Updated September 19, 2025 at 5:03 AM EDT
Comedian Jimmy Kimmel being pulled off the air has taken the conversation around freedom of speech to a new level after the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10 as he spoke to a crowd of mostly students at Utah Valley University.
It's a pivotal moment with a lot of layers and important questions facing the country. They center on power, money, charges of hypocrisy and the direction of American democracy itself.
In the wake of Kirk's death, powerful people on the right, including in the White House, seem to be making lists and taking names.
"I have read someplace that the networks were 97% against me, again, 97% negative," President Trump told reporters traveling with him Thursday, "and yet I won and easily, all seven swing states" in the 2024 presidential election. "They give me only bad publicity, press. I mean, they're getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away."
Licenses for use of public airwaves are given to local broadcast stations. Those can be stations owned and operated by the big networks — ABC, CBS and NBC. Others are owned by chains or private companies. Cable news and podcasts do not use the public airwaves, are not federally licensed and, therefore, not subject to the same federal regulations.
Conservatives have long been frustrated with what they see as a liberal bias in the media — whether it's movies, television or the news — and many Republican officials see what Trump is doing as comeuppance and support stronger regulatory efforts.
Others, though, see Trump as abusing his power. They charge that he's leveraging the federal government in ways no past president has, using Kirk's death to operationalize a retribution campaign, rebalance the media and squash speech and dissent.
They also see hypocrisy in the push, not only because Kirk argued for the right to say even "outrageous" things, but also because of years of conservatives chafing at what they saw as "cancel culture."
What did Kimmel say?
The comments at issue came during Monday night's episode of "Jimmy Kimmel Live!"
"We hit some new lows over the weekend," Kimmel said, "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."
There was more – about how the president is mourning Kirk's death more like a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish than an adult; he poked fun at FBI Director Kash Patel for his early social media posting after Kirk was killed, as well as saying he looks like he "got hit by a Volkswagen"; he used a derogatory term to refer to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.
Kimmel has not responded to NPR interview requests and has not commented on ABC's suspension of his show.
It was that implication that the alleged shooter had ties to the right that really rankled conservatives.
Immediately after Kirk's assassination, the motives were not well known. There was discussion in some corners of the Internet about inscriptions on the bullets, the meme and gamer culture around them, and how they may have been prevalent with some who didn't like Kirk from the right.
This week, the prosecutor in the case laid out text messages – and relayed what the alleged shooter's parents told them – that show a left-wing orientation.
The Trump administration's role
Enter: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr.
Carr called Kimmel's comments the "sickest conduct possible" on The Benny Show, a podcast hosted by conservative, right-wing commentator Benny Johnson.
"In some quarters," Carr said, "there is a very concerted effort to try to lie to the American people about the nature, as you indicated, of one of the most significant newsworthy public interest acts that we've seen in a long time."
He said Kimmel appeared to be playing into that and noted that the FCC would not stand idly by as, he said, the agency had in the past.
"They have a license granted by us at the FCC," Carr said of local broadcast stations, "and with that, comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest. And we can get into some ways that we've been trying to reinvigorate the public interest and some changes that we've seen, but frankly when you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. 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."
Others disagree with how Carr is applying that public-interest standard.
"The FCC is weaponizing its licensing authority in order to bring broadcasters to heel, and to really think twice about what they say about this administration," FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the commission, said about the Kimmel suspension and other broadcasters who have faced off with the Trump administration while she attended the Axios Media Trends Live conference on Thursday.
"It's not because of the content of the broadcast, whether the Jimmy Kimmel show or CBS, is actually inciting violence or breaking the law when all they are doing is speaking about this administration in a way that it does not like. That is contrary to the First Amendment. It's contrary to the Communications Act, which prohibits the FCC from censoring broadcasters. So, any pressure on these broadcasters to alter their broadcasts because of their content is in fact inappropriate. And this is important to keep in mind, the FCC doesn't have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional rights to revoke licenses because of content."
Trump paid Carr arguably the highest compliment that can come from the president, calling him a "tough guy," and Carr made media rounds after his podcast appearance.
But Carr had very different things to say in recent years.
"Should the government censor speech it doesn't like? Of course not," Carr wrote on X in 2019 in a response to a proposed FCC crackdown on e-cigarette ads. "The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the 'public interest.'"
Perturbed by the banning of a conservative parody site from what was then Twitter, Carr wrote in 2022: "Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people in to the discussion. That's why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship."
A marriage of politics and money
For the Trump administration, getting a critic off the air is a political win. But as with any story, it's important to follow the money.
Nexstar Media owns a lot of local broadcast stations across the country. It is on the verge of a $6.2 billion merger with competitor Tegna.
But there's a problem.
FCC rules put a limit on how wide the reach is supposed to be for local broadcasters, and with this merger, Nexstar would exceed that reach.
FCC Chairman Carr has said he's open to changing the rule, calling it "arcane" and "artificial." There's some question as to whether the FCC can do that on its own or if it needs Congress. Nevertheless, Nexstar is banking on the Trump administration to lift the cap.
And this deal may be at the heart of why Kimmel was pulled off the air. Follow what happened Wednesday – Carr went on Johnson's podcast, then hours later, Nexstar announced it would be preempting "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" on all of its stations. Later, ABC takes Kimmel off the air.
It's not a far leap to see a lot of companies are doing what they can to stay in the good graces of the Trump administration because there's a lot of money at stake.
Ironies abound
The entire GOP apparatus campaigned for years against "cancel culture" and what it saw as the censoring of conservatives, particularly on social media.
After the siege at the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook. Twitter cited the "risk of further incitement of violence."
So Trump made "free speech" a cornerstone of his presidential campaign. It was a regular feature in his stump speeches, and when he became president, he pledged to fight for it.
"After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression," Trump said during his inaugural address earlier this year, "I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America."
He has since made similar pro-free speech pledges more than a dozen times.
But that's changed. His attorney general, Pam Bondi, went so far as to say that her Justice Department would "absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech."
After pushback from conservatives, Bondi walked that back.
Among the conservative voices drawing a sharp line saying that speech should not and could not be prosecuted was Carr himself.
Here's what he said Tuesday, the day before his podcast appearance.
"I think you can draw a pretty clear line, and the Supreme Court has done this for decades, that our First Amendment, our free speech tradition, protects almost all speech," Carr said at Politico's AI & Tech Summit. He added that there was only "a relatively small category of speech" that is not protected – speech that incites violence.
There is also an irony to liberal protestations about free speech, considering the policing of speech, particularly on social media, that went on for years. Lots of conservatives felt targeted.
Progressives would say they were targeting hateful rhetoric, that the speech was protected by the First Amendment, but that there were consequences for that speech. Conservatives would say the same about their efforts in the aftermath of Kirk's death.
The difference is Trump is now using the full force of the federal government to punish political enemies. Trump argues Democrats and the Biden administration did the same through "weaponization" of the Justice Department.
Of course, that was not for speech, but alleged criminal behavior.
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