When ABC announced Wednesday that Jimmy Kimmel Live! wouldn’t be airing that evening or anytime soon, the reaction was immediate. Today, Felix Gillette explains how the Trump administration influenced the decision and why some of its allies are unhappy about it. Plus: American farmers are feeling a growing sense of betrayal, and an Enron parody somehow became its own mess.

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First Colbert. Now Kimmel. Who’s next? That’s the question ricocheting through the media industry after the latest benching of a prominent Trump critic from late-night TV under pressure by the US government.

On Wednesday, during an appearance on a conservative podcast, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr criticized a recent segment from ABC’s late-night host Jimmy Kimmel in which the comedian weighed in on President Donald Trump and his followers’ reactions to the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Carr suggested it might be time for individually licensed stations, which are required to act in the public interest, to reject programming like Kimmel’s that fails to live up to the standard.

Kimmel, who also helms Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, won an Emmy for outstanding host for a game show at the 2025 Creative Arts Emmy Awards this month. Photographer: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

A few hours later, Nexstar Media Group Inc., one of the largest owners of TV stations in the US, heeded the call. The company—which has an acquisition pending of its rival Tegna Inc. in a $6.2 billion deal that will require approval from the FCC along with a change of ownership rules—announced that its ABC affiliate stations would be preempting Kimmel’s show for “the foreseeable future.” Sinclair Inc., another large station group owner that in recent years has leaned into conservative news, announced it too would be pulling Kimmel’s show indefinitely over his “deeply insensitive” comments—concerns they’d expressed to the show’s producers at Walt Disney Co.

With the storm gathering strength, Disney’s ABC network hastily decided to take Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air indefinitely. Watching the events unfold, Carr thanked Nexstar and encouraged other broadcasters to follow suit.

For a range of onlookers, including US senators, Facebook commenters and First Amendment scholars, the suspension was the latest ominous instance of the Trump administration using the levers of government regulation and the threat of legal action to chill free speech and silence critics. They didn’t have to look far for other examples.

Only two months ago, Paramount Global—which, at the time, was also seeking the FCC’s sign-off on a multibillion-dollar deal—announced that next year its CBS network would be ending the late-night run of Stephen Colbert, another prominent mocker of Trump. The president has also sued multiple news organizations, including ABC News, CBS News, the Wall Street Journal and the Des Moines Register. This week, he filed a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times and Penguin Random House LLC. Both responded that the suit was without merit, and the Times went on to note they will “not be deterred by intimidation tactics.”

At the center of the growing hostilities with traditional media companies is Carr, Trump’s combative FCC chair, who came into the position vowing to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.”

If those words seem at odds with Carr’s recent actions, the reversal is unlikely to upset Trump’s most ardent supporters, plenty of whom are cheering on the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Which is not to say that the move is without some political risk for Trump. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly declared that, if elected for another term, he’d fiercely protect free speech and put an end to so-called cancel culture. It was a message that resonated beyond his core supporters with two groups in particular: comedians and the libertarian tech crowd. At the tail end of the 2024 campaign, Trump picked up a surge of support from prominent podcasters in both camps.

It’s possible that the Kimmel situation ultimately won’t sit well with at least some outspoken members of both crowds. A large chunk of the comedy world swung to the right politically in recent years, in part, in reaction to the pandemic shutdowns and, in part, because of concerns about aggressive speech-patroling on the left. But if there’s one thing comedians of all stripes tend to agree on, it’s that the government shouldn’t get involved in deciding what’s an acceptable joke. By Wednesday night, many prominent comedians were rallying behind Kimmel.

At the same time, some libertarian-leaning tech influencers, who’ve been wary of overregulation by Democrats, are now balking at Trump’s recent actions.

“Censorship by Biden on social media or Trump on late-night is the same thing—un-American,” tech investor Jason Calacanis of the All-In podcast wrote on X. “Interesting how similar the Biden and Trump administrations have turned out to be: cancel culture, Orwellian censorship, never ending wars, executive power overreach, out of control spending and divisive partisanship.”

None of which seemed to faze Trump, who suggested on Wednesday night that the purge of his comedian critics would continue. He even offered up names. In a post on Truth Social, he said that Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal division should fire their late-night talk-show hosts, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.

