Jimmy Kimmel is back on the air, but the circus surrounding his suspension and reinstatement reveals more about the state of American media than about one late-night host.
Disney announced Monday that Jimmy Kimmel Live would resume Tuesday night, less than a week after the company abruptly yanked him for comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Kimmel had claimed on air that Tyler Robinson — the 22-year-old suspect — was a MAGA-aligned killer, despite investigators and prosecutors confirming Robinson’s leftist ideology and ties to a trans-identifying partner.
The backlash was immediate. Affiliates like Sinclair and Nexstar pulled the show, FCC Chair Brendan Carr blasted the comments as reckless, and Kimmel’s Hollywood peers circled the wagons with predictable fury. Fallon, Colbert, Maher, and even former Disney chief Michael Eisner denounced the suspension as censorship. For days, Kimmel kept quiet — except to be photographed heading into his lawyer’s office.
Disney’s official explanation was pure corporate varnish: the suspension was “to avoid further inflaming a tense situation” and because the comments were “ill-timed and insensitive.” Translation: ratings are tanking, affiliates were furious, and the optics of mocking a murdered conservative in the middle of a national crisis were unsustainable.
Meanwhile, the situation outside ABC’s orbit turned darker. In Sacramento, a man named Anibal Hernandez Santana allegedly opened fire on ABC10’s station. No one was hurt, but bullets pierced the front lobby.
The FBI later revealed chilling details: a note on Santana’s fridge reading “Do the Next Scary Thing” and another threatening Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Pam Bondi — signed cryptically, “C.K. from above.” He now faces federal charges for discharging a firearm in a school zone and interfering with a licensed broadcaster.
The FBI has taken into custody the suspect linked to the shooting into ABC10’s Sacramento station lobby under a federal hold for interference with licensed broadcasts.
Targeted acts of violence are unacceptable and will be pursued to the fullest extent of the law. pic.twitter.com/M9yy1tSjGv
— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) September 22, 2025
The irony here is impossible to ignore. Kimmel’s defenders screamed “free speech” while ignoring that his false framing of Kirk’s assassination poured gasoline on an already volatile moment. Disney, meanwhile, played both sides — suspending him just long enough to look responsible, then reinstating him once the storm quieted. And on the fringe, unstable actors took the rhetoric and turned it into literal violence.
At the end of the day, Kimmel returns to a shrinking audience, ABC absorbs the hit to its reputation, and Charlie Kirk’s family still grieves. The real story isn’t whether Kimmel gets another monologue. It’s how the legacy media turned a tragedy into a ratings war, and how dangerous the rhetoric has become when bullets are now flying at newsrooms.
