Jimmy Kimmel's abrupt ABC cancellation follows a "personal matter" notice, sparking theories about his wife's political rifts and linking the move to his controversial handling of Charlie Kirk's shooting, where 20% of affiliates dropped him. The host connects this to broader media bias concerns, citing an FCC investigation into network coverage favoring Democrats by 87% and criticizing Whoopi Goldberg for ABC bosses' reaction to her inaccuracies, suggesting these events reveal deep fractures in network management under new ownership. [Automatically generated summary]
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Jimmy Kimmel Mystery Deepens00:08:20
So this is a rare thing.
We're not usually together on a Saturday night.
But, you know, this mystery around Jimmy Kimmel is getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
Plus, we get some subpoenas to talk about.
So I thought I would join you.
It's good to have you here.
Make sure you subscribe, share, like, all that good stuff.
Jimmy Kimmel's show has been mysteriously canceled, ladies and gentlemen.
And we're not getting a lot of transparency, if you would, from ABC as to why this happened.
So it started earlier in the week.
On Thursday, all of a sudden, there were some guests that were supposed to come on.
David Cutney was one who, you know, we haven't heard that name in a little while, shall we say.
I certainly haven't.
And he and some others apparently got a note, according to the Daily Mail, saying suddenly, okay, we're not going to have a show tonight.
And we'll reach out when in fact we do.
And the word on the street was this was all because of, look at this, I've got it, what do you know?
I got the show on my phone as well.
So that's what that was.
All of a sudden, You know, people are like, what's going on?
What's going on?
And there are some reports that there was a personal matter that was, in fact, the issue.
So, if it was a personal matter, why didn't the show come back on Friday?
Apparently, they ran a rerun on Friday, so a rerun on Thursday, a rerun on Friday, and ABC isn't saying boo, nor is Jimmy.
Like, they've been asked for comments, and nobody's got anything to say other than it's a personal issue.
That's what's being reported.
Well, personal.
His wife apparently is very angry, angry all the time.
allegedly, after losing relationships with Trump voting family members.
Jimmy Kimmel's wife is angry all the time after losing, losing relationships with Trump voting family members.
Apparently, this was reported on a podcast.
The wife went out on a podcast and complained about this.
I don't know if I totally believe it.
Was this on his podcast?
I guess it was.
Is this not just like what we saw the other day with Stephen Colbert?
Stephen Colbert coming out from CBS, the late night show host, and saying, You know, I'm actually more conservative than people give me credit for.
I'm more conservative than people think.
It's like, Okay, Stephen, I'm sorry.
Your show's already been canceled.
You're losing like tens of millions of dollars a year.
Like it's over, buddy.
And Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison, with Skydance, just came in and bought Paramount CBS, and they've already canceled your contract.
So I don't think that's coming back, even though you're trying.
think you're trying to appeal to conservatives saying, hey, really, I'm just a normal person.
I'm more conservative than you think.
And now you get Jimmy Kimmel's wife saying, you know, I've got tons of members of my family that voted for Trump, and I'm really upset that I'm losing my relationships with them.
And I'm really upset that my husband might be losing his job over the disastrous show that he has that doesn't seem to get any ratings.
Here's what went down.
Again, if you think about what had happened in the past, he had been under a ton of fire, right?
So this is, you know, normally we wouldn't necessarily report on something like this, we'd say, okay, maybe he's having a personal matter.
Who really cares?
But the reason it suddenly becomes news is because of what happened with my late friend Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk was made fun of after being, you know, just so devastatingly executed at that event in Utah, right?
And this guy, this idiot, Kimmel, who thinks he's funny and he's not, goes on his show.
And after everybody knew exactly what had went down, and it was already reported on the radicalization of this guy, this young guy that shot him, he said some really heinous stuff.
and tried to insinuate that somehow this guy was part of MAGA, which he certainly was not, okay?
He definitely was not.
And so that's why this is important.
Normally, again, maybe we wouldn't care that he's suddenly off the air.
But I'm telling you, we care right now because we don't know why he was mysteriously canceled.
We don't know why the show was taken off air or why ABC is saying nothing or why there are reports that it's a personal matter.
And now it's timed coincidentally with his wife saying, Oh, I've got family members that are Trump supporters.
Just as Stephen Colbert goes out on podcasts and says, you know, I'm more conservative than you think.
It's like they're all groveling.
They're all begging for their jobs here.
Again, don't forget you had all of those affiliates all over the country canceling Jimmy Kimmel.
Remember that 20% of ABC's affiliates canceled Jimmy Kimmel after the disastrous, disgusting, gross things that he said about my friend Charlie Kirk.
