Howard Stern is the latest broadcaster to support Jimmy Kimmel on the radio.
About Monday, Sept. 22, the radio host spoke out about Jimmy Kimmel Live! being yanked off the air indefinitely due to Kimmel’s comments about Charlie Kirk, revealing that he has been in contact with Kimmel, 57.
“I’m not sure what their goal is, but it appears they may be laying him off. Then I heard somewhere that they’re not going to dismiss him; I’m not sure,” Stern, 71, stated on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show.
“I have spoken with Jimmy. I didn’t ask him these questions,” Stern added. “I just asked him how he was doing personally.”
On September 17, an ABC spokesman confirmed to PEOPLE that Kimmel’s late-night program will be taken off the air for the foreseeable future, two days after Jimmy mentioned Kirk’s death in his September 15 monologue.
“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 stated during his opening monologue. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grief. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which drew some criticism, but on a personal level, you can see how difficult the president is taking this.
On Stern’s radio show, he discussed how President Donald Trump’s administration has influenced Kimmel’s absence.
“I just know when the government begins to interfere—when the government says, ‘I’m not pleased with you, so we’re going to orchestrate a way to silence you’—it’s the wrong direction for our country.”
“I should know. I’ve been involved in something like this,” Stern added. “And now ABC is placed in the same spot. And it’s bad that ABC is in this situation; they shouldn’t be. I also sympathize with them in this situation.”
“But someone has to step up and say, ‘Enough.'” “We are not going to bow.”
Stern also stated that he is “canceling my Disney+” membership in response to the Kimmel revelation. “I’m attempting to express, financially, my disapproval of what they’re doing with Jimmy.”
Nexstar Media, the biggest local broadcast and digital media firm in the United States with more than 200 television stations in 116 areas, said in a statement to PEOPLE that it “strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk.”
In his own statement, Andrew Alford, president of Nexstar’s broadcasting division, added, “Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time, and we have made the difficult decision to preempt his show in an effort to let cooler heads prevail as we move toward the resumption of respectful, constructive dialogue.”
Nexstar recently revealed plans to purchase rival broadcast giant Tegna for $6.2 billion, a major deal that would further dominate the local television landscape and place Nexstar in 80% of America’s TV-owning households, according to a news release. The purchase will need final clearance from the Trump-controlled Federal Communications Commission.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr praised Nexstar for exerting pressure on ABC to remove Kimmel. “It is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming that they determine falls short of community values,” Carr told X.