Jimmy Kimmel vs. the FCC: How the UCC continues to fight for media justice

Sara Fitzgerald is a member of Rock Spring Congregational United Church of Christ in Arlington, VA, and a member of the board of the UCC Media Justice Ministry.

The ABC television network launched a firestorm on September 17 when it announced that it would cancel “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” citing comments the late-night host had made after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Following a large public outcry, protests, and people cancelling their Disney Plus and Hulu subscriptions, ABC announced it would be returning Kimmel’s show to its timeslot on Tuesday, September 23. Earlier in the summer, Paramount, the parent company of CBS, announced it would cancel “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” at the end of Colbert’s contract. Both comedians had frequently skewered President Trump in their opening monologues.

But what made Kimmel’s dismissal particularly alarming to the United Church of Christ’s Media Justice Ministry were threats that the current chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made right before Kimmel’s firing and comments he made about freedom of speech and  broadcasting “in the public interest.”

During an interview with conservative commentator Benny Johnson, posted on YouTube the day Kimmel was fired, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said: “This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney (ABC’s parent company). We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Disney needs to see some change here, but the individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it’s time for them to step up and say this, you know, garbage to the extent that that’s what comes down the pipe in the future isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities.”

Following Carr’s comments, Nexstar Media Group Inc. said it would stop airing Kimmel’s show on the 32 ABC affiliates it owns. Soon after that, ABC, which holds FCC licenses for eight local television stations, announced it would cancel the show for all of its affiliates.

During his interview, Carr said his goal was to “reinvigorate the public interest” in broadcasting. He said his agency was trying “to empower those local stations to serve their own communities. And the public interest means you can’t be running a narrow partisan circus and still meeting your public interest obligations.”

In the late 1950s, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. prodded the Rev. Everett Parker, then head of the UCC’s Office of Communications, to see what could be done about television stations in the Deep South. At the time, WLBT-TV in Jackson, MS, was ignoring the city’s black residents, which made up more than 40 percent of its population. Further, the station edited its broadcasts of the nightly network news show to eliminate any coverage of the growing civil rights movement.

Parker organized a team of local residents to monitor the station’s broadcasts to confirm the complaints. He also founded a separate corporate entity (then known as the Office of Communications, Inc., commonly known as OC Inc.) to undertake this advocacy on behalf of the UCC. Parker then launched a legal battle that took a decade to resolve. In 1966, he established the right of individuals, not just corporations, to petition the FCC. A majority of the commissioners continued to support the station’s owners, but in 1969, in his last decision before he was promoted to the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Warren Burger wrote a stinging opinion in support of the UCC plaintiffs. He wrote that his earlier decision had not intended for the members of the public to be treated as interlopers. The station, he said, was not operating in the public interest. He ordered the FCC to open new proceedings to award the station’s license. That license, the only one successfully challenged in the agency’s history, was subsequently awarded to an integrated group, and a Black station manager hired.

Over nearly sixty years, UCC Media Justice has continued to pursue the same concerns that animated Everett Parker: reviewing the hiring practices of television and radio stations, promoting educational television, and fighting media conglomeration.

Television networks (and their cable counterparts) are not subject to licensing requirements (except for the stations they own). But the FCC must approve network mergers. Nexstar, the first company to cancel Kimmel’s show, is petitioning the FCC to approve a $6.2 billion deal to acquire TEGNA Inc., which owns 64 stations; the merger is contingent on the FCC’s willingness to change its rules that limit the number of stations a company can own. In early 2023, UCC Media Justice and its partners persuaded the Biden-era FCC to block another proposed merger with TEGNA, this one with Standard General.

In July, around the time of Colbert’s firing, the FCC also cleared the way for an $8 billion merger of Paramount, his parent company with Skydance Media Inc. after Paramount made several concessions to the Trump administration.

Commentators across the political spectrum were strongly critical of Carr’s threat. In a statement, Anna M. Gomez, the sole Democrat on the FCC, said: “We cannot allow an inexcusable act of political violence to be twisted into a justification for government censorship and control. . . . This FCC does not have the authority, the ability or the constitutional right to police content or punish broadcasters for speech the government dislikes. If it were to take the unprecedented step of trying to revoke broadcast licenses, which are held by local stations rather than national networks, it would run headlong into the First Amendment and fail in court on both the facts and the law. But even the threat to revoke a license is no small matter. . . .

“When corporations surrender in the face of that pressure, they endanger not just themselves, but the right to free expression for everyone in this country. The duty to defend the First Amendment does not rest with government, but with all of us. . . .”

UCC Media Justice will honor Gomez with its Newton N. Minow Award for outstanding government service at the 2025 annual Everett C. Parker Awards Breakfast and Lecture on October 30 at First Congregational UCC in Washington. The event will be livestreamed.

Carr’s comments drew criticism even from conservative leaders, including Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who chairs the Senate committee that oversees the FCC. Cruz likened Carr’s threats to those of a Mafia boss. “That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it,’” he said. Cruz said he was “thrilled” that Kimmel had been fired, but added, “if the government gets in the business of saying, ‘We don’t like what you the media have said, we’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like,’ that will end up bad for conservatives.”

Others noted that before his death, Charlie Kirk had himself been a strong supporter of the 1^st Amendment. In a post he made on X in May 2024, Kirk wrote: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And all of it is protected by the First Amendment.”

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