After being pulled off the air nearly a week ago, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” will return on Tuesday, The Walt Disney Company announced Monday.
The late-night show had been “pre-empted indefinitely” last week following comments Kimmel made on the show in response to the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
In a statement Monday, The Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, said Kimmel’s show was suspended “to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country,” adding that some of the host’s comments were “ill-timed and thus insensitive.”
“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,” Disney said.
Kimmel had not yet commented on Monday on his show’s return.
The late-night host made the remarks in his monologue on Sept. 15, saying: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang 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.” He also mocked Mr. Trump’s reaction to the shooting.
Before Disney announced last week that Kimmel’s show was “pre-empted indefinitely,” Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr called the remarks “some of the sickest conduct possible,” and said there was a “path forward for suspension over this.”
“The FCC is going to have remedies we could look at,” he said during a podcast interview, telling host Benny Johnson: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Kimmel faced criticism from conservatives over his comments. Mr. Trump last week had congratulated ABC for “finally having the courage to do what had to be done.”
Carr’s comments on Kimmel drew pushback on First Amendment grounds, with the FCC’s sole Democrat-appointed commissioner, Anna Gomez, arguing the agency had used Kimmel’s “inopportune joke as a pretext to punish speech it disliked.” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas also blasted Carr, calling his pressure on ABC “dangerous as hell” and “right out of Goodfellas.”
ABC’s announcement last week came after media giant Nexstar announced that it would pre-empt Kimmel’s show indefinitely on all its stations over Kimmel’s remarks. Andrew Alford, president of Nexstar’s broadcasting division, said the comments were “offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located.”
Nexstar owns and operates more than 200 stations nationwide, including more than two dozen ABC affiliates. Nexstar has a deal pending to purchase Tegna, a smaller rival, for $6.2 billion, and needs the Federal Communications Commission to approve it. A Nexstar spokesperson told CBS News last week that the decision was “made unilaterally by the senior executive team at Nexstar, and they had no communication with the FCC or any government agency prior to making that decision.”
Another major station owner, Sinclair Broadcast Group, also said last week that it was pulling Kimmel’s show.
“Regardless of ABC’s plans for the future of the program, Sinclair intends not to return ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ to our air until we are confident that appropriate steps have been taken to uphold the standards expected of a national broadcast platform,” Sinclair said last week in a statement.
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