Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was bleeding viewers before Disney-owned ABC pulled the plug and suspended him for his comments on Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Nielsen data showed sharp summer declines and a year-long slide that leaves him trailing late-night rivals such as Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld and CBS star Stephen Colbert.
According to monthly Nielsen figures, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” dropped to just 1.1 million total viewers in August 2025, down 43% from January’s 1.95 million. His August household rating of 0.35 marked the weakest showing of the year.
The advertiser-coveted 18–49 demo also cratered. Kimmel averaged only 129,000 viewers in that bracket in August, off from 212,000 in January and less than half his June peak of 284,000.
With his ABC contract set to expire next year, the slump raises questions about whether “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” can regain momentum against Colbert, Fallon and cable insurgents.
Kimmel’s deal with ABC runs through May 2026, under a three-year extension signed in September 2022.
Industry reports put his salary at $15 million to $16 million a year, with some outlets noting that bonuses can push his annual earnings above $20 million.
Despite ABC’s indefinite suspension of the show, the network has not announced any change to his contractual pay.
The Post has sought comment from Kimmel and ABC.
This year’s erosion in viewership follows a bumpy 2024. Annual Nielsen ratings compiled by industry site LateNighter show Kimmel averaged 1.77 million total viewers last year, down 2.3% from 2023. In the demo, he shed more than 12%, pulling 221,000 nightly viewers on average.
By comparison, CBS’s “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” held the top broadcast spot with 2.57 million viewers and 281,000 in the demo, despite also losing ground year-over-year.
NBC’s “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” lagged behind with 1.37 million total viewers, but it narrowly trailed Kimmel in the demo with 220,000.
Fox News’ “Gutfeld!” remained cable’s late night ratings juggernaut in 2024, averaging 2.76 million viewers — though the program airs at 10 p.m. when more viewers are awake.
Fox News shares common ownership with The Post.
Comedy Central’s “Daily Show,” powered by Jon Stewart’s Monday night return, posted the biggest growth, surging 84% among total viewers and 53% in the demo.
Within broadcast, Kimmel’s position has weakened in 2025.
After a relatively steady winter and spring, he has logged consecutive declines since June. His July average fell to 1.23 million viewers before dipping below 1.2 million in August, according to Nielsen.
Quarterly numbers confirm the trend: Kimmel averaged 1.82 million viewers in Q1 2025, then slipped to 1.77 million in Q2. The August low signals a deeper summer swoon — though summer viewership is traditionally lower as most shows air re-runs.
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Brendan Carr: You’re Damn Right We’ll Call a Code Red At the FCC
Can the FCC crack down on broadcasters over content? Yes. Should it? Well …
Let’s start with Matt Taibbi’s understandable discomfort over the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel at ABC. Taibbi writes — accurately — that Kimmel always ranked as the worst of the late-night political clapterists, at least since Samantha Bee finally disappeared from the scene. Even Stephen Colbert didn’t match Kimmel’s ignorance and malice, Taibbi concedes. But still, Taibbi wanted a market response instead of a government intervention:
We’ll get back to the OfCom comparison in a moment. Last night, FCC chair Brendan Carr refused to retreat from his activist position on enforcement of the “public interest” requirement for broadcast licenses. Carr told Sean Hannity that the FCC had abdicated its legitimate role in ensuring that public airwaves get used properly:
In this argument, Carr makes a very important distinction about jurisdiction. The FCC issues licenses for broadcasters only pursuant to the Communications Act of 1934 and other legislation, ie, those whose signal goes out over the public airwaves. As Carr notes (and as I noted briefly last night), the FCC does not have jurisdiction over cable channels such as Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, or others. The FCC has absolutely nothing to do with online outlets either, nor newspapers. This is a key difference between the FCC and OfCom, which polices all media in the UK — and is politically corrupt, to boot.
Even so, why does Congress invest the FCC with the authority to terminate licenses for content or actions they consider to be “not in the public interest”? To understand that, one has to understand the nature of broadcasting. In the earliest days of radio, operators would “step on” each other’s broadcasts by using the same or close-by frequencies, ramp up power, and attempt to drive competitors into collapse by literally blocking their signals. Congress put an end to it by declaring the commercial broadcast spectrums to be a federal jurisdiction and to be public property.
To ensure the proper operation of commercial broadcast spectrums (radio and TV use different spectrums, ie frequency ranges), Congress gave the FCC to essentially grant and enforce local monopolies on specific frequencies. The FCC also regulates and restricts power output to ensure no overlap between broadcast areas for legit licensees. That’s all a broadcast license is — a grant of a monopoly on a specific ‘channel’ in a local area to one entity to the exclusion of all others.
