September 17, 2025 • 17 mins
BULLETIN, SEASON 4 EPISODE 14, COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
BULLETIN (2:55): ABC announced late this afternoon that it had taken "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" off the network's air effective immediately, because Kimmel had the nerve to tell the truth about how Trump and the MAGA terrorists have exploited the indefensible assassination of Charlie Kirk, how they have tried to blame the left without evidence and with increasing evidence that this was an instance of a man who feared Kirk was a direct threat to a person he loved, and how they have ruthlessly tried to suppress all public comment that contradicts their narrative, or the nonsensical whitewashing of Kirk's violent, ultra-right platform that once included him publicly calling for the execution of President Biden.
“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 and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said Monday.
By this afternoon FCC chairman Brendan Carr dipped into the Goebbels playbook and threatened ABC's station licenses if it did not take Kimmel off the air, and the Nexstar stations that own many ABC affiliates, said they would not broadcast any more of Kimmel's shows. At that point ABC simply said the show was off the air "for the foreseeable future."
Fascism can truly overtake this country's democracy only with the collaboration of Disney and ABC and people they run them - desperate people like Bob Iger, who reclaimed the chairmanship of the company and will do anything he can to maintain it - including selling this country out to the fascists.
I'll also discuss why Kimmel has no recourse against the action and will most likely not appear again, and why ABC's only contractual obligation to him is to pay him the remaining year of his salary. This part of it I've personally been through - though under far less dire circumstances.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. All Right,
I will try to tell you that Jimmy Kimmel's story
while suppressing my rage over it. On Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel,
(00:27):
in his program on ABC Late Night said quote, 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 and doing
everything they can to score political points from it. There
is some reason to think that to say Charlie Kirk's
(00:50):
murder was anything other than one of them was a
little broad. Otherwise, that script could have gone into any
newscast in America. It is that close to what has
proven to be true. And that statement was made before
the news conference explaining all of the correspondence between the
alleged murderer and his girlfriend and the motivation for it. Yes,
(01:16):
that's all they have done since Charlie Kirk died, and
many of them are doing them, as I mentioned the
other day, from a position of knowing only of the
Charlie Kirk, who was a Bible thumper. This weird position
we are in in which somebody can have two sets
of video feeds. One is seen by normal people like
(01:39):
presumably you and me, although I don't necessarily mean to
speak for you, and another that is seen by ultra
right wingers and Bible thumpers and religious nuts and people
who would never have heard that cut that I played
earlier Charlie Kirk saying that Joe Biden should be executed.
They would only have heard the ones about stay in
(02:01):
school and read your Bible and the family's most important
and they would never have seen the rest of it.
So there are some people operating from a position of
at least authenticity within their own world. Then there are
the politicians and the political figures who know Charlie Kirk
for what he was and are taking advantage of the
(02:21):
fact that there are people who do not know what
Charlie Kirk really was and the kind of filth that
he put out every day, hour upon hour in the
guise of being the Bible thumper. Jimmy Kimmel cut through that.
In the wake of the cancelation of Stephen Colbert, I
continued to maintain that CBS's decision about Colbert was actually
(02:44):
almost ninety nine percent financial. These shows are not making money,
and just because you have the top rated one does
not mean you are not losing money for your company.
The whole genre is dying. The audiences under fifty under
thirty from which these shows were springing and making all
kinds of money, they are leaving in droves the percentages.
(03:06):
In just the last eighteen months, I believe the audience
number under thirty for Kimmel and for Colbert and for
the NBC shows was now down fifty percent. It's not sustainable. However,
the Kimmel move, in which they announced late yesterday that
(03:27):
Kimmel was off the air effective immediately on the ABC
network because a series of local stations owned by a
company called Nexstar, which has its own history of repression
of freedom speech, that those stations would not carry Kimmel
and were pressuring ABC to drop or suspend the show,
and ABC did this also late afternoon yesterday. The man
(03:51):
I referred to in the first segment, Brendan Carr, Brendan Goebbels.
