"The outlet reported that Kimmel had plans to address the controversy on his next episode, but his team had run out of time to do a live taping. By then, roughly 66 of the 200 stations where Kimmel would have been broadcast were promised to be offline."
"Hothead Jimmy Kimmel felt he had nothing to apologize for, he told ABC and Disney executives as his media blackout and boycott grew from a rolling snowball into an avalanche.
"Kimmel had just finished mocking MAGA Republicans on his Tuesday night episode when alarm bells went off inside ABC studios. By injecting himself directly into the finger-pointing game between defenders and detractors of Charlie Kirk, Kimmel had put ABC and Disney in the crosshairs of the culture war, they feared.
"Discussions between network executives and Kimmel had not yet reached the desk of Disney CEO Bob Iger, but they were close. Those familiar with the talks say Kimmel was presented with an ultimatum: Apologize for suggesting Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s suspected killer, was a Trump supporter, or face the consequences, which were not yet known to either side.
“ 'We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said during the monologue.
"A “social media s**tstorm” quickly followed, an insider said, but then subsided.
"Participants had just enough time to take a breath before Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, fanned the flames in an interview where he suggested ABC could lose its broadcasting license for airing one-sided political commentary.
"That’s when the storm “became a bigger swirl,” the source told the Hollywood Reporter." . . .