Let’s take Los Angeles as an example. The local ABC TV affiliate is Channel 7, which is identified in the US as the frequency band 174 MHz – 180 MHz. (Trust me on this; I’m a former ham radio licensee, KJ6FR.) The FCC granted Disney/ABC the exclusive rights to broadcast on that frequency. If anyone else attempts to broadcast in that frequency range in LA, the FCC can and most definitely will shut down that transmitter and penalize its operators. In exchange for enforcing Disney’s monopoly on that broadcast frequency range, Disney has to agree to operate its station in the “public interest,” as determined and enforced by the FCC.
The FCC has mainly let its foot ease off that pedal in recent years, as Carr notes. Why? Most of the offensive material they would normally police has moved to cable or the Internet. The irony of this is that the FCC has largely stood down while the Biden administration essentially created its own OfCom at the State Department and HHS, funding “misinformation” policing that targeted mainly the online and cable-channel markets. The federal government created censorship regimes on platforms where they had no jurisdiction, while allowing broadcasters to exploit government-provided monopolies with carte blanche on blatantly false content with clear partisan and malicious intent.
Now, one can argue that the FCC really should use a more laissez-faire approach to enforcing the “public interest” clause. However, one can’t argue that the authority doesn’t exist and hasn’t been enforced in the past. And one cannot argue after the last few years of Big Brother-Big Tech censorship that Kimmel is some sort of anomaly. Kimmel’s harangue was precisely the kind of speech that the State Department (and HHS) kept shutting down via its Global Engagement Center, its partnerships with activist “monitors” like Newsguard, not just on media organizations but on Facebook and Twitter users.
And we weren’t using a government-provided broadcast monopoly as a speech platform, either.
That’s why Disney et al have little choice but to play along. They need the FCC to enforce the monopolies it grants in order for their broadcast stations to operate. If the FCC decided to stop enforcing its authority, pirate operators would waste no time interfering with their over-the-air connections to viewers, and that means lost revenue in a business that is already a thinner-margin enterprise already.
To use the theme from my headline: Disney (and even more so the affiliates) want the FCC on that wall. More importantly, they need the FCC on that wall, or at least their broadcast units do, radio as well as TV.
In the end, Kimmel isn’t worth the fight anyway. He was almost certainly headed for cancellation of a normal sort anyway, as Taibbi notes. Carr simply escalated the cost structure to accelerate that choice.
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Founder of Armed Queers group investigated in Charlie Kirk shooting is radical trans leftist who advocated violence
The founder of Armed Queers SLC, a pro-gun LGBTQ group being investigated by the FBI for possible ties to accused Charlie Kirk sniper Tyler Robinson, has been identified as a radical transgender political organizer with ties to communist politics.
Armed Queers SLC quietly scrubbed its online presence after Kirk was assassinated, but a law enforcement source told The Post that all open-source information on the group was downloaded and handed over to the FBI.
The cache of information includes posts from Ermiya Fanaeian, the child of Iranian immigrants, according to the source familiar with the federal investigation, whose Instagram bio calls for “Revolution + Trans liberation in our lifetime!”
She has also advocated violence to achieve the aims of LGBTQ groups, citing the Stonewall Riots as an example in a TV interview on the campus of University of Utah.
“Sometimes violence, protest, and really riots and those kinds of loud rebellions must take place for tangible change,” she said.
The feds are still deciding whether to bring charges against Robinson and working to determine whether anyone else was involved in Kirk’s killing.
However, Fanaeian and Armed Queers SLC are on investigators’ radar as the FBI has widened its probe to include a potential “extended network” that could have aided Robinson in the Sept. 10 sniper attack at Utah Valley University.
Despite her fringe leftist views, Fanaeian has time and again been welcomed by the political mainstream, and even rewarded for her advocacy.
In 2022, Fanaeian was given a “7 for 17” award for “gender equality” by the Utah Global Diplomacy, a nonprofit that worked with the State Department to “promote citizen diplomacy and international exchange in Utah.”
Fanaeian also joined then-presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) onstage during an April 2019 campaign event in Salt Lake City, an archived picture from Fanaeian’s since-deleted Facebook page shows.
A Warren spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
In 2020, Fanaeian, 25, started the Salt Lake City chapter of Pink Pistols, a national organization “whose mission is to arm LGBTQ people,” Utah’s KUER wrote that year in a puff piece heralding Fanaeian’s involvement in the group.
“I used to think that guns were a scary thing,” Fanaeian told the outlet. “Back then, I would have agreed with Joe Biden’s assertion to take everyone’s AR-15s away. And now I own one.”
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The trans radicalization of Utah has ‘Republican’ fingerprints all over it…
“That brings us to Governor Spencer Cox and his son. Instead of defending Utah’s values, they’ve been some of the loudest promoters of the LGBTQ agenda in the state, creating the very atmosphere where this violent trans terror movement could take root and grow.”
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