David Letterman has provided an update on Jimmy Kimmel’s frame of mind following his ABC suspension after his comments about Charlie Kirk’s death.
Broadcaster ABC yesterday announced Jimmy Kimmel Live had been pulled ‘indefinitely’ following comments made by the presenter about the assassination of right wing influencer Kirk.
The American TV host, 78, spoke to Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic Festival in New York and called the suspension a ‘misery’ and part of a ‘world of someone who’s an authoritarian, maybe a dictatorship’, reports the Daily Mail.
‘It’s ridiculous. You can’t go around firing somebody because you’re fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian criminal administration in the Oval Office, that’s just not how this works,’ he said on Thursday.
Giving an update on Kimmel, Letterman – who previously hosted Late Night – said he was ‘sitting up in bed taking nourishment. He’s going to be fine’.
Letterman observed that his show lived through six Presidents, and despite them ripping into those governments ‘mercilessly’ he was never pulled from air.
‘Beating up on these people, rightly or wrongly, accurately or perhaps inaccurately, in the name of comedy, not once were we squeezed by anyone from any governmental agency, let alone the dreaded FCC,’ he said, in reference to the independent agency of the US government that regulates media communications.
Conservative activist Kirl was shot dead last week while speaking at Utah Valley University in Orem.
The 31-year-old had been credited with energising the Republican youth movement and helping Donald Trump win the 2024 election, with the accused shooter Tyler Robinson, 22, making his first court appearance this week.
On Monday’s episode of the show – which Kimmel has hosted since 2003 – Kimmel said the following about Kirk’s alleged killer: ‘We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and with everything they can to score political points from it.’
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