Former President Barack Obama denounced the Trump administration’s targeting of ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ and warned that its threats to media companies had taken cancel culture to a “new and dangerous level.”
“After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like,” Obama wrote in a Thursday post on X, which linked a Vox story describing ABC’s decision to yank Kimmel off air as a capitulation to Trump officials.
“Let’s be clear about what just happened: Jimmy Kimmel, a prominent late-night comedian, was just taken off the airwaves because the Trump administration didn’t like what he had to say — and threatened his employer until they shut him up,” Vox’s Zack Beauchamp wrote.
ABC pulled Kimmel’s show indefinitely on Wednesday in the wake of conservative backlash over comments the late-night host made about Charlie Kirk’s killing in a Monday monologue. The decision also followed a staggering threat from Trump FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who urged Disney to take action and suggested the agency could revoke individual stations’ licenses as punishment.
