Kulturkampf

[HaughtyFrank]

This entire Kimmel situation is dumb. He almost certainly broke FCC rules by knowingly reporting misinformation, but looking at Colbert, I highly doubt he was making ABC any money to begin with, either. And so, when two of the largest broadcast networks told ABC that they would no longer air the show, meaning it would lose even more money, what was Disney supposed to do? Keep producing a controversial, expensive format nobody cared about anymore to begin with, now with less than half the potential reach? Of course they were going to shitcan it.

The US Talk show opening monologue is pretty fucking well defined in both structure, format, and tone at this point.
I don't think anyone could convincingly claim that they mistook it for reportage and not - as it has been for what, 50+ years now? - topical jokes

And to be fair, Kimmel also left himself enough wiggle room by not outright stating that the thinks the shooter is a right wing fanatic

“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.”

IMO the implication that he thinks the shooter is MAGA is very strong but he doesn't outright say it.

Kimmel himself now says his statement was mischaracterized, and I guess you can choose to believe him or not, but if he really didn't mean it I'd argue the writers did a shit job by writing such an ambiguous line.