Car did something that is quite literally exactly something that
Goebels did in the early years of Nazi Germany in
his role as the media control ler and chief propagandas
for Adolf Hitler, he silenced all criticism by taking the
broadcasting companies. In those days, almost all broadcasting in Germany
(04:15):
was radio. He took all the private radio companies away
from their owners, the few that maintain some kind of viability,
and also the newspapers. The few that maintained viability in
Nazi Germany were the ones that never criticized the Nazis thereafter,
that's what they want. Brendan Carr may have said something
(04:37):
appropriate about the First Amendment, but of course he doesn't
want the First Amendment to apply to private broadcasting. Because
his argument was, we can take the licenses away from ABC,
ABC the network, the Jimmy Kimmel Show, Fox News Channel,
all of cable. There are no licenses for them. There
are licenses for the individual stations that ABC owns, that
(04:59):
Fox owns, that CBS owns, that NBC owns. There are
individual licenses, and they can be challenged, and they can
be taken away from the owners no matter who they are.
Usually it's under the most dire and extraordinary of circumstances.
I don't know the last time a license was actually
taken away from an American TV license holder. Now the
(05:22):
Trump administration under this despot car would take somebody's license
away for being critical of Trump. There is no pretext
being made anymore about why they would go after ABC licenses.
The other reason they're going after ABC licenses is they
know Bob Iger is now a collaborator. He is a
(05:46):
quizzling Bob Iger who stood up many times, not just
for ABC News, for ABC Sports, for ESPN after Disney
and ABC bought ESPN. Why I was there? Stood up
for me personally? Has now abandoned all of that because
Bob Iger is the classic person who is vulnerable to
(06:07):
professional blackmail. Bob Iger retired as chairman of ABC and
found that he no longer had anything to do. He
wanted the power back. His successor was not who he
thought he was, and he believed and those around him
believed too, that he was essential to the future success
of Disney, and so he Jay lenoed this guy who
(06:30):
succeeded him. It is pardon parcel of retirement. I have
felt it too, watching people who succeeded me and gone,
what the hell are they doing? Why did I leave?
Why did I semi retire? Why did I go into
this instead of saying, there, imagine when it's the level
of finance of tens of millions of dollars in salary,
(06:51):
hundreds of millions of dollars in value that people like
Bob Iger make. And so Bob Iger came back, and
Bob Iger is a man who wants the money and
wants the job, and frankly, he is a coward who
values his job over democracy and ultimately values his job
(07:12):
running Disney over America. He has just sold America out
by taking Kimmel off the air till further notice. It
is extraordinary. I'm not utterly surprised. On Tuesday, Kimmel came
back and said, many in Magaland are working very hard
(07:35):
to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk. Yesterday, JD. Vance,
who himself famously called Trump's America as Hitler, hosted the
Charlie Kirk Podcast from the White House, where he pointed
his little mascari stained finger directly at the left, and
then they played the tape of Vance saying most of
the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of
the far left. And Kimmel came back on and said,
(07:56):
and by statistical fact, he means complete bullshit. Again, probably
wouldn't use the word bullshit in a newscast. Otherwise completely
accurate and worthy of an inclusion on ABC World News.
Let me explain to you why they did this again. Primarily,
(08:17):
Iigre did it to protect Iiger. To some degree, he
did it to protect ABC. They already gave up sixteen
million dollars to Trump as a bribe to keep them
from suing. Further over, the Stephanopoulos quotes about Trump and
the Agen Carrol case, so there's already a history there.
(08:38):
They already knew Bob Eiger was a soft target who
could be blackmailed into doing what they wanted. The Kimmel stuff,
although it is factually verifiable, was still so pointed that
it became an easy weapon to use against Iiger, and
no doubt there were phone calls made directly to people
around Iigre saying, we will go after your licenses, we
(09:01):
will go after your theme parks, we will go after
everything Disney has that's worth anything. Ironically, of course, the
station licenses are probably the least valuable thing in the equation,
because local TV stations are not something you would want
to invest in, even if you were only investing fifty
dollars a local TV station is not a big deal anymore.
(09:24):
The network properties, the syndication rights to shows on networks,
the shows that networks produce or are involved in the
production of, that's a different story. But the local stations, yeah,
you're probably better off just affiliating your programs with independent
stations that you do not own. Nevertheless, the implication here
(09:45):
was we already bought you horror Bolla, Higer, we are
going to make you whore some more, or we are
coming after what we already told you was yours and
we wouldn't come after again. And Iiger folded. It is shameful.
It is the only thing he will be remembered for
(10:06):
after a tremendous career, fifty years in broadcasting. As I said,
personal relationship with me that dates back literally to before
I went on the air professionally in nineteen seventy nine,
some of the greatest advice I have ever been given.
