Jimmy Kimmel: We Do Seem to Have the Power

by Violeta Gonzalez, Contributor

Illustration by Rishi

One month ago, on Sept. 10, right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk was shot while debating at Utah Valley University. We’ve all heard about it by now.

Kirk’s death resulted in an overwhelming reaction from conservatives. Flags were ordered to be flown at half-mast; Kirk is to be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom; this year, October 14th, Kirk’s birthday, will be an official day of remembrance for him. Right-wingers online even compared Kirk to notable assassination victims such as Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.

But most notable, perhaps, has been the Trump administration’s commendation of censorship in the aftermath of the incident. Beginning with J.D. Vance imploring people to report anyone they may hear making light of Kirk’s death to their employers, the situation escalated to the point where Trump himself declared that networks criticizing his administration too much should be taken off air.

“All they do is hit Trump. … They’re not allowed to do that,” Trump said to The Guardian. “They’re an arm of the Democrat [sic] party. …They give me only bad publicity…I would think maybe their licenses should be taken away.”

Since then, even offhanded comments about Kirk have resulted in all sorts of people losing their jobs: educators, nurses, journalists, restaurant workers. Also—for a little while there—Jimmy Kimmel.

Kimmel has hosted Jimmy Kimmel Live! nightly since 2003. But on Sept. 17, ABC announced that production would be suspended indefinitely following comments Kimmel made regarding responses to Kirk’s death.

“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,” he said in his opening monologue on September 15th’s show.

He also said of Trump, “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he calls a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

Kimmel never mocked Kirk or his death—he actually expressed his condolences to Kirk’s family on the day of the incident, condemning the violence. In ABC’s view, however, these two facts were not mutually exclusive. For a time it seemed as though his suspension was definite, and would serve as a premonition of the censorship to come under the Trump administration.

But, fascinatingly, Kimmel returned after barely a week off-air. Why?

Kimmel’s show is, of course, widely known. Though his numbers have dropped alongside the decline of network television, for many years he has consistently cleared the one-million-viewer mark every evening. 

It was no surprise, then, that people did not take well to the suspension. ABC is a property of the Walt Disney Company—so people’s solutions were to cancel their subscriptions to Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. 

This strategy—likely in conjunction with other factors—wound up having an effect. Between Kimmel’s suspension and Sept. 22, Disney lost $6.4 billion in market capitalization; additionally, a source of The Handbasket’s at Disney claimed that, combining all three streaming services, 1.7 million people had canceled their subscriptions by Sept. 29.

It’s impossible to know what really made ABC put Kimmel back on air. Regardless, he’s back as of Sept. 23—and though he, emotional, clarified that he did not mean to make light of Kirk’s murder, he neither felt the need to nor was forced to make an apology. 

The fact remains, however, that the Trump administration’s declarations led to one of America’s most popular live TV shows being cancelled. It’s distressing that the decision was able to go through at all; and with Trump not commenting until after Kimmer was fired, it feels as though we’ve yet to see the worst of this particular vein of censorship. 

What was most striking, though, was the sheer amount of people that were willing to drop Disney over Kimmel.

The boycotts activists have called for in recent memory have had mixed results. Some, like the one on Amazon, have had a negligible impact; others, however, like those on Target and McDonald’s, have led to those companies taking pretty big hits in terms of both finances and reputation. Still, it’s difficult to gauge how effective the latter examples have been in the grand scheme of things; Target hasn’t reinstated its DEI policies, after all, and McDonald’s continues to operate in Israel. 

Yet it took audiences only seven days to get Kimmel back on air. There’s a difference in scale, of course, but Disney lost billions of dollars over the course of less than a week.

This is positive—it shows that we are, as consumers, capable of bringing about these fast-acting impacts on major corporations—but it also made me wonder, “Why couldn’t this have been happening before?”

I found two takeaways here. First, it’s clear to see that we will need to be engaging far more critically with the media that we consume. Second, we must continuously find ways to keep our administration accountable for inevitable instances of censorship—and not take them lying down.

At the same time, we need to consider what it is we’re choosing to focus our efforts on. It’s telling that the public was able to enact justice for a white, male entertainer so quickly, but not bring about any inconvenience to Israel in the time since it begun carrying out its genocide on the Palestinian people—whose conflict, incidentally, hit the two-year mark a few days ago.

So don’t be complacent. Ask: What are changes I can see occurring in the things around me? What is it that I can focus my efforts on? How can we, as a greater, more powerful community, come together to bring about the change we want to see? If there’s anything that the situation with Kimmel has shown, it’s that pushing back does have an impact; it’s imperative that we keep that momentum going, and find other places in which to focus those efforts going forward.