Hours before Jimmy Kimmel returned to ABC\u2019s airwaves, Roseanne Barr directed a message at the recently suspended late-night host: \u201cGee Jimmy, if you would have defended me, maybe this wouldn\u2019t have happened to ya.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barr on Tuesday called in to NewsNation<\/a> to air her grievances about former employer ABC, Kimmel\u2019s suspension and his subsequent reinstatement<\/a>. The 72-year-old comedian claimed she faced more professional repercussions over a racist tweet about an Obama-era aide than Kimmel and \u201cThe View\u201d co-host Whoopi Goldberg,<\/a> the latter of whom was suspended briefly in 2022 for erroneous comments about the Holocaust. <\/p>\n Barr\u2019s eponymous series was canceled in 2018<\/a> after a tweet of hers described senior Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett as the child of the Muslim Brotherhood and \u201cPlanet of the Apes.\u201d She apologized and said she thought Jarrett was white, not Black<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI got my whole life ruined. No forgiveness and all of my work stolen and called a racist for time and eternity for racially misgendering someone,\u201d she said Tuesday. \u201cIt just shows how they think. It\u2019s a double standard.\u201d <\/p>\n Kimmel, whom Barr alleged \u201cpurposefully lied,\u201d returned to his post less than a week after ABC pulled him from his usual slot over his comments about MAGA and the suspect in the shooting death of right-wing activist and podcaster Charlie Kirk. Nexstar Media Group \u2014 which owns NewsNation \u2014 and Sinclair Broadcast Group announced last week<\/a> that they would pull \u201cJimmy Kimmel Live!\u201d from their ABC affiliate stations. The two media groups opted<\/a> Tuesday to keep Kimmel off their ABC affiliates despite Disney\u2019s decision to reverse the suspension. <\/p>\n Barr went on to criticize Kimmel and noted that ABC kept working with the comedian despite his past repeated use of blackface<\/a> for \u201cThe Man Show\u201d in the late 1990s and early aughts. He apologized for those performances in 2020. Barr also directed her ire at Sarah Silverman and \u201cThe View\u201d co-host Joy Behar, who both were also subject to backlash <\/a>for their past use of blackface. Her gripes with the network and the other TV personalities segued into a tirade against the left, which she said \u201cunderstands everything in a way different than myself.\u201d<\/p>\n Barr said she feels \u201cI\u2019ve been socially erased everywhere\u201d and overlooked after her 2018 firing, sentiments she previously shared with The Times in 2023<\/a>. When asked if Kimmel\u2019s return signals whether \u201ccancel culture is going in the right direction,\u201d Barr simply said \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think as their viewership tanks, they congratulate themselves,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n During his emotional monologue<\/a> upon returning to the airwaves Tuesday night \u2014 a week after he was suspended \u201cindefinitely\u201d \u2014 Kimmel opened by emphasizing the need for free speech. \u201cOur government cannot be allowed to control what we do and do not say on television, and we have to stand up to it.\u201d<\/p>\n FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said on a podcast two days after Kimmel\u2019s initial comments but before Nexstar and Sinclair urged ABC to take action<\/a>, noting, \u201cWe can do it the easy way or the hard way.\u201d<\/p>\n Kimmel also said his ability to speak freely is \u201csomething I\u2019m embarrassed to say I took for granted until they pulled my friend Stephen [Colbert] off the air and tried to coerce the affiliates who run our show in the cities that you live in to take my show off the air.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s not legal,\u201d he continued. \u201cThat\u2019s not American. That is un-American.\u201d<\/p>\n Colbert was told in July that his show would not be returning to CBS after his contract ends in 2026<\/a>. At the time, CBS parent company Paramount was seeking federal approval to be sold to Skydance Media. Skydance is now said to be preparing an offer to buy Warner Bros. Discovery<\/a>, which owns, among other things, CNN.<\/p>\n Times staff writer Kaitlyn Huamani contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hours before Jimmy Kimmel returned to ABC\u2019s airwaves, Roseanne Barr directed a message at the recently suspended late-night…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":252144,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[8811,127770,133350,1582,276,133351,127271,2961,224,5337,133349,133353,133352,10063,76407,6620,5618,20175,22968,2452],"class_list":{"0":"post-252143","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-abc","9":"tag-abc-affiliate-station","10":"tag-blackface","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-california","13":"tag-double-standard","14":"tag-kimmel","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-los-angeles","17":"tag-losangeles","18":"tag-man-show","19":"tag-newsnation","20":"tag-racist-tweet","21":"tag-roseanne-barr","22":"tag-suspension","23":"tag-time","24":"tag-tuesday","25":"tag-use","26":"tag-view","27":"tag-week"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115261664472725392","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}