Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show was bleeding viewers before Disney-owned ABC pulled the plug and suspended him for his comments on Charlie Kirk's assassination.
Nielsen data showed sharp summer declines and a year-long slide that leaves him trailing late-night rivals such as Fox News' Greg Gutfeld and CBS star Stephen Colbert.
According to monthly Nielsen figures, "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" dropped to just 1.1 million total viewers in August 2025, down 43% from January's 1.95 million. His August household rating of 0.35 marked the weakest showing of the year.
The advertiser-coveted 18--49 demo also cratered. Kimmel averaged only 129,000 viewers in that bracket in August, off from 212,000 in January and less than half his June peak of 284,000.
With his ABC contract set to expire next year, the slump raises questions about whether "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" can regain momentum against Colbert, Fallon and cable insurgents.
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Kimmel's deal with ABC runs through May 2026, under a three-year extension signed in September 2022.
Industry reports put his salary at $15 million to $16 million a year, with some outlets noting that bonuses can push his annual earnings above $20 million.
The left and some "both sides" libertarians are complaining that while ABC has the right to suspend this money-losing unfunny pudge-bag, it was wrong for FCC head to involve himself and "jawbone" Disney and its affiliates into "doing something."
Two points about that:
First: I was surprised to learn from 2Way today that the rule about networks being obligated to provide "equal time" to both political parties was still in force. I thought Reagan repealed it -- but no, it's still the law. I guess Reagan just stopped enforcing it, and other presidents followed suit.
Brandon Carr believes it should be enforced. It is still on the books, and therefore the prior non-enforcement was just an executive choice to not apply the law, just as Biden chose not to enforce the border. But prior administration's choice to ignore the law does not bind Trump or his officials.
Obviously, ABC is running an absolute propaganda shit-show with Kimmel and The View and their own rancid gayboy "News" unit. They are in violation of the equal time law every single day, and it is within Carr's right to use his regulatory power to force them to provide equal time.
Second: The left and libertarians are now complaining that Carr "jawboned" -- used verbal pressure with the hint of future punishment if the pressure did not work -- ABC into taking this step.
They point out that we conservatives opposed such "jawboning" when Biden "jawboned" social media and regular media into deplatforming all speech questioning the covid vaccine or the 2020 election results.
Thousands of people were cancelled and deplatformed -- and even debanked -- due to Biden's "jawboning" of media companies and banks.
We -- meaning conservative states and seven conservative individuals -- brought suit to declare this "jawboning" to be illegal.
Leftists opposed us and insisted that Biden's "jawboning" was perfectly legal.
The left won. Our three weak-sister "conservatives" -- Roberts, Coney-Barrett, and Kavanaugh -- joined with the three bloc-voting leftists to rule 6-3 that governmental "jawboning" of private companies into becoming de facto agents of government censorship was perfectly legal.
Fine. I didn't like that outcome and was outraged at the time.
I also said: Now that you have made your rule, we will be using it going forward.
And that's what we're doing. The left fought like tigers to both "jawbone" companies into censorship and then to establish in the Supreme Court that such "jawboning" is legal and just and necessary.
We disagreed -- but we lost.
The precedent is now established that we can "jawbone" companies into deplatforming RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION like Jimmy Kimmel's, and the left showed us how to do this and established the absolute legal permission to do this.
So we'll do this. We're not going to play by the rejected rule we preferred, but the actual rule in place that we opposed.
The rule for you is the rule for me. No more of this insane situation where the left uses its power and invents new powers to steamroll us but then relies on RINO and GOPe traitors to keep us from doing the same.
We kicked those people out of party leadership for a reason.
If the left wants to pass a law retroactively declaring Biden's "jawboning" to have been an unconstitutional act official government censorship, then let us know. We can work on that.
But until then: We will "jawbone" companies just like you did.
The days of One Rule for Thee Another Rule for Me are over.
CNN Chief Media Potato Brian Stelter's entire career has consisted of taking oppo research from Media Matters and Sleeping Giants and using it to pressure media complies, from Twitter to Fox News, into censoring conservatives.
He's written columns demanding that cable providers take Fox off their menu.
And now... Guys, he's really a-scared of all this censorship.
Here's the Potato previously stating that conservatives are "crying" about cancel culture and that we routinely whine about our speech being suppressed. It's as "predictable as the sunrise."
He has not retracted these comments nor, of course, even acknowledged them when people ask him to explain his "evolution" on these issues.