Kulturkampf

[wsippel]

He almost certainly broke FCC rules by knowingly reporting misinformation

I don't believe this because the rule is about misinformation in a crisis like telling people there's no tornado as it's destroying the town. And I'm certain they believed it was true.

I would love to see evidence that the FCC has ever enforced a claim against a television network for reporting misinformation because I'm still not convinced there was ever a legitimate threat here. Trump is a liar and so is every Trumper so they just claim stuff no matter how untrue it is. I'm not convinced they had anything to do with this decision because of that.

The rules are kinda vague, but I'd argue misattributing a politically motivated assassination causes damage by poisoning the civil and political discourse, especially considering a lot of people apparently fell for it. And if Kimmel or his writing room actually still believed the groyper rumor at that point in time, they did a piss poor job researching their headline topic and should at least issue an retraction and apology, but Kimmel doubled down instead. That might not be enough to warrant a FCC investigation, but seems perfectly sufficient to cancel a show nobody watches.