ArcaMax

PARIS — Late-night TV talk show host Jimmy Kimmel is guilty of wrong-speak about conservative influencer Charlie Kirk’s assassination. What he said doesn’t even matter. Nor should it, frankly. At least not inside a free speech zone.

But of course, that era is light years in the rearview mirror. These days, every offhand remark gets treated like the Cuban Missile Crisis — especially once it lands on the internet, where outrage is monetized. And that’s exactly where clips of Kimmel’s remarks ended up. Suddenly, they morphed into a political football being tossed around between two factions.

Enter US President Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, to grab that ball and run with it like the star quarterback in an ideological Super Bowl. “It was appearing to directly mislead the American public about a significant fact that probably one of the most significant political events we’ve had in a long time, for the most significant political assassination we’ve seen in a long time,” Carr said of Kimmel’s controversial late-night monologue qualifying the “MAGA gang” as “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

Kimmel’s network, ABC, read the regulatory risk tea leaves and yanked Kimmel off the air indefinitely. An ironic turn of events, given that Carr once derided media censorship himself.

But it’s not hard to imagine why Carr could be tempted to give the censors a taste of their own medicine — now that he was chief censor.

But is the solution really just to double down on the same chilling effect and have everyone walking on eggshells, terrified that the next quip could end their career? It’s not free speech if the only freedom is guessing which words are off-limits depending on who sits in the Oval Office.

It never used to be this way, and you have to wonder what happened. It wasn’t that many decades ago that Americans, regardless of ideology, were entertained by a debate like the headliner aired in 1968 on ABC News between William F. Buckley on the right and Gore Vidal on the left, or by anti-Equal Rights Amendment crusader Phyllis Schlafly having it out with feminist and “The Feminine Mystique” author Betty Friedan on ABC’s own “Good Morning America”.

That was back in the day of a whopping, like, five channels — and you had to physically walk up to the TV to change them. Today, in our 500-channel universe, you sit down, flip through all of them three times while scrolling on your phone, then give up in favor or something less boring. Like washing your hair.

Coincidence? Nope. Everything is beige and “corporate.” If you want to watch a real ideological brawl, you have to go online, where people are figuratively — and sometimes literally — setting themselves on fire to claim a slice of the “attention economy.”

But not everyone is into the bot-fueled, algorithmic orgy of hysteria that social media represents.

That’s where TV should shine. But it’s lost its way, smothered under the same cancel-culture blanket that made Hollywood comedies unwatchable and late-night shows unfunny. The censorial instincts that once hounded advertisers the moment a host said something “problematic” have altered the DNA of mainstream culture.

And networks still wonder why they’re hemorrhaging viewers to online alternatives. Ever since Elon Musk bought the X platform (formerly Twitter), even Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has been forced to loosen his hoodie strings and pretend that Facebook isn’t a corporate yoga class.

Objectively, what Kimmel said was indeed misleading. There’s evidence that the perp’s family was MAGA, but his own political leanings seem to have evolved. But if these networks weren’t so dominated by groupthink, there would ideally have been someone on that network — or even on Kimmel’s own show, maybe a sidekick or a guest — who could have pushed back with something as simple as, “Did you actually see him personally wave a MAGA hat, Jimmy? Or is this just another one of your imaginary FBI field reports?”

That one line could have spared ABC from accusations of mischaracterization and bias. But the network can’t even manage to produce any real dissent on its supposed “debate” show, “The View,” which treats anti-Trump, anti-populist neoconservatives as the token “right-wing” voices across from establishment left darlings Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg. Basically, if you wouldn’t be invited to a Manhattan cocktail party, you don’t exist — at least not on network TV.

American networks shouldn’t sit around waiting for the FCC to legislate “political pluralism,” as France has done, mandating that a host play devil’s advocate if no one else is there to do it. They should recognize it as good ratings business. Nothing spikes interest like heated, messy, unpredictable arguments. That’s what audiences used to tune in for, and what they’re starved for now.

Trump has leveraged the controversy to point out how much the ratings of late-night hosts like Kimmel suck. He isn’t wrong. Kimmel’s viewership is down by nearly half since January, to 1.1 million in August, as the New York Post reported, citing the latest Nielsen stats.

And those figures aren’t going to recover by staging friendly games of ideological tee-ball, or with Kimmel lobbing unopposed woke monologues into the weeds. Late-night used to be edgy. Now it’s a country club putting green, and Jimmy’s the guy in plaid pants knocking softballs into the sand trap while viewers change the channel.