After a joke by late-night host Jimmy Kimmel drew calls from the White Home for ABC to fireside the comic, the U.S. Federal Communications Fee on Tuesday ordered an early license overview of the community’s tv stations.
The standoff between President Donald Trump’s administration and the worldwide leisure conglomerate is the primary disaster going through Walt Disney’s new CEO Josh D’Amaro.
Final Thursday, Kimmel, whose late-night TV program airs on Disney’s ABC, did a send-up of the annual White Home Correspondents’ Affiliation dinner, joking that First Girl Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow.”
The joke was made three days earlier than the precise black-tie dinner, celebrating press freedom and free speech, in Washington. The president and first girl had been rushed from the dinner following an assassination try.
On Monday, the Trumps referred to as for ABC to fireside Kimmel, the most recent incident of the White Home pushing again on free speech that has roiled the world of late-night comedy. It has once more positioned Disney on the heart of a battle amongst media homeowners, regulators and political leaders in a extremely charged political surroundings.
Throughout his monologue on Monday evening’s present, Kimmel mentioned the “expectant widow” remark “clearly was a joke about their age distinction,” that had been misconstrued. Trump might be 80 in June, and his spouse turned 56 this month.
“It was not by any stretch of the definition a name for assassination,” Kimmel mentioned.
Actress Jane Fonda’s Committee for the First Modification, a gaggle whose members embody actors, writers, journalists and others within the leisure business, urged Disney to defy the Trump administration’s name to fireside Kimmel.
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“In America, satire just isn’t against the law. The suitable to mock, to problem, and sure, to offend these in energy, is foundational to democracy,” the group wrote in an announcement shared with Reuters.
“A authorities that seeks revenge and punishment in opposition to those that dare to criticize it doesn’t cease by itself. It stops once we refuse to conform.”
Steven Cheung, White Home communications director, stored the stress up, accusing Kimmel of “making a disgusting joke about assassinating the President” and “doubling down on that joke as an alternative of doing the respectable factor by apologizing,” in a publish on X.
The FCC ordered early evaluations of eight Disney-owned ABC stations, a pointy escalation of the administration’s battle with main media retailers. The evaluations might result in the FCC searching for to revoke the stations’ licenses to make use of the published airwaves.
D’Amaro, who grew to become Disney CEO in March, should resolve how to answer the mounting stress to fireside Kimmel.
A Disney spokesman couldn’t be reached for remark about Kimmel, who survived a earlier name for ABC to fireside him.
The primary girl’s shut exterior advisor, Marc Beckman, mentioned ABC ought to fireplace the late-night host, “who for months and months is spewing vile political rhetoric … into the properties of Individuals throughout the nation?”
In September 2025, the pinnacle of the FCC pressured broadcasters to take Kimmel off the air. ABC briefly suspended Kimmel’s present that month over feedback he made in regards to the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Previous White Home Correspondents’ Dinner controversies have typically centered on comedians pushing the occasion’s conventional roast format too far for some attendees. Late-night hosts Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers confronted criticism for his or her stinging remarks. This 12 months’s occasion was to characteristic mentalist Oz Pearlman, not a comic.
In 2018, Trump administration officers protested comic Michelle Wolf’s roast of press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Trump himself has declined to attend most dinners held throughout his presidency.
In recent times, the dinner’s organizers have opted to decide on entertainers apart from comedians for the dinner, together with the historian Ron Chernow in 2019.
