Tuesday on CNN’s “News Central,” network chief media analyst Brian Stelter claimed comedian Jimmy Kimmel had “all the power” in the current fight over his White House Correspondents’ dinner monologue in which he said Melania Trump had the “glow like an expectant widow.”
Both the first lady and the president have called on ABC to fire Kimmel.
Stelter said, “My indication, you know, Disney is being tight-lipped about this, so on the record, nobody there is saying anything about Kimmel. But my sense talking with sources, making calls overnight, is that Disney is absolutely standing by Kimmel, and you can see that because he was on everyone’s television sets last night. But more importantly, behind the scenes there have also been signals to Kimmel and to his team that the company is with him, that the company is not wavering, that the company is not going to try to knuckle or maybe cower in the face of Trump’s pressure and that is of course notable because of last fall.”
He added, “The reason he was yanked from the airwaves back then was, in part, due to local stations with cozy ties to the Trump administration that yanked Kimmel’s show locally. The big difference in this case, John, is that those station group owners, Nexstar and Sinclair, they haven’t done a thing. They haven’t said a word. I think they learned last time that it was a mistake to pull Kimmel, and so they’re not doing it this time. So we’re seeing a big difference in the power dynamics here. Frankly, John, Kimmel has all the power this time.”
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