A week after ABC pulled his show off the air under pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration, the comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a return to late-night TV screens Tuesday night — but not in Vermont, among dozens of other markets nationwide.
In Vermont, Jimmy Kimmel Live! airs on the local ABC affiliate WVNY. The station is owned by Nexstar Media Group, a national company that earlier on Tuesday announced its local stations would continue to keep Kimmel’s show off the air.
WVNY is one of nearly 70 local stations across the country that was slated to not broadcast Kimmel’s show on Tuesday, including stations serving Albany, New Orleans and Seattle. Some of those stations are also owned by Nexstar, while others are owned by another national company, Sinclair Broadcast Group.
Vermont’s local affiliate is branded as ABC22 or MyChamplainValley.
ABC’s parent company, Disney, decided to pull Kimmel’s show off the air last week after the host made comments during a Sept. 15 monologue that seemed to link the person who shot and killed the conservative activist Charlie Kirk the week before with supporters of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.
Brendan Carr, Trump’s chair of the Federal Communications Commission, criticized Kimmel’s remarks and threatened federal action against ABC affiliates who aired the show. The FCC has authority over the licenses that allow local stations to broadcast on public airwaves.
“Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said on a podcast last week. “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Disney changed course on Monday, however, after facing intense public backlash to a decision that was seen across the political spectrum as an infringement on constitutional speech protections with little precedent in modern U.S. history. More than 400 celebrities signed an open letter organized by the American Civil Liberties Union panning “government threats to our freedom of speech” in the wake of Kimmel’s suspension.
On Tuesday, however, Nexstar said in a statement that it stood by the initial decision to pull Kimmel’s show and would continue to forgo the program “pending assurance that all parties are committed to fostering an environment of respectful, constructive dialogue in the markets we serve.”
Nexstar noted that Jimmy Kimmel Live! would still be available on Disney-owned streaming services while, in the meantime, its TV stations “will focus on continuing to produce local news and other programming relevant to their respective markets.”
MyChamplainValley’s general manager, Tina Castano, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday afternoon.
In his show Tuesday night, which is available to watch in full on YouTube, Kimmel said it was not his intention to blame any one group of people for Kirk’s killing — though said he could see how his comments would have made people upset.
He also connected the program’s muzzling to broader concerns about censorship.
“This show is not important,” Kimmel said. “What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.”
