Even The FCC Chair Is Walking Back Some Of His Threats About Jimmy Kimmel

Federal Communications Commission Chair and Project 2025 co-author Brendan Carr is now claiming that he never meant to imply that local ABC affiliates could lose their broadcasting licenses if they failed to “take action” on Jimmy Kimmel. According to his own interpretation of the First Amendment, a lie that’s this egregious should get Carr banned from television.

Last Wednesday, Carr appeared on a right-wing podcast where he excoriated comments made by Kimmel regarding President Donald Trump’s reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk during the Monday night episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, calling them “some of the sickest conduct possible.” Carr then publicly urged the local TV stations carrying ABC to pre-empt Jimmy Kimmel Live!, warning them, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” 

Carr further threatened, “It’s time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, ‘Listen, we’re going to pre-empt, we’re not going to run Kimmel anymore, and so you straighten this out because we, licensed broadcasters are running into the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.” 

When local TV giants Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group did exactly that and pre-empted Jimmy Kimmel Live! while condemning the host’s comments, Carr gloated on Twitter about removing one of President Trump’s most prominent critics from his platform and advancing the agenda set out by Project 2025. 

Then, yesterday morning, Carr spoke at the Concordia Summit in New York where he told the attendees that he did not threaten to revoke broadcasting licenses from TV stations over Jimmy Kimmel Live! “in any way, shape or form.” Even though a simple Google search would return Carr’s clearly stated threats from just last week, the FCC chairman is apparently taking the Nexstar and Sinclair approach to the controversy by banking on his target audience getting all their information from the local news.

“What I spoke about last week is that when concerns are raised about news distortion, there’s an easy way for parties to address that and work that out,” Carr claimed of his comments that directly led to the brief suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! by Disney CEO Bob Iger. “In the main, that takes place between local television stations that are licensed by the FCC and what we call national programmers like Disney. They work that out, and there doesn’t need to be any involvement of the FCC.” 

In his speech, Carr conspicuously ignored the irony that he, the FCC chair, explicitly advised those affiliates to pre-empt Jimmy Kimmel Live! or else risk losing their broadcasting licenses. 

Carr then claimed that the consequences of a local ABC affiliate continuing to carry Jimmy Kimmel Live! might not necessarily be as dire as he said they would be last Wednesday. On the topic of his infamous “easy way or the hard way” threat, Carr explained, “If they don’t (pre-empt Kimmel), there’s a way that is not as easy, which is someone can file a complaint at the FCC, and then the FCC, by law, as set up by Congress, has to adjudicate that complaint.”

Then, in his most preposterous and implausible claim, Carr stated, “And what I’ve been very clear in the context of the Kimmel episode, is the FCC, and myself in particular, have expressed no view on the ultimate merits.”

Now, some late-night fans and freedom-of-speech-enjoyers may claim Carr's cowardly, hypocritical lies to the Concordia Summit as a victory, especially seeing as Jimmy Kimmel Live! returns to ABC (but not to Sinclair or Nexstar-owned affiliates) tonight. However, within the greater context of Project 2025, for which Carr wrote the far-right's gameplan for using the FCC to consolidate power in the executive branch and eliminate the possibility of dissent, Carr’s newest claims are really more of a tactical retreat.

What happened last week was the FCC testing the waters on publicly intimidating the most powerful media organizations in the world into silencing a critic of the conservative power structure. And, despite Kimmel’s return tonight, the test run was far from a failure — within a matter of hours, Carr’s public threats brought Sinclair, Nexstar and Disney all to heel. Now that the local affiliates have adequately demonstrated their loyalty, Carr doesn’t need to threaten the nuclear option just to get them to do his bidding.