On Wednesday night, Kimmel was put on ice by ABC. Local affiliates had said they wouldn’t air “Jimmy Kimmel! Live” because of his vile monologue suggesting Charlie Kirk’s killer was a MAGA true believer.
“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 had said on-air Monday.
But it was his grotesque commentary that was hitting a new low.
His pronouncement was well out of step with what we already knew to be true about the shooter’s affiliation. Yet Kimmel chose to dive into a conspiracy theory to exploit a horrific political assassination.
If the ideologies were reversed, virtuous lefties would have been red in the face, screaming: “That’s disinformation!”
The reality is, this moment of reckoning was self-inflicted — and inevitable. For the last decade, Kimmel and Colbert have decided that viewers don’t need chuckles and interviews with the celeb du jour.
We don’t even need jokes.
Nope, we need to be lectured on politics and told that one side of the country, those who voted Republican, is inherently evil and destructive.
To be fair, that model may have bought their shows an extra decade of life, but in an era of streaming and YouTube, late night chat shows are being retired one by one by the legacy television networks, and will likely be replaced by a product far cheaper and easier to produce, such as this stopgap(?) replacement: ABC Airs Celebrity Family Feud After Pulling Jimmy Kimmel Live! Amid Charlie Kirk Backlash.