Former ESPN host rips Disney’s Bob Iger for ‘state-run media’ move on Jimmy Kimmel show decision

Former ESPN Radio host Dan Le Batard ripped Disney’s Bob Iger for going through with pulling talk show host Jimmy Kimmel off the air after he made controversial comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. 

On Monday, Kimmel accused “the MAGA gang” of reaching “new lows” in “trying to characterize” 22-year-old suspect Tyler Robinson “as anything other than one of them.”

But Le Batard said the decision to remove Kimmel off the airwaves moves “dangerously close to state-run media.”

“Seeing Jimmy Kimmel not have the protection of something as powerful as Disney because corporate interests in media are filled with such cowardice that you have a situation where not even Bob Iger has the money or the power to stand up to the threat that is presently upon the shores of everyone in media because of how compromised they are by a series of mergers and money interests,” Le Batard said on his show Thursday. “And to see Bob Iger show this kind of cowardice and bend the knee again, again with Trump, not the first time, because what happens here is once you’re a coward who’s extorted, the bully is going to keep extorting the coward.”

Le Batard then pin-pointed Trump’s $16 million settlement with ABC as the beginning of a “threat” to spread propaganda.

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“And when they gave Trump $16 million on something that [George] Stephanopoulos said, they opened the doors now to all of media feeling like it needs to capitulate to a threat, and now you get dangerously close to state-run media. And I will tell you as someone who descends, grandparents and parents, from a childhood filled with ‘you can’t trust the media, it’s all propaganda,’ I’ve never seen in my lifetime America in the position it’s presently in where the media is running this kind of scared from power as if we’re not a place that one of the chief principles is free speech.

“I understand that private business don’t have to adhere to free speech stuff. But there’s no one who can look at what’s happening here and say this is a kind of threat that you have not seen before in the United States.”

Kimmel’s comments came one day after both FBI officials and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said that Robinson held a “leftist ideology” and was increasingly radicalized in recent years. It was also revealed that he had a romantic relationship with a transgender partner who was biologically male and transitioning to female.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr then issued a threat against Disney if it didn’t address the controversy.

Appearing on Wednesday’s “The Benny Show,” Carr called Kimmel’s comments “some of the sickest conduct” and suggested there were potential “avenues” the FCC could pursue.

“In some quarters, there’s a very concerted effort to try to lie to the American people about the nature … of one of the most significant newsworthy public interest acts that we’ve seen in a long time in what appears to be an action by Jimmy Kimmel to play into that narrative that this was somehow a MAGA or a Republican-motivated person,” Carr told host Benny Johnson.

Nexstar Media Group, which owns hundreds of television stations, announced earlier it would preempt Kimmel’s show on its ABC affiliates starting Wednesday night “for the foreseeable future” and would replace it with other programming over his comments about Robinson.

Kirk, 31, was shot and killed last week while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University. Thousands of people have mourned his death in vigils across the U.S.

The conservative influencer’s funeral is set for Sept. 21, in Glendale, Arizona.

Fox News Digital’s Jackson Thompson contributed to this report.

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