THE NEW YORKER on Trump's Censorship of Jimmy Kimmel

From Inkoo Kang's 9-19-25 NEW YORKER article entitled "How Donald Trump’s Culture-Wars Playbook Felled Jimmy Kimmel":

On Wednesday, bowing to pressure from the Trump Administration, ABC pulled the late-night series “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air. The show, which had run for more than two decades, was shelved indefinitely over a monologue addressing the murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk—one in which Kimmel did not disparage Kirk, nor, indeed, comment on him at all. Instead, he directed his contempt at those eager to exploit the activist’s death: members of “the MAGA gang” who were, he said, “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.” It wasn’t clear whether Kimmel was suggesting that Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s alleged killer, was “one of them,” but his ideological foes pounced on the ambiguous phrasing. Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called Kimmel’s words “truly sick” and threatened retaliation through his agency. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said, on a right-wing podcast. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the F.C.C. ahead” [...].

Kimmel’s censorship comes just two months after the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,” under similar duress, but the differences between the two incidents are significant. Colbert got nearly a year’s notice before the end of his show, giving him time to conclude things on his own terms. In contrast, the abruptness of Kimmel’s suspension has sent shock waves throughout Hollywood [...].

By now, it’s clear that the Trump Administration intends to radically reshape America. Cultural institutions are very much a part of that agenda, which has seen a deformation of the Kennedy Center, a forced resignation at the National Portrait Gallery, and censorship at the Smithsonian. The President formed strategic alliances with the world’s two richest men, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison (though his relationship with the former has since fractured spectacularly). Musk remade the site formerly known as Twitter in his own image; Ellison is now in talks to control both TikTok and Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes CNN and HBO. It was inevitable that the Administration would come for television—by all accounts Trump’s favorite medium. During his first term in office, some critics turned on late-night hosts, deriding the frequency of “clapter” and their tendency to preach to the choir. Even the catharsis that they had to offer came under suspicion; perhaps the nightly dissipation of outrage also sapped political will. But if liberal late night didn’t affect much in the way of the real world, it still got under the President’s thin skin...

To read the entire article, click HERE.