Key Points:
- The Center for American Rights filed an FCC complaint against Disney’s KABC, saying Jimmy Kimmel spread false claims about Charlie Kirk’s suspected killer.
- FCC Chair Brendan Carr blasted ABC over Kimmel’s monologue, hinting at regulatory hurdles, leading Nexstar and Sinclair to drop the show.
- CAR’s Daniel Suhr urged the FCC to revoke KABC’s license if ABC and Disney refuse to permanently pull Kimmel off the air.
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- Special coverage: The FCC vs. Jimmy Kimmel — click or tap here to read the latest news.
A law firm with conservative ties has filed a formal complaint to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against a Los Angeles television station that is directly tied to the Walt Disney Company and ABC’s decision to suspend its late night talk show “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
On Thursday, the Center for American Rights (CAR) filed the complaint against KABC-TV (Channel 7), alleging talk show host Jimmy Kimmel acted with “callous disregard of the facts” in his opening monologue on Monday, during which he wrongfully implied that a man suspected of shooting political activist Charlie Kirk was politically aligned with supporters of President Donald Trump.
“We hit 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,” Kimmel said.
“When he said that, it had been clear for several days that what he said was utterly, totally 100 percent false,” Daniel Suhr, the chief litigator for the CAR, said in the complaint.
Kimmel’s monologue drew little controversy from the public until FCC Chairman Brendan Carr criticized him and the ABC network during an interview with a conservative podcaster on Wednesday.
During the interview, Carr issued a veiled threat against ABC and Disney, suggesting the FCC would make future business-related transactions difficult for the network because it didn’t prevent Kimmel from going to air with the monologue.
Hours after Carr’s complaint, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair, Inc. said they were pre-empting Kimmel’s show from their ABC affiliates for the foreseeable future. The network ultimately decided to put the show on hiatus.
That is not good enough for Suhr, who says the FCC should revoke KABC-TV’s television license if the network is unwilling to pull Kimmel’s show off the air for good.
“ABC’s affiliates need to step up and hold ABC accountable as a network for passing through material that fails to respect the public-interest standard to which they are held,” Suhr wrote. “Disney as ABC’s corporate owner needs to act directly to correct this problem. And if ABC won’t take Kimmel off the air for this, then this Commission should tell KABC-7 it will come off the air if that’s necessary to put an end to this outrage.”
KABC is one of eight licensed TV stations directly owned by ABC and Disney. It also serves as the ABC station for Los Angeles, the country’s second biggest, which includes the city of Burbank, where Disney is headquartered.
It is at least the second complaint filed by CAR and Suhr against a local ABC station in recent years. Last September, CAR filed a similar complaint against WPVI (Channel 6), the ABC-owned station in Philadelphia, arguing that a debate between then-former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris was designed by ABC to cast Harris as the more-favorable candidate.
The WPVI complaint was tossed in January by former FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel as part of a broader dismissal of petitions and complaints that were deemed to be politically motivated. Carr re-opened those complaints in April, raising concerns among some lawmakers that the FCC was evolving into a political weapon.
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