I always had tremendous respect for him, and he made
overtures again and again, offering me the opportunity to go
back to ESPN after I left. Called when I was leaving,
(10:29):
expressed his regrets criticized the management beneath him, saying he
didn't know I was about to leave. I had all
the respect in the world for this man until the
last year. Because there is nothing more dangerous than a
man who retires and sees that the only thing next
in his life is his own death, whenever that may come.
So you have to go back and reclaim your old job,
(10:52):
and once you reclaim it, you will kill to maintain it,
metaphorically speaking. And what he just metaphorically killed was freedom
of commentary in this country. Real people ask me in
the wake of this announcement late last afternoon early evening,
can't Kimmel sue about this? Isn't this obviously damaged to
(11:15):
Jimmy Kimmel and against the contract? And doesn't the contract
say you're doing the show and you're being paid this
much money. All television contracts are pay or play. All
the company has to do is pay you. They don't
have to play you. So the roughly sixteen million dollars
that Jimmy Kimmel is still owed in the twenty twenty
(11:36):
five to twenty six television season that just began and
ends May June July of next year, as long as
they pay him that money, he has no recourse. If
they do not absolutely slander him in any announcement about
canceling the show or in any suspension of the show,
If they do not materially damage him, he has no recourse.
(11:58):
He can only do one of two things, take the money,
or come out and slam ABC back, and then probably
forfeit the money, because then they could fire him for cause.
And I know this intimately because this is exactly what
Fox did to me on a much smaller scale, literally
one twentieth size. In two thousand and one. Fox wanted
(12:19):
me out. They were overspending on their cable sports operation,
and I was something like forty percent of the budget.
When I found that out, I sold my house because
I knew the thing couldn't last much longer. But what
Fox realized early in two thousand and one was they
were paying me an inordinate amount of money for something
that was not going to last much longer, and they
needed to take a gamble. Yes, they owed me one
(12:40):
hundred thousand dollars a month for the remaining eight months
of my contracts, but they could probably piss me off
enough that I would say something incredibly stupid and they
could fire me for cause instead of paying me eight
hundred thousand dollars to do nothing for the next eight
months while I was free to look around and try
to get a new job and then trash them once
I got the new job, and not before bad call
(13:04):
on their art on my worst day. I'm always going
to take that eight hundred thousand dollars to do nothing
and just save up all the terrible things I intended
to say about Fox, which I have been saying NonStop
since January first, two thousand and two. But it's exactly
the same situation. There is nothing, and there was nothing
in my contract, and there is nothing in Jimmy Kimmel's
contract that says you have to be on the air.
(13:27):
You do not have to be on the air. You
only have to be paid. That's it. There are no
other elements. Sometimes something can be twisted in such a
way that you may be able to say to your employer,
you took me off that show, you have breached my contract,
you owe me all the money, and I'm free to
leave now, which also happened to me at NBC. But
(13:50):
you really cannot force your way back onto a television
show or onto a television network just because you have
a contract. Your contract is to do the show if
they let you. Their contract is to pay you, whether
you do the show or not. So no, there is
no recourse for Jimmy Kimmel, and there is effidentally no
(14:11):
recourse for America. ABC could have stood up, could have
weathered the storm that would be coming, could have fought back,
and unfortunately, as I explained earlier, of all times, for
an egotistical old man holding on to his last remaining
glory before death, for him to be in charge of
(14:33):
a company like Disney, this is the worst for the
purposes of freedom of press in America, freedom of comment,
freedom of political expression, simply freedom. Bob Iger on the
side of the devils, taking it out on America so
he can maintain his power. I don't know how this
(14:54):
turns out. Perhaps Bob will get some sort of inspiration
from the realization that he's about to sell his country
to the fascists and participate even further in that process.
Perhaps the ABC people will all walk out. The problem,
of course, is this the same financial considerations that essentially
made the Stephen Colbert Show a financial impossibility. Certainly, going forward,
(15:18):
we'll make the Jimmy Kimmel Show a financial impossibility. If
they're not making money with the highest rated late night show,
why would they be making money with the second highest
rated show. And I know Kimmel disagrees with all of
the finances and all of the accounting, and I understand
that because I have said that before in the past.
I happen to think in this case that part is legit.
