Day: September 23, 2025

• Bob Iger’s legacy at Disney is at stake amid culture wars and pressure from the FCC.
• Disney is reinstating Jimmy Kimmel, but affiliates like Sinclair and Nexstar won’t air it.
• Kimmel’s suspension over comments on Charlie Kirk’s death sparked boycotts and backlash.

Jimmy Kimmel is back on ABC, but Bob Iger’s reputation might not get a ratings boost.

Disney’s decision to reinstate Kimmel’s show after benching him over comments he made in the wake of the killing of political activist Charlie Kirk might have quieted some critics, but it didn’t signal the final act for the drama starring Disney’s CEO.

Soon after Disney announced the return of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” two top ABC affiliate operators, Sinclair Broadcasting Group and Nexstar Media Group, said they would continue to air alternative programming in place of the show.

While the creative class that Iger has long courted has largely celebrated Kimmel’s reinstatement, how it all will play out is still unclear. And some people who threatened to cancel their subscriptions to protest Kimmel’s suspension said they would continue to boycott the company.

How the saga ends could be pivotal in cementing the legacy that Iger has worked so hard to mold — both during his first 15-year run as head of the company and in a second act that began in 2022, corporate observers and entertainment insiders told Business Insider.

“Whether he’s remembered as a CEO who made billions of dollars for this corporation, or as the one who made the right choices in difficult times, I think people will pay more attention to the difficult choices,” Christopher Myers, the faculty director of the Center for Innovative Leadership at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, told Business Insider.

Meanwhile, Iger faces a Cinderella problem: He has about 15 months before the clock strikes, and his contract as CEO is set to end.

“This will be sort of the lasting image — the final taste in people’s mouths — of his legacy,” Myers said, referring to Iger’s actions in the Kimmel saga. Myers said that when people think about leaders, they often over-emphasize initial actions and the most recent things they’ve done.

Disney didn’t respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Corporate tug-of-war

When running a company, CEOs inevitably face times when doing what is best for the bottom line and doing what’s popular come into conflict.

Iger himself has addressed the issue.

“When you’re dealing with right and wrong or when you’re dealing with something that does have profound impact on your business, I just think you have to do what is right and not worry about the potential backlash to it,” he said on CNN in 2022, discussing his predecessor’s botched response to the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

CEOs have a moral obligation to shareholders, among others, to do right by the company and give investors a reasonable return, said Jeffrey Moriarty, a philosophy professor who directs Bentley University’s Hoffman Center for Business Ethics. He said that Iger could decide that, in this case, shareholders’ concerns trump those about free speech.

Obvious business considerations went into the call to pull Kimmel.

Nexstar and Sinclair’s decisions to stop airing the show could mean fewer ad dollars for Disney. Disney also needs FCC approval for its pending deals with the NFL and Fubo.

“He’s trying to steer a middle course in defense of Disney’s core values,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for leadership studies at Yale School of Management, referring to Iger. “And Kimmel is a hired hand who has to respect the same objective.”

Sonnenfeld said he doesn’t think Kimmelgate will stain Iger’s legacy. As Sonnenfeld sees it, the CEO was doing what he’s done in the past: staking out a middle ground to appeal to a broad audience while avoiding divisive language, like when he canceled Roseanne Barr’s show or stood up to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

A big difference is that in this case, Trump-appointed FCC chair Brendan Carr was threatening Disney over the show, and yanking Kimmel left the impression in Hollywood that Iger was throwing free speech under the bus. Even some GOP lawmakers said the FCC chair went too far. Disney’s saying it would “indefinitely suspend” Kimmel with no further explanation freaked out people in the creative community, some of whom heard it as Kimmel being canceled for good.

Bentley University’s Moriarty said the speed at which Disney appeared to acquiesce to pressure from Carr and affiliates raised the question of how much the company was willing to fight for its values.

It’s a concern shared by Disney’s Hollywood home base. Creatives — a key engine of Disney — denounced Kimmel’s cancellation, attended rallies, and some high-profile figures vowed never to work with the company again.

“Without the creatives, there is no business,” said Michael Santoro, a professor of management and entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University.

In the days between Kimmel’s suspension and return, the number of X posts that expressed support for a boycott of ABC or Disney was more than two times the number that expressed support for firing Kimmel, social analytics firm PeakMetrics found.

Faced with the uncertainty of boycotts, cancellations, and a growing number of Hollywood stars vowing they’d never work with Disney again, Iger had to bring back Kimmel to protect his legacy — even if the affiliates decide not to carry Kimmel’s show and it costs Disney in ad revenue, one veteran Hollywood PR exec told Business Insider.

“The reputation damage of him leaving outweighs the cost of keeping him,” they said.

A legacy do-over

Iger is no stranger to storytelling. He’s long cultivated a reputation as a staunch supporter of the creator class. His Disney career started at ABC, where he was a studio supervisor. His wife, Willow Bay, is a journalism school dean.

Iger helped build the modern Disney with acquisitions like Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, and the launch of Disney+. During his first run, the company’s market cap ballooned more than 400%.

After retiring, he returned to the company in 2022 to fix problems left by his first successor, Bob Chapek. Chapek’s run overlapped with the depths of the pandemic and saw a drop in the company’s stock price and fights over Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Iger’s most important remaining task — to help identify his next successor — might now be overshadowed by the Kimmel situation.

Disney has been a culture war focal point

Disney has increasingly become a flash point in the culture wars, threatening its positioning as the squeaky clean entertainment brand with broad appeal. Since Iger’s return to power, conservative critics have ramped up their attacks against Disney, taking aim at its inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters or racially diverse casts. In combating that narrative, Iger has committed to no more “woke” Disney and shown his willingness to give concessions to Trump.

In December, Disney’s ABC agreed to pay $15 million to then-president-elect Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation suit.

The Kimmel situation has provoked a greater public reaction than the settlement — and there are lingering questions.

What, if any, concessions did both sides make to restore Kimmel? Did Kimmel, who has a history of taking jabs at the president, agree to dial back his Trump jokes? Will his reinstatement quell the boycotts, which historically don’t make much of a dent, and how much damage did they do? What will Trump say? Will he go after Disney and the press all the harder and encourage people to boycott the company?

All of this leaves the head mouse caught between a trap and a hard place.

• Big Tech platforms used to insist they didn’t have an anti-conservative bias.
• Now, they’re saying something a little different: They’ve never had a bias, but the Biden administration tried to bias them.
• First Meta, now Google: They’re putting those statements into letters, which are useful for Trump and his Republican allies.

How does one of the world’s most powerful companies please powerful Republicans — without actually doing that much?

Mark Zuckerberg figured out that trick in the summer of 2024. That’s when he sent a letter to Congress that sort-of-but-not-really apologized for behavior conservatives have accused Big Tech platforms of for years — but also said the real bad actors were Joe Biden and his administration.

Now, we’re seeing Google use the same playbook, with one twist, which we’ll get to in a minute.

But the very big picture is that Google, like Meta in 2024, is attempting to give a win to Jim Jordan, the Republican Congressman who has long been trying to prove that Big Tech platforms are biased against conservatives. But it’s trying to do that without admitting that it did much wrong itself.

So, in a letter to Jordan, released on Tuesday, Google spends