On Sept. 17, 2025, ABC executives decided to cancel “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after he made comments about the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Although the board took it as offensive, the comments were simply Kimmel’s opinions of the situation. And, even if they were viewed as ignorant, it was shocking to see him removed from air so quickly as a result.
It’s hard to discern what President Donald Trump’s administration orchestrates when it comes to First Amendment concerns. Was Stephen Colbert’s cancellation just a move by Paramount, the owners of CBS, to curry favor with the FCC, who had to approve its recent merger with Skydance Media? Was ABC’s brief cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel’s show just a submission to that same FCC and its aggressive chair, Brendan Carr, to avoid his threats of taking their license to be on air?
These actions can’t be flagged by courts and overturned: private entities can censor their own employees’ speech all they want. The First Amendment only blocks the government from doing so directly. These instances of media censorship in the past year should be worrying because they seem so government driven.
Media companies will do anything to cut a deal with Trump’s FCC, even drop their superstars. Newspaper executives who don’t care about independent journalism will censor their own editorial sections to win power.
It’s a perfect crime. The courts can’t block this sneaky, quid pro quo censorship. But citizens can stand up against it. That’s why enraged online protests and a drop in ratings forced ABC to bring back Kimmel in just six days.
During his inaugural address at the beginning of the year Trump stated that he would “sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.”
Since then, the Trump administration has flipped their ideology, aiming to root out any voice that opposes their dissonant agenda.
More right leaning news outlets, like Fox News, are not facing any risks of being shut down pushed by the Trump administration: freedom of speech gets clouded when this freedom is only granted to one side of the political spectrum.
Now, Vance, Trump, and other members of the administration are openly encouraging the firing of anyone who celebrates the death of Kirk online and celebrating the cancellation of Kimmel’s show.
“It’s not free speech when you come out and you say, ‘it’s OK what happened to Charlie,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “We’re firing people, we’re seeing people online who are posting hate speech — they should be shut down.””
Yet this is more than normal cancel culture. The difference between cancel culture and the censorship of Jimmy Kimmel is the fact that the government is now involved.
This is purposeful from Trump as an attempt to restrict free speech, evidently making misinformation and suppression of free thinking more common among the American people.
His effort of removing unbiased journalism and entertainment jeopardizes the seeking of education and curiosity. The more freedom of speech we have, the more people want to learn. If censorship continues to plague our country, the foundation of opinion and democracy will deteriorate.
We the people are being desensitized to what democracy and freedom is. We are forgetting what makes up our nation, and being blindsided at what threatens all of us in the ‘land of the free.’
