Kimmel's suspension confirms what many suspected after Colbert's cancellation

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When “Last Week Tonight” won an Emmy on Sunday, Daniel O’Brien’s acceptance speech touched on something many intuited when Stephen Colbert’s show was canceled in July — at precisely the moment Paramount was trying to get the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission to approve its merger with Skydance. “We are honored to share [the Emmy] with all writers of late-night political comedy,” O’Brien said, “while that is still a type of show that’s allowed to exist.”

It won’t be allowed to exist for long. Sunday’s Emmy Awards were creepy and subdued for good reason: Broadcast television, as it has existed for decades, is coming to an end. The crisis is as obvious as it is grave, and it has implications far beyond late-night: Billionaires are accelerating their efforts to consolidate control over media platforms and the president is eager to help them do so, provided they shut down his critics. If they don’t, he threatens to use the levers of government — particularly those designed to remain independent — to financially punish them. None of this is secret; the brazenness is, at least partly, the point.

News broke Wednesday that Disney-owned ABC — following a similar announcement from Nexstar, the largest owner of television stations in the United States — was pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s show, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” off the air. The shocking move was ostensibly in response to a remark Kimmel made Monday night, which Nexstar and Sinclair, its biggest competitor, have characterized as so beyond the pale that the late-night comic’s show could not be permitted to air.

Here is that remark: “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.”

Washington Post