On September 4, a Chicago-based public interest law firm promoting conservative values filed a complaint with the FCC against Jimmy Kimmel, the Kevin & Bean “sports guy” turned entertainer and late-night talk host, on the grounds that he engaged in “unlawful politicking.”
Two weeks later, Kimmel is at the center of a firestorm surrounding comments made Monday on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” about the man who is suspected of assassinating Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk being a “MAGA” Republican and supporter of the president. Those comments have led that law firm to file a fresh complaint against ABC and, in particular, its Los Angeles-based owned station.
Daniel Suhr, a constitutional litigator who is the forward-facing leader at the Center for American Rights, on Wednesday night filed a complaint with the Commission targeting KABC-7 in Los Angeles, one of eight broadcast television properties ultimately under control of The Walt Disney Co.
The September 17 filing, which comes two weeks after CAR blasted Kimmel and ABC for hosting Democratic Party politicians on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” without disclosing his personal donations to them, assails the Disney-owned network for “failing its public interest obligations by recklessly or intentionally pushing untrue material on the air.”
In the four-page complaint, available here via PDF download, CAR believes that, given Kimmel’s comments against Kirk’s purported killer, “we now have all the proof this Commission should need of his failure to meet his public interest responsibilities, as he misused the airwaves to act in callous disregard of the facts and the obligations he owes viewers and the truth.”
Kimmel’s September 15 opening monologue on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” saw the host utter, “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.”
Two days earlier, the Governor of Utah told The Wall Street Journal that the suspect had leftist ideology indoctrination and was, in fact, linked to an ultra-radical anarchist group.
“This is not a simple or innocent mistake,” CAR assert. “It is a massive error made regarding the most important news event of the month, if not the year. It was an error that was obvious at the time it was made.”
For CAR President Suhr, there is one solution ahead of any FCC probe. “Here, where ABC affiliates nationwide broadcast ‘untrue matter’ on the most important news story of our times, in line with the clear ideological bias of the host, without prompt correction, strong action by the Commission to protect the public interest is required. ABC’s affiliates need to step up and hold ABC accountable as a network for passing through material that fails to respect the public-interest standard to which they are held. Disney as ABC’s corporate owner needs to act directly to correct this problem. And if ABC won’t take Kimmel off the air for this, then this Commission should tell KABC-7 it will come off the air if that’s necessary to put an end to this outrage.”
Why KABC-7? Disney’s corporate headquarters is in Burbank, Calif.