(15:41):
I will repeat, I believe, And it certainly isn't an
indicator that Colbert was not fired for political reasons. Because
Colbert is still on the air, depending on what he
says about Kimmel, perhaps they will try to fire him
for cause at some point, but they have not done
that yet, and the schedule is for Colbert to continue
into next year. The only thing, though, that CBS would
(16:03):
be required to do into next year is pay Colbert,
and there could be at any point in the next
eight months or so the opportunity for them simply to
take him off the air and hand him the cash. Sadly,
that is the way commercial broadcasting works in this country.
It is dependent on the goodwill and the courage of
the people who run it. I can tell you, having
(16:24):
now worked in television for forty four years, that the
amount of courage and goodwill among the people who manage
and own television operations in this country, news and otherwise,
it could fit into a thimble. And nobody knows that
better right now than Jimmy Kimmel. Countdown with Keith Olderman
(16:59):
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
is it the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. All Right,
I will try to tell you that Jimmy Kimmel's story
while suppressing my rage over it. On Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel,
(00:27):
in his program on ABC Late Night said quote, 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 and doing
everything they can to score political points from it. There
is some reason to think that to say Charlie Kirk's
(00:50):
murder was anything other than one of them was a
little broad. Otherwise, that script could have gone into any
newscast in America. It is that close to what has
proven to be true. And that statement was made before
the news conference explaining all of the correspondence between the
alleged murderer and his girlfriend and the motivation for it. Yes,
(01:16):
that's all they have done since Charlie Kirk died, and
many of them are doing them, as I mentioned the
other day, from a position of knowing only of the
Charlie Kirk, who was a Bible thumper. This weird position
we are in in which somebody can have two sets
of video feeds. One is seen by normal people like
(01:39):
presumably you and me, although I don't necessarily mean to
speak for you, and another that is seen by ultra
right wingers and Bible thumpers and religious nuts and people
who would never have heard that cut that I played
earlier Charlie Kirk saying that Joe Biden should be executed.
They would only have heard the ones about stay in
(02:01):
school and read your Bible and the family's most important
and they would never have seen the rest of it.
So there are some people operating from a position of
at least authenticity within their own world. Then there are
the politicians and the political figures who know Charlie Kirk
for what he was and are taking advantage of the
(02:21):
fact that there are people who do not know what
Charlie Kirk really was and the kind of filth that
he put out every day, hour upon hour in the
guise of being the Bible thumper. Jimmy Kimmel cut through that.
In the wake of the cancelation of Stephen Colbert, I
continued to maintain that CBS's decision about Colbert was actually
(02:44):
almost ninety nine percent financial. These shows are not making money,
and just because you have the top rated one does
not mean you are not losing money for your company.
The whole genre is dying. The audiences under fifty under
thirty from which these shows were springing and making all
kinds of money, they are leaving in droves the percentages.
(03:06):
In just the last eighteen months, I believe the audience
number under thirty for Kimmel and for Colbert and for
the NBC shows was now down fifty percent. It's not sustainable. However,
the Kimmel move, in which they announced late yesterday that
(03:27):
Kimmel was off the air effective immediately on the ABC
network because a series of local stations owned by a
company called Nexstar, which has its own history of repression
of freedom speech, that those stations would not carry Kimmel
and were pressuring ABC to drop or suspend the show,
and ABC did this also late afternoon yesterday. The man
(03:51):
I referred to in the first segment, Brendan Carr, Brendan Goebbels.
Car did something that is quite literally exactly something that
Goebels did in the early years of Nazi Germany in
his role as the media control ler and chief propagandas
for Adolf Hitler, he silenced all criticism by taking the
broadcasting companies. In those days, almost all broadcasting in Germany
(04:15):
was radio. He took all the private radio companies away
from their owners, the few that maintain some kind of viability,
and also the newspapers. The few that maintained viability in
Nazi Germany were the ones that never criticized the Nazis thereafter,
that's what they want. Brendan Carr may have said something
(04:37):
appropriate about the First Amendment, but of course he doesn't
want the First Amendment to apply to private broadcasting. Because
his argument was, we can take the licenses away from ABC,
ABC the network, the Jimmy Kimmel Show, Fox News Channel,
all of cable. There are no licenses for them. There
are licenses for the individual stations that ABC owns, that
(04:59):
Fox owns, that CBS owns, that NBC owns. There are
individual licenses, and they can be challenged, and they can
be taken away from the owners no matter who they are.
Usually it's under the most dire and extraordinary of circumstances.
