Bob Iger, the former chief of the Disney Grooming Syndicate, says the decision to suspend former comedian Jimmy Kimmel last September had nothing to do with pressure from President Donald Trump and everything to do with Kimmel’s “bad taste.”
Iger’s “approach to the Trump administration was scrutinised when Kimmel was taken off the air following his comments about the shooting of the rightwing culture warrior Charlie Kirk,” writes the Financial Times. “Iger says people mistook the move as being politically motivated.”
“That was not the case,” he said. “We thought it was in bad taste … We just wanted him to acknowledge that it was an ill-timed and probably inappropriate comment.”
Charlie Kirk was assassinated in front of a group of college students on September 12 of last year, and the accused assassin is a gay leftist in a relationship with a man who pretends to be a woman.
Kimmel couldn’t live with those facts, so he chose to lie to his small audience…
“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 said days after the assassination when everyone knew who and what the alleged assassin was and is.
It was a desperate and deliberate act of misinformation on Kimmel’s part that was meant to play into the left’s phony narrative that because the accused assassin came from a right-leaning family, he was MAGA.
Kimmel was rightly suspended the next day and back on the air after five short days.
Kimmel claims his words were deliberately and maliciously misinterpreted. Read his words again. He was not. Kimmel lied about Kirk’s alleged assassin and then lied about lying about it.
As far as Iger’s comments about pulling Kimmel over bad taste and not pressure from Trump, I believe him. If Trump had any sway with the Disney Grooming Syndicate, Kimmel would have never returned to Late Night or, subsequently, had his contract renewed (for one year).
Disney hands two full hours of valuable network broadcast time over to Trump haters: Kimmel and the harridans on The View. There’s no counter-programming anywhere on the network for opposing opinions. That’s two hours where Disney becomes the Democrat Party’s super PAC over airwaves owned by the public. This is a clear violation of FCC rules, and the Disney-owned ABC should lose its broadcast license.
But the fiction that Trump pressured Disney to suspend Kimmel will live on because that fiction is useful to Kimmel, who (like the now-cancelled Stephen Colbert) wants to be remembered as a political martyr instead of what he is: a ratings failure. It’s also useful to the overall left to pressure and bully Disney into not making changes the left does not approve of for fear of being attacked as Trump lackeys.