“That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC,” the president wrote. “Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”

So far, Disney has given no indication of when Kimmel’s show might return. Ironically, the suspension could wind up being a good thing for Kimmel as he figures out the next chapter in his career. For years, the late-night talk shows have been suffering from declining audiences and ad revenue, as viewers abandon traditional TV for topical comedy online. The late-night shows are an endangered species, their time as megafauna in the entertainment world quickly running out. Kimmel is well aware of this.

Thanks to Carr and his allies, rather than fading away as a historical asterisk in the broader secular decline of broadcast TV, Kimmel now has a chance of going out in a blaze of free-speech martyrdom.

As always, podcasting beckons.

In Brief

• Nvidia agreed to invest $5 billion in Intel and said the two will co-develop chips for PCs and data centers, a surprise move to help prop up an ailing archrival.
• Trump has asked the US Supreme Court to let him fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook while she fights his attempt to oust her.
• How the government defines ultraprocessed will have a big impact on the $2.6 trillion US food industry. Options seen as healthy, including some yogurts, breads and plant-based meats, could be tagged with that label.
• The FTC and seven states sued Live Nation Entertainment and Ticketmaster for failing to stem the use of automated ticketing bots and large-scale resale operations.

Subscribe to Everybody’s Business, the Businessweek podcast: Hosts Stacey Vanek Smith and Max Chafkin take a look at the week’s business news and break down what you need to know, with the help of Bloomberg Businessweek journalists, experts, and the people and businesses trying to navigate the economy every day. Sign up here for new episodes, available Fridays.

The Pain on the Farm

Jeff Winton was on a national radio tour this spring raising awareness about US farmers’ declining mental health when he had a startling realization. As he described to a series of radio hosts from Iowa to Texas the sense of isolation and despondency increasingly affecting the agricultural workforce, he noticed with a jolt that he was describing himself.

Winton is the founder of Rural Minds, a not-for-profit group connecting Americans living outside big cities to local mental health resources. He also runs a dairy farm in New York’s Chautauqua County. He’s been overcome by worries about how President Donald Trump’s tariffs would hurt his 100-cow operation, as well as the rural peers he works with every day. “I was feeling very angry. I was feeling very depressed. I was feeling very pessimistic. I just couldn’t believe that we were doing these things to the people that I advocate for,” Winton, 67, says. He’d spent years directing other struggling farmers into care after his 28-year-old nephew died by suicide near the family farm in 2012. So Winton decided in May to start seeing a therapist himself for the first time.

Across America’s heartland, hotlines and mental health forums focused on agricultural workers are reporting a sharp influx of calls—and bracing for more as the critical fall harvest progresses with little action or support from the industry’s supposed allies in Washington. After helping to elect Trump, US farmers felt “somebody finally was going to do right by them.” But “the exact opposite has happened,” Winton says. “People in rural America played a role in this, but now they feel betrayed.”

Ilena Peng writes that the key theme among growers’ concerns is what they might be losing: American Farmers Are Feeling the Pain of Trump’s Policies.

Enron Satire Versus Reality

Connor Gaydos with the Egg. Photographer: Houston Cofield for Bloomberg Businessweek

In early December an advertisement appeared on social media with an inviting caption: “We’re back. Can we talk?”

A time-lapse video of Manhattan followed. “The world is changing faster than ever,” a voice intoned. “Can you feel it?” The announcer extolled dynamism and innovation as a series of portraits flashed across the screen. There was a protester embracing a riot policeman, a stone-faced farmer surveying his field, an elegant ballerina dancing on a beach and an elderly man beaming while wearing a virtual-reality headset.

The ad was instantly familiar to anyone conversant in the language of corporate reputation management. It could have been a promotion for a scandal-prone chemical conglomerate, a comically amoral management consulting firm or the tourism bureau of an authoritarian kingdom. In fact it was a relaunch video for an entity held in even lower esteem than any of those.

“I am Enron,” said the stone-faced farmer.

“I am Enron,” said a young pregnant woman.

“We are Enron,” said the ballerina, as the camera pulled back to reveal that she was among hundreds of people forming the energy company’s logo—an “E” cocked upward.

Of course, Enron, the energy company, collapsed in 2001 in a pile of corporate fraud. Then some performance artists bought the name for peanuts and concocted an elaborate caricature of corporate excess. As Max Chafkin writes, it also didn’t go as planned: How an Enron Parody Turned Into a Financial Mess of Its Own.

Labubu Mania

Israeli Settlements

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