(18 Sep 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
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ASSOCIATED PRESS
Washington – 18 September 2025
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1. SOUNDBITE (English) Sen. Kevin Cramer, (R) North Dakota:
Reporter: "I wanted to ask you about Jimmy Kimmel, if you have any concerns with ABC suspending him. And if you think it amounts to FCC interference here.
Cramer: "That’s up to ABC. I don’t have any problems with that. I don’t have any concerns about it certainly. In fact, I don’t — I don’t know what he said. I didn’t see it. I saw the news today that they had suspended him or whatever they call it for now. And I have no problem with it. Quite, quite honestly. I mean — One of the things that makes a liberal a liberal is when they think they’re smarter than everybody else and say anything they want because they’re so brilliant. And everyone ought to listen. And by the way, if you’re not one of those people, you’re the liberal that wants somebody to tell them what to do. And you know, I think some of these people, including Jimmy Kimmel are getting what the market wants and he’s getting what he deserves. I don’t know about FCC, but am I concered about it? No.
Reporter: "Well, it seemed like (FCC Chairman) Brendan Carr had kind of issued a veiled threat that actually about, you know, further scrutinizing a merger.
Cramer: "So a veiled threat, occasionally maybe, you know, if that’s what scares off ABC, maybe they need a little bit of a scare. When it comes to the merger itself, I don’t know a lot about it. I do know that the concentration of liberal communications companies isn’t great for America, but again, it’s a it’s a nice liberal thing to do to consolidate power."
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2. SOUNDBITE (English) Sen. Richard Blumenthal, (D) Connecticut:
Reporter: "Are you concerned about how quickly these networks are becoming scared?"
Blumenthal: "The networks have to be standing up and showing some backbone. This censorship of Kimmel flies in the face of the First Amendment, free expression, and the networks ought to be standing strong in favor. They should be the bulwarks of free expression, not kowtowing to the chairman of the FCC just because of his personal whims doing the president’s bidding and the precipitous, premature kind of action against Kimmel reflects a lack of real backbone, which ought to worry not just the industry, but also its viewers and advertisers, because this kind of censorship will spread like a cancer. It will metastasize. And if they start bowing now to the whims and wishes of the censors in Washington doing President Trump’s bidding, we will lose all of our liberties eventually and the autocratic threat to our democracy will continue to mount."
Reporter: "It’s amazing everybody wants to censor they just called it different things."
Blumenthal: "Whatever it’s called, it’s censorship, whatever they want to call it, it amounts to censorship. It’s the blunt gagging of somebody expressing views in the public square. And if it’s not halted now, it will just continue to mount and spread, and ultimately we will be the losers. Satire, humor, comedy are the stuff of political expression. Not just entertainment. And this kind of heavy-handed, ham-handed censorship is going to be a whirlwind that will come back to haunt the chairman of the FCC and others."
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STORYLINE:
Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill are weighing in on ABC suspending Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show indefinitely after comments that he made about Charlie Kirk’s killing.
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