Breibart Business Digest: The Real Reason Kimmel Got the Boot

Kimmel Gets Removed, Lisa Cook Gets to Stay, and Stephen Miran Drops a Dot

Welcome back to the Breitbart Business Digest Friday Wrap, our weekly survey of the economy, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Washington, DC, and the incredible rediscovery of the spirit of free speech by the American media. The shoe is on the other foot now—which is weird because why is there only one shoe?

This week, ABC removed Jimmy Kimmel from its airwaves for spreading disinformation about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The U.S. Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit said that Donald Trump violated the procedural rights of Lisa Cook when he removed her from the Federal Reserve in a Truth Social Post. Stephen Miran won Senate confirmation and participated in this week’s FOMC meeting. And the SEC said it may remove the requirement for quarterly corporate reporting.

The ABCs of Jimmy Kimmel’s Suspension

A is for Affiliates: Jimmy Kimmel was booted off the airwaves of the ABC network indefinitely this week after criticizing how President Trump and Republicans were responding to Charlie Kirk’s fatal shooting, saying, “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.” He also mocked Trump’s grieving process.

There’s some controversy over whether this was a lie or simply misinformation. Many on the left apparently sincerely believe that one of the leading lights of the young American right wing was snuffed out by other American right-wingers. Heather Cox Richardson, who you probably have not heard of but enjoys an enormous—and no doubt stunningly lucrative—following on Substack, told her fans this: “But in fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.” Jemele Hill, a contributing writer to the Atlantic, said that “Charlie Kirk likely was the victim of a white supremacist gang hit.”

You might not find it plausible that people of ordinary intelligence and some experience in the world could believe this fabrication, but friends of ours with more acquaintances on the left than we have assure us that many actually do. Or, at least, did. The latest line, it seems, is just that we’ll never really know what was in the assassin’s heart. At this point, it’s probably safest to say we simply do not know why Kimmel used his national platform to spread a falsehood.

Major station owners—including Sinclair and Nexstart, controlling over 60 ABC affiliate stations—balked at Kimmel’s affront and threatened to “indefinitely preempt” his show. Advertisers started contacting the network expressing concerns. And when Disney executives Dana Walden and Bob Iger found out that Kimmel’s planned response was going to be to double down with his attacks on the “MAGA gang,” they pulled the plug.

B is for Brendan Carr: Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, scolded ABC in a podcast interview, reminding them that its right to use the public airwaves is accompanied by legal obligations to serve the public interest. “The FCC could make a strong argument that this is sort of an intentional effort to mislead the American people about a very core fundamental fact, a very important matter,” Carr told Benny Johnson.

Here are some other quotes from Carr about the Kimmel mess:

• “Frankly, when you see stuff like this—I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
• “Disney needs to see some change here. But the individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it’s time for them to step up and say this, you know, garbage—to the extent that that’s what comes down the pipe in the future—isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities.”
• “There are calls for Kimmel to be fired. I think you could certainly see a path forward for suspension over this.”

The left immediately decided that even though the motives of the murder of Kirk remain inscrutable to them, the motives of ABC were completely obvious and that this was simply a case of state action through intimidation. Carr’s remarks, they say, scared Iger so much that he just had to suspend Kimmel. ABC’s statements about its reasons for suspending Kimmel were just lies to cover up its cowardice. Alternatively, the left has advanced the idea that Nexstart is just lying about its objections to Kimmel’s remarks and is really just kowtowing to Carr because it wants FCC approval for a planned acquisition of another television station operator.

C is for Capitalism: Underlying all this is the fact that the business model of late-night television is badly broken. No one under the age of 35 or so watches these comedians interviewing television and film actors. Younger people don’t even regard actors as “stars” in any meaningful sense, preferring to preserve their admiration for digital media influencers. One way or another, late-night television is going away.

Late-night talk shows started as relatively bare-bones affairs, which made them inexpensive to produce. Think of Johnny Carson‘s Tonight Show with its simple desk setup, basic lighting, and small staff that often included just two or three writers. The guests appeared primarily to promote their work, often receiving no compensation at all beyond the publicity.

That’s no longer the case. Host salaries alone represent a massive shift. Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, and Jimmy Kimmel reportedly had contracts for $15 million or more a year. Production costs have also exploded. Modern shows feature elaborate sets, sophisticated lighting systems, larger crews, and huge writer staffs. Guests are often now paid tens of thousands of dollars, and musical guests can take in even more than that.

Graffiti on Sunset Boulevard reads “Bye Kimmel, Thank Iger” near the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” studios on September 18, 2025, in Hollywood, California. (AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images via Getty Images)

The irony is that despite these massive budget increases, the advertising revenue model has become more challenging with cord-cutting and fragmented audiences. So, networks are spending far more to produce content that reaches smaller, less valuable audiences than the mass audiences these shows once commanded.

Kimmel might have hastened his exit by spreading falsehoods about Kirk’s assassin, but he was marching toward the end long before this week.

Lisa Cook Forever

A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court delivered a divided judgment that allowed Lisa Cook to participate at this week’s Federal Reserve meeting. The two judges in the majority held that President Trump had violated Cook’s procedural rights by not giving her sufficient notice and the opportunity for a hearing before he removed her as a Fed governor. Although this was depicted as a setback for the Trump administration—which has appealed the decision—the idea that Cook’s job hangs on the question of whether Trump gave her time to plead her case before announcing “you’re fired” probably does not bring her much comfort.

Stephen Miran’s Lonely Dot

Stephen Miran won Senate confirmation on Monday night and was sworn in as a Federal Reserve governor in time for this week’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting. As expected, he voted against the Fed’s 25 basis point cut because he preferred a bigger cut. He also succeeded in creating the most non-anonymous dot plot dot ever by saying he thought the Fed should cut rates by 150 basis points by year’s end.

The “dot plot” from the Summary of Economic Projections for the FOMC September 2025 meeting. The red arrow was added by Breitbart Business Digest.

If you are looking at the Summary of Economic Projections on your phone, you have to scroll down to find the lone dot hundreds of basis points below the consensus.

Show Them No Quarter

The idea that required quarterly reporting has been a malevolent force on the U.S. economy has been around for at least as long as the requirement itself. Critics have charged that it encourages short-term thinking among corporate managers and investors. So, when Donald Trump endorsed scrapping the requirement, this reform was universally embraced.

Just kidding. The usual suspects instantly decided that this would bring about a host of maladies and destroy the American stock market. “Wall Street Raises Alarm on Trump Ending Quarterly Earnings,” Bloomberg warned.

It never really made all that much sense to require companies as diverse as those traded in U.S. public markets to follow the same financial reporting schedule. In fact, it’s very likely that the rule was originally put in place in 1970 to benefit Wall Street analysts and the large conglomerates that were so politically influential at the time. After more than a half-century of homogenized reporting requirements, it’s time to allow different strokes for different stocks.