After two episodes of staying silent on the matter, Whoopi Goldberg and her co-hosts on ABC’s “The View” have finally commented on Jimmy Kimmel‘s suspension by the network. Fans had been theorizing amid their silence that the hosts were instructed by their parent company not to discuss Kimmel’s suspension. During the Monday, Sept. 22 episode of “The View,” Goldberg opened the show by saying: , “Did y’all really think we weren’t going to talk about Jimmy Kimmel? I mean, have you watched the show over the last 29 seasons? No one silences us.”
“When the news broke last week about Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, we took a breath to see if Jimmy was going to say anything about it first,” Goldberg added. “You cannot like a show and it can go off the air. Someone can say something they shouldn’t and get taken off the air. But the government cannot apply pressure to force someone to be silenced.”
Ana Navarro added: “I don’t understand how in this country, where the First Amendment was made to the Constitution to guarantee freedom of the press and freedom of speech, how the government itself is using its weight and power to bully and scare people into silence.”
“The First Amendment is the first for a reason, because you need to be able to hold those in power accountable,” Alyssa Farah Griffin said.
Goldberg ended with a message of equality.
“We talk about freedom of speech a lot because we are always in somebody’s mess because somebody has decided that we have said something that’s offensive,” she said. “But we fight for everybody’s right to have freedom of speech because it means my speech is free, it means your speech is free.”
On Sept. 18, the day after ABC announced Kimmel’s suspension, FCC chairman Brendan Carr suggested the FCC look into “The View” as well. The hosts’ silence on the matter during the next day’s episode only confounded fans more.
“When you look at these other TV shows, what’s interesting is the FCC does have a rule called the equal opportunity rule. But there’s an exception to that rule called the bona fide news exception, which means if you are a bona fide news program, you don’t have to abide by the equal opportunity rule.” Carr said on a radio show. “Over the years, the FCC has developed a body of case law on that and has suggested that most of these late night shows, other than ‘SNL,’ are bona fide news programs. Potentially I would assume you can make the argument that ‘The View’ is a bona fide news show, but I’m not so sure about that, and I think it’s worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether ‘The View’ and some of the programs that you have still qualify as bona fide news programs and therefore exempt from the equal opportunity regime that Congress has put in place.”
Unlike the hosts of “The View,” many non-ABC television hosts were quick to condemn Kimmel’s suspension. Stephen Colbert called the decision “blatant censorship” to appease Donald Trump, while Jimmy Fallon expressed his desire for Kimmel to return to air and vowed never to stop making Trump jokes even if there are fears it will get “The Tonight Show” censored.
“This is misery,” David Letterman said when asked about Kimmel’s suspension. “I feel bad about this. We see where this is all going, correct? It’s managed media. And it’s no good. It’s silly. It’s ridiculous. And 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.”
Howard Stern announced he canceled his Disney+ subscription because of ABC’s decision to yank Kimmel off the air and explained: “I just know when the government begins to interfere, when the government says, ‘I’m not pleased with you, so we’re gonna orchestrate a way to silence you,’ it’s the wrong direction for our country… I’m canceling my Disney+. I’m trying to say with the pocketbook that I do not support what they’re doing with Jimmy.”
Kimmel remains off the air as of the morning of Monday, Sept. 22.
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