“Someone can say something they shouldn’t and get taken off the air,” said Whoopi Goldberg. “But the government cannot apply pressure to force someone to be silenced”
The women of The View have entered the Jimmy Kimmel chat after initially holding their tongues in the wake of his suspension last week. In the opening segment of their ABC morning show on Monday, the hosts made clear they didn’t hold back at first because they share a parent company with the suspended talk show host.
“Did y’all really think we weren’t going to talk about Jimmy Kimmel?” Whoopi Goldberg asked the audience, after ignoring the topic last week. “I mean, have you watched the show over the last 29 seasons? No one silences us…When the news broke last week about Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, we took a breath to see if Jimmy was going to say anything about it first. You can not like a show and it can go off the air. Someone can say something they shouldn’t and get taken off the air. But the government cannot apply pressure to force someone to be silenced.”
Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as the White House director of strategic communications during the first Trump administration, echoed the sentiment. “The First Amendment is the first for a reason,” she said, “because you need to be able to hold those in power accountable.”
Ana Navarro, who considers herself a centrist and has been deeply critical of Trump from the beginning, chimed in, too. “I don’t understand how in this country, where the First Amendment was made to the Constitution to guarantee freedom of the press and freedom of speech,” the co-host said, “how the government itself is using its weight and power to bully and scare people into silence.”
The segment ended with strong words from Goldberg: “We talk about freedom of speech a lot because we are always in somebody’s mess because somebody has decided that we have said something that’s offensive,” she said. “But we fight for everybody’s right to have freedom of speech because it means my speech is free, it means your speech is free.”
Earlier in the day, Howard Stern defended Kimmel in even stronger terms, adding that he canceled his Disney+ subscription in protest. “You can’t support this kind of a move,” Stern said. “I don’t care whether you like Jimmy or not. It’s about freedom of speech. If ABC wanted to fire Jimmy because they didn’t like him, or he had low ratings — they didn’t want to fire him. They’re being pressured by the United States government. We can’t have that, not if we’re going to have a democracy.”
Jimmy Kimmel Live! was indefinitely suspended on Sept. 17 due to statements the host made earlier in the week about Charlie Kirk’s assassin. “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 said, “and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
This launched a firestorm of controversy, and even condemnation from FCC chairman Brendan Carr. “This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney,” Carr told right-wing commentator Benny Johnson. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead … They have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest.”
