I have never seen the Jimmy Kimmel television show, and it looks now like I never will. On Monday evening, Kimmel offered the ultimate in gaslighting, claiming that Tyler Robinson murdered Charlie Kirk because he–Robinson, not Kirk–was a MAGA person:
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.
Nexstar Media Group moved first, announcing that their ABC-affiliated stations would pre-empt the Kimmel show for the foreseeable future. ABC followed suit soon after:
ABC on Wednesday night pulled the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” late-night show off the air “indefinitely” after controversial comments by its host about the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and hours after the head of the Federal Communications Commission suggested ABC’s broadcast license was at risk.
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“‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ will be pre-empted indefinitely,” an ABC spokesman told NBC News on Wednesday.ABC is a subsidiary of Disney.
I see that Kimmel’s ratings were even lower than Stephen Colbert’s, so I assume that he, too, was losing money for his network. ABC executives were likely glad to have an excuse to get rid of him.
Many observers have pointed out that today’s late-night television hosts have abandoned the Johnny Carson approach of trying to appeal to all Americans, and instead have staked out positions on the left. (Greg Gutfeld being the obvious exception.) As their audiences have dwindled, they have doubled down by becoming ever more hard-left, thus appealing to an ever-shrinking base. We are now seeing the consequences of that strategy play out.
It occurs to me that many newspapers have done exactly the same thing. The New York Times, for example, used to be widely read and widely respected. But at some point, the people who run the Times decided they had a higher mission–to advance the interests of the Democratic Party, and the left generally. This caused their audience to self-select, as non-leftists abandoned the paper. The Times has responded by appealing ever more strongly to its liberal base by becoming even more stridently left-wing. The same thing has happened with many other newspapers–the Washington Post before Jeff Bezos’s attempt to steer it back toward the middle, the Los Angeles Times, the Minnesota Star Tribune, and so on.
Appealing to the leftward-most 25% of the population didn’t work, economically, for the television networks. It remains to be seen whether it will be a viable business strategy for newspapers. But one thing is certain: the newspapers that have pledged fealty to the left cannot pretend to speak to, or for, the broad mass of Americans, any more than Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert could.
UPDATE: It may be past midnight in the U.K., but President Trump was quick to gloat over Kimmel’s demise:
Is it unpresidential for Trump to exchange insults with television performers? Yes. But Trump is a counter-puncher. Pretty much everyone he attacks, has attacked him first. The alternative is to let them tear him down without fighting back, as so many Republicans have done in the past. Trump’s approach seems to work better.