You know, Charlie didn't deserve that.
He didn't deserve any of that.
Okay.
We all know that.
But for this comedian to get on and say the things that he said, I'm just going to say it right here and now.
Okay.
One, it shouldn't happen.
But two, if that's your kind of humor, go do it on MSNBC.
Don't be doing it on federally controlled airwaves.
And this is where the FCC comes in.
And you know what?
The FCC is coming in.
They already launched an investigation.
A new study, by the way, out of MRC this week shows that all the coverage is still continually biased.
87%, ladies and gentlemen, of all the shutdown coverage, what do you know, is biased towards.
Democrats.
Again, that study coming out of MRC, I'll get into some details of it, but the reality is the FCC knows this, Brandon Carr knows this, and he knows he's backed by the 1934 Communications Act, which says that they've got an obligation to their communities.
They've deserted their communities, if you would, because they care about one thing and one thing only, and that's their Democrat talking points.
I'm telling you, he went on the air on Monday, right, after the whole thing had happened with Charlie, and we already knew by then that any kind of chatter about this kid being MAGA was totally wrong.
So much so that Larry, what's his name, you know, the constitutional law professor that's like begging for a gig at MSNBC if he doesn't already have one, he was out there having to apologize for some of the things that he put on Twitter.
And yet Kimmel and his producers thought it was still okay to say what they said.
Well, they got in trouble.
20% of the affiliates canceled them.
And then you had him begging, saying, oh, you know, after the fact, when he was finally brought back on air, it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man.
I don't think there's anything funny about it going on to say.
nor is it my intention to blame any specific group for the actions of what was obviously a deeply disturbed individual.
To some, my remarks felt either ill-timed or unclear.
I get why you're upset.
Yeah, well, that really was an apology, an apology as we discussed at the time.
Now, was it?
And so a lot of people were still upset about it.
You know, he wasn't backtracking.
He didn't say, gee, I was wrong about the MAGA stuff.
He didn't apologize directly to Erica Kirk, who deserved it.
And he didn't acknowledge any defamation or direct misleading statements.
Instead, he was focusing on his intention and interpretation because suddenly he's the victim, right?
He's the victim.
I'm sorry, Jimmy.
You know what?
You get to live another day.
literally.
Charlie didn't.
All right.
So I don't know why your show was canceled on Thursday and why you ran a rerun on Thursday and why you ran another rerun on Friday and why nobody at ABC is saying boo.
But I'll tell you, if you're gone, I don't have a lot of pity for you.
And I bet you, you know, Erica, she's, she's more forgiving person, let's just say than I am.
But, you know, she's kind of like a saint.
She's, you know, I guess, you know, guided primarily by her religion and she is forgiving.
But I'm going to go with Trump on the, you know, I would never have forgiven that guy.
And I certainly wouldn't have forgiven Jimmy Kimmel.
I don't think she's really being asked here in this interview that she did with my former colleague, Jesse Waters, whether she's forgiving Kimmel.
But she is being asked about the whole situation because, again, don't forget, this woman got no apology.
Interestingly, this interview airs and the very next day, Kimmel's gone mysteriously off the air in reruns.
Media Bias and Forgiveness00:04:24
Huh, watch.
Jimmy Kimmel lied about your husband's murder and didn't really apologize.
What would you say to Jimmy Kimmel?
Same thing I told Sinclair.
They asked, I haven't really told anybody this, so they asked, Do you want Jimmy to give you an apology?
Do you want to be on a show?
How can we make it right?
Through our team, I responded.
I said, Tell them thank you.
We received their note.
This is not our issue, not our mess.
If you want to say I'm sorry to someone who's grieving, go right ahead.
But if that's not in your heart, don't do it.
I don't want it.
I don't need it.
No, she doesn't need it.
She doesn't need any of it.
He needs her.
That's what he needs.
He needs to be begging for her forgiveness.
But I don't know what's going on.
I mean, mysteriously canceled.
Think about that.
You know, it comes as we get more and more information. about how biased the media has been throughout all of this.
If you guys watch this show, you know we cover this a lot.
We cover this a lot because the bias is off the charts.
And I think it's kind of amazing that Americans, they pushed back in this election cycle and they elected Donald Trump in spite of the media.
It really was in spite of the media because they had their own bias that they were pointing to.
And they're continuing to do this.
I mean, the MRC report, they did a research report, Media Research Center, aka NewsBusters.org.
And they looked at all of this and they found, guess what, 87% of government shutdown coverage on ABC.
On CBS and on NBC.
It favors Democrats and their point is, this is no longer journalism, this is flat out propaganda.
And they are so right.
