are putting Jimmy Kimmel back on the air. You can resubscribe now."
ME: "I unsubscribed because you immorally bowed to fascism. I'm not going to resubscribe because you immorally bowed to finances."
https://bsky.app/profile/mrsbettybowers.bsky.social/post/3lzhda6fmac2u
Sinclair is about to find out there's this thing called streaming.