I don't know the last time a license was actually
taken away from an American TV license holder. Now the
(05:22):
Trump administration under this despot car would take somebody's license
away for being critical of Trump. There is no pretext
being made anymore about why they would go after ABC licenses.
The other reason they're going after ABC licenses is they
know Bob Iger is now a collaborator. He is a
(05:46):
quizzling Bob Iger who stood up many times, not just
for ABC News, for ABC Sports, for ESPN after Disney
and ABC bought ESPN. Why I was there? Stood up
for me personally? Has now abandoned all of that because
Bob Iger is the classic person who is vulnerable to
(06:07):
professional blackmail. Bob Iger retired as chairman of ABC and
found that he no longer had anything to do. He
wanted the power back. His successor was not who he
thought he was, and he believed and those around him
believed too, that he was essential to the future success
of Disney, and so he Jay lenoed this guy who
(06:30):
succeeded him. It is pardon parcel of retirement. I have
felt it too, watching people who succeeded me and gone,
what the hell are they doing? Why did I leave?
Why did I semi retire? Why did I go into
this instead of saying, there, imagine when it's the level
of finance of tens of millions of dollars in salary,
(06:51):
hundreds of millions of dollars in value that people like
Bob Iger make. And so Bob Iger came back, and
Bob Iger is a man who wants the money and
wants the job, and frankly, he is a coward who
values his job over democracy and ultimately values his job
(07:12):
running Disney over America. He has just sold America out
by taking Kimmel off the air till further notice. It
is extraordinary. I'm not utterly surprised. On Tuesday, Kimmel came
back and said, many in Magaland are working very hard
(07:35):
to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk. Yesterday, JD. Vance,
who himself famously called Trump's America as Hitler, hosted the
Charlie Kirk Podcast from the White House, where he pointed
his little mascari stained finger directly at the left, and
then they played the tape of Vance saying most of
the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of
the far left. And Kimmel came back on and said,
(07:56):
and by statistical fact, he means complete bullshit. Again, probably
wouldn't use the word bullshit in a newscast. Otherwise completely
accurate and worthy of an inclusion on ABC World News.
Let me explain to you why they did this again. Primarily,
(08:17):
Iigre did it to protect Iiger. To some degree, he
did it to protect ABC. They already gave up sixteen
million dollars to Trump as a bribe to keep them
from suing. Further over, the Stephanopoulos quotes about Trump and
the Agen Carrol case, so there's already a history there.
(08:38):
They already knew Bob Eiger was a soft target who
could be blackmailed into doing what they wanted. The Kimmel stuff,
although it is factually verifiable, was still so pointed that
it became an easy weapon to use against Iiger, and
no doubt there were phone calls made directly to people
around Iigre saying, we will go after your licenses, we
(09:01):
will go after your theme parks, we will go after
everything Disney has that's worth anything. Ironically, of course, the
station licenses are probably the least valuable thing in the equation,
because local TV stations are not something you would want
to invest in, even if you were only investing fifty
dollars a local TV station is not a big deal anymore.
(09:24):
The network properties, the syndication rights to shows on networks,
the shows that networks produce or are involved in the
production of, that's a different story. But the local stations, yeah,
you're probably better off just affiliating your programs with independent
stations that you do not own. Nevertheless, the implication here
(09:45):
was we already bought you horror Bolla, Higer, we are
going to make you whore some more, or we are
coming after what we already told you was yours and
we wouldn't come after again. And Iiger folded. It is shameful.
It is the only thing he will be remembered for
(10:06):
after a tremendous career, fifty years in broadcasting. As I said,
personal relationship with me that dates back literally to before
I went on the air professionally in nineteen seventy nine,
some of the greatest advice I have ever been given.
I always had tremendous respect for him, and he made
overtures again and again, offering me the opportunity to go
back to ESPN after I left. Called when I was leaving,
(10:29):
expressed his regrets criticized the management beneath him, saying he
didn't know I was about to leave. I had all
the respect in the world for this man until the
last year. Because there is nothing more dangerous than a
man who retires and sees that the only thing next
in his life is his own death, whenever that may come.
