Jimmy Kimmel should not have been fired for a single ill-timed, offensive joke that he told on his program following the assasination of Charlie Kirk. He deserves however to be fired for turning a non-political television program broadcast over the public airwaves into a partisan political outlet for the Democrat party and it’s about time that Republicans embrace that idea. Yet, when the news broke that Kimmel was being put on indefinite suspension, individuals on the Right rushed to deny that there was anything political about the decision; that it was because he had lied or that it was really because the show was losing money due to poor ratings.

This begs the question, why are we on the Right so afraid to exercise political power? We are as much owners of the public airwaves as Leftists are, yet Leftist programming dominates nearly every time slot at ABC, CBS and NBC. Morning talk shows, early evening news broadcasts, prime time series and late night “comedy” shows all produce nothing but propaganda for the Democrat party.

And how has ABC handled the privilege of being handed the opportunity to inform and entertain the American populace? Let’s see, since 2016 when Donald Trump was first elected president, they’ve been forced to pay a $15 million defamation settlement when one of their principle news anchors repeatedly slandered Trump on air, another reporter was fired for pushing a false report about Trump that literally caused a stock market crash, two ABC news anchors cited false information while “fact checking” the president during the 2024 televised presidential debate against Joe Biden and in 2022 alone, The View, ABC’s morning program, had to issue 36 on air legal corrections. And people on the Right think this is acceptable for a company broadcasting on the public airwaves? That it doesn’t require intervention from the FCC for deviating from their charter to serve the public interest?

Jimmy Kimmel didn’t get fired for telling a bad joke, he was fired for making a nakedly partisan statement as the host of a show on a non-partisan network and it was scarcely the first time. In his nightly monologues, he routinely goes off on anti-Republican political screeds that aren’t even thinly disguised as jokes. Designating a program as “comedy” or “entertainment” does not give the network carte blanche to engage naked partisan politicking.

And if that weren’t enough, Kimmel and his late night co-conspirators actively served as gatekeepers to prevent conservatives from gaining access to the airwaves to which they are entitled. According to a report by the Media Research Council, since 2022, the big five alphabet network late show hosts have had on 343 left-wing-identified guests, while welcoming a grand total of five guests identified as right-wing. And of course, a deeper dive reveals that most of those were anti-Trump or were brought on to be mocked and ridiculed.

For far too long, the term “public” means that conservatives cede all of their community ownership to the Left for them to do as they please. Public education means we send our children to government schools to be indoctrinated by Leftist teachers. Public art means we send our tax dollars to liberals to paint murals of George Floyd all over our respective cities. And still we have conservatives who argue that telling public school teachers what to teach or telling artists working on public commissions what to create would be some kind of sacred violation of the First Amendment.

The reality is we own as much of these things as the Left does and we are entitled to a say about how the public business will be conducted, and in this case, the means for that expression is the FCC. The question is, do we want to moan and complain about the leftist media but do nothing in service to some misguided principle about government involvement, turning a blind eye to the violations of ABC (as well as NBC and CBS), or do we want to exercise our legitimate authority to demand that the public airwaves reflect the mores of the public they are meant to serve?

We don’t need a joke police, we don’t need someone to review the scripts for primetime T.V. series, we don’t need to vet every news story, but we do need someone at the FCC who pays attention to the direction that these networks are moving and takes active measures to course-correct them when necessary. For that reason, conservative Americans should be encouraging the efforts of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, not disparaging them.

Image: Public domain.