I mean, even when you think about the CBS NEWS interview that was done on 60 Minutes last weekend sunday night.
Donald Trump sat down for that one and when the correspondent asked hey, you know like why is this still going on?
And she he answered he said, look the Democrats.
He recently said the other day, they're just totally crazy.
But he said to her, look, they want to spend one and a half trillion dollars on health care for illegals and I'm not going to have it.
I'm just not going to do it.
And that's the reason.
But she cut all that out.
She cut all that out.
And it's like, we wouldn't even know that if the White House hadn't put out the entire interview.
He sat for 74 minutes.
She ran 27 minutes of it.
I'm sorry, it's a 60-minute show, right?
I guess you get some commercials.
So if we assume 22 minutes out of 30 with eight minutes, sadly, going to commercials, then guess what?
You had 44 minutes.
And you didn't use the 44 minutes.
You just used 27.
Because apparently it was all stuff for the cutting room floor, including his reason for the shutdown.
So again, once again, a reflection of the total bias that you see in the media.
87% of the coverage of the shutdown.
We have more to get to on the shutdown.
I actually think things might be thawing out.
But it comes, you know, as Whoopi Goldberg increasingly is under fire, under a microscope.
I mean, I'm sort of wondering because this was very peculiar.
This happened on Wednesday of last week.
Then on Thursday, we learned that Jimmy's mysteriously off the air.
And you wonder what's going on.
We know that the FCC is basically, I mean, they've given warning after warning after warning to Disney and to Iger.
As soon as Donald Trump was elected, Brendan Carr fired off a letter saying, hey, you guys don't have a whole lot of trust with the American people.
And he's threatened to say, you know what, we're not going to allow for those affiliate relationships.
Why should the affiliates be paying you for garbage like this that's on television?
This isn't serving your community.
You have a duty to serve your community.
And what's amazing, a show like Whoopies, it comes under the news division.
Yeah.
And some of you know that.
I said this the other day.
The reason I know that is because at one point, my agent, I don't have an agent anymore because, you know, it's just you and me.
This whole new, whole new medium, you guys lately.
But I had an agent and he was like, hey, you know, the view, would you consider them?
Like, are you crazy?
I knew even back then, I mean, that would be a danger zone, danger zone, but it comes under the news division.
And I was like, that's weird.
Whoopi Goldberg's Earnest Warning00:02:02
So they've got this entertainment show because let's.
Let's face it, it's nothing but entertainment.
There is no news in that show, just a whole bunch of biased, angry women with TDS like we've never seen before.
It's like a terminal case.
Anyway, Whoopi got scolded on the air by her bosses.
Think about this for a joke she made.
And you know what?
She's entitled to make a joke.
The problem is she said so many things that are just not accurate that I think they're nervous now.
And this little one was kind of a silly thing to pick on, but it shows you.
How scared ABC is, and you put this together with what may be going on with Jimmy, and I'll tell you, it's got me raising an eyebrow.
Watch.
And the other insane thing is that when people are going to go to their meetings with the judge, the meetings that they're supposed to go to, when they're listening to it, what the hell?
What?
I love when Sonny passes notes.
We don't know if Trump used an auto pen to part.
It was a joke!
Yes.
We don't know if Trump used an auto pen.
Oh, come on.
But we do know that he didn't know who that crypto guy was.
Well, I'm sorry.
You know, the hardest thing about this job now is no one understands nuance.
You know when you hear a joke, when somebody's fooling around, when they're not saying something specific, especially on this show.
I'm very specific when I'm pointing stuff out.
When I'm making jokes, you know when I'm making jokes.
This is ridiculous.
Okay, so what's interesting there is that in fairness, she was kind of making a joke and I got the joke, but she said so many things that are so blatantly wrong.
I mean, like, okay, a black woman would have a better shot of freedom in Iran today than she would.
Trump Ballroom Taxpayer Costs00:01:02
And she said this in earnest to the point where it got into a little bit of a fight there on the set with some of the other hosts.
And then she said quite earnestly that you're going to pay for the ballroom that Trump wants you as an American taxpayer, despite the fact that he's already.
Paid for it.
He's collected all the money from all these different companies we've run through the list uh, Comcast interestingly, Rachel Maddox Employer, was on there.
So it's like, Whoopi okay, you made a joke.
I hear you like I, I understand why she'd be upset, because that one, like seriously, was kind of a joke and they went after her.
So why, that shows you something's up.
They are now reaching the point of being frankly scared, Okay, so this is, you know, why Entertainment did a whole thing on it.
And you put this together, of course, with Jimmy now being out.
And I think you got to start to ask the question, what is going on?