So you have to go back and reclaim your old job,
(10:52):
and once you reclaim it, you will kill to maintain it,
metaphorically speaking. And what he just metaphorically killed was freedom
of commentary in this country. Real people ask me in
the wake of this announcement late last afternoon early evening,
can't Kimmel sue about this? Isn't this obviously damaged to
(11:15):
Jimmy Kimmel and against the contract? And doesn't the contract
say you're doing the show and you're being paid this
much money. All television contracts are pay or play. All
the company has to do is pay you. They don't
have to play you. So the roughly sixteen million dollars
that Jimmy Kimmel is still owed in the twenty twenty
(11:36):
five to twenty six television season that just began and
ends May June July of next year, as long as
they pay him that money, he has no recourse. If
they do not absolutely slander him in any announcement about
canceling the show or in any suspension of the show,
If they do not materially damage him, he has no recourse.
(11:58):
He can only do one of two things, take the money,
or come out and slam ABC back, and then probably
forfeit the money, because then they could fire him for cause.
And I know this intimately because this is exactly what
Fox did to me on a much smaller scale, literally
one twentieth size. In two thousand and one. Fox wanted
(12:19):
me out. They were overspending on their cable sports operation,
and I was something like forty percent of the budget.
When I found that out, I sold my house because
I knew the thing couldn't last much longer. But what
Fox realized early in two thousand and one was they
were paying me an inordinate amount of money for something
that was not going to last much longer, and they
needed to take a gamble. Yes, they owed me one
(12:40):
hundred thousand dollars a month for the remaining eight months
of my contracts, but they could probably piss me off
enough that I would say something incredibly stupid and they
could fire me for cause instead of paying me eight
hundred thousand dollars to do nothing for the next eight
months while I was free to look around and try
to get a new job and then trash them once
I got the new job, and not before bad call
(13:04):
on their art on my worst day. I'm always going
to take that eight hundred thousand dollars to do nothing
and just save up all the terrible things I intended
to say about Fox, which I have been saying NonStop
since January first, two thousand and two. But it's exactly
the same situation. There is nothing, and there was nothing
in my contract, and there is nothing in Jimmy Kimmel's
contract that says you have to be on the air.
(13:27):
You do not have to be on the air. You
only have to be paid. That's it. There are no
other elements. Sometimes something can be twisted in such a
way that you may be able to say to your employer,
you took me off that show, you have breached my contract,
you owe me all the money, and I'm free to
leave now, which also happened to me at NBC. But
(13:50):
you really cannot force your way back onto a television
show or onto a television network just because you have
a contract. Your contract is to do the show if
they let you. Their contract is to pay you, whether
you do the show or not. So no, there is
no recourse for Jimmy Kimmel, and there is effidentally no
(14:11):
recourse for America. ABC could have stood up, could have
weathered the storm that would be coming, could have fought back,
and unfortunately, as I explained earlier, of all times, for
an egotistical old man holding on to his last remaining
glory before death, for him to be in charge of
(14:33):
a company like Disney, this is the worst for the
purposes of freedom of press in America, freedom of comment,
freedom of political expression, simply freedom. Bob Iger on the
side of the devils, taking it out on America so
he can maintain his power. I don't know how this
(14:54):
turns out. Perhaps Bob will get some sort of inspiration
from the realization that he's about to sell his country
to the fascists and participate even further in that process.
Perhaps the ABC people will all walk out. The problem,
of course, is this the same financial considerations that essentially
made the Stephen Colbert Show a financial impossibility. Certainly, going forward,
(15:18):
we'll make the Jimmy Kimmel Show a financial impossibility. If
they're not making money with the highest rated late night show,
why would they be making money with the second highest
rated show. And I know Kimmel disagrees with all of
the finances and all of the accounting, and I understand
that because I have said that before in the past.
I happen to think in this case that part is legit.
(15:41):
I will repeat, I believe, And it certainly isn't an
indicator that Colbert was not fired for political reasons. Because
Colbert is still on the air, depending on what he
says about Kimmel, perhaps they will try to fire him
for cause at some point, but they have not done
that yet, and the schedule is for Colbert to continue
into next year. The only thing, though, that CBS would
(16:03):
be required to do into next year is pay Colbert,
and there could be at any point in the next
eight months or so the opportunity for them simply to
take him off the air and hand him the cash. Sadly,
that is the way commercial broadcasting works in this country.
It is dependent on the goodwill and the courage of
the people who run it. I can tell you, having
(16:24):
now worked in television for forty four years, that the
amount of courage and goodwill among the people who manage
and own television operations in this country, news and otherwise,
it could fit into a thimble. And nobody knows that
better right now than Jimmy Kimmel. Countdown with Keith Olderman
(16:59):
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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