Kimmel Breaks Records After Suspension

Jimmy Kimmel's return hit like a storm. His broadcast averaged 6.2 million viewers, nearly quadruple his usual audience. Meanwhile, his opening monologue has pulled in more than 15 million YouTube views. He was emotional and defiant, reminding viewers a government threat to silence a comedian the President doesn't like is anti American. Okay, what's the real message here with Jimmy Kimmel coming back and coming back with a huge, huge audience? It is that the people in America still have some voice in things. When they speak out loudly enough, people listen. CEOs of major media companies listen, Even some politicians listen. So message to Americans, you still have some power. Before every shred of this democracy is torn apart. If you speak out in a forceful way and demand things, you can still get it. Okay, so let's look a little more at some of the details here. 6.2 million viewers for Jimmy Kimmel the night of his return. Which if you were Johnny Carson, that would have been depressing. Johnny Carson never had ratings that small. But in the new world we live in where everything is on demand and everyone has a million TikTok channels they like, 6.2 million is about six times bigger than normal. So that is a huge, huge audience. It's especially impressive given 20% of the affiliates that normally carry the channel or the show said, oh, we don't like Jimmy Kimmel. He's not conservative enough for us, he's not politically correct, he's not sufficiently right wing woke for us. So we're not going to have him on our airwaves. That's what Sinclair and another collection of stations did. They decided not to air it. And you know, Trump had mocked Jimmy Kimmel for being low in ratings and Kimmel said, well, they're not low tonight. He's right on that. Does this solve the long term problems for late night TV on broadcast networks or Jimmy Kimmel's long term career situation? No, it doesn't solve it. What we may find is six months or a year from now, ABC may come back to Jimmy Kimmel and say, hey, we're either canceling your show or you got to take a 50% pay cut and you got to reduce your headcount by 100. That could still happen. Nobody has a problem with it if it's not done because some politician is saying, I don't like what you said. It's okay for a private sector business to allocate resources differently, to fire people occasionally. There's nothing wrong with that. You want that in a democracy, in a free market system. What you don't want is politicians saying, oh, you criticized me. I'm a snowflake. You hurt my feelings. Therefore, I want to use the big power of government to shut you down. That's what you don't want. And apparently I'm not the only one who feels that way. Americans spoke out. They spoke out by watching. They spoke out by canceling their Disney contracts, their Disney channels, their Disney apps. They spoke out in a lot of ways. A lot of angry letters, notes, calls to Disney, the parent company of abc, and let's give some credit to Bob Iger and ABC and the parent company. They did listen to people. Maybe they did the wrong thing the first time, but they did listen. They did put Jimmy Kimmel back on the air. And what's interesting is how Jimmy Kimmel wove in all the support. He was very gracious in his first night back and he wove in support he got from Republicans like Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro, the right wing commentator and others. And now we're seeing even more support from people like Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is the most popular podcaster arguably in the world, but certainly in the English speaking United States part of the world. He's the king. He is someone who did endorse Trump. He's not a liberal op ed columnist for the New York Times who can simply be dismissed as too liberal a feat and out of touch. It's Joe Rogan, you know, Mr. Muscles, Mr. MMA, Mr. Call it like I see it, who has tremendous credibility with the base of supporters of Trump. And he's supporting Kimmel. He's condemning these actions of the federal government, the fcc, trying to stifle Jimmy Kimmel. So all in all, the tide has changed a little bit. We're not out of this yet, folks. And we'll talk about later in the show, a new survey showing the vast majority of Americans feel like America is coming apart at the seams. But I do feel that this, this was a good sign. This shows that the entire country is not going to just roll over and play dead. We're not all going to be possums saying, yeah, we're dead. Kick me again, run over me again, I won't notice, I won't complain. No, people did speak up. And you know, is Jimmy Kimmel the greatest cause in the world? No. And he rightly pointed out on his first monologue back, his show's not important. He said that. I give him tremendous credit for that. He had grace in class, he pointed out, but it is important to live in a democracy that allows a show like his very, very well stated on Kimmel's part. And is this going to solve the problems long run? I don't know for ABC News, but it's going to solve I think one problem that the government that tries to shut down comedians using the ham fisted approach of we're going to take away your licenses is going to get a lot of blowback not just from l liberals and Democrats and centrists and the so called left, five people who are a part of the left in certain precincts in Manhattan, but from people like Joe Rogan. And it's going to be too hard for this administration to ignore the wishes, the concerns, the political sentiments of not just Joe Rogan, but the people who like him and support him and listen to him. I'm TJ Walker. This is filtered. This is this news show where you get analysis from a sensible, sane centrist. And I'm going to display that in just a moment by attacking a lot of different sides. So if you feel like I'm saying something you like and agree with, hang on, you're going to hear something in a moment where you think, well I don't really agree with that. Can TJ say that? Well, yes, I can say that. And you're going to have a hard time kicking me off the airways or getting my contract from with ABC canceled because I don't have a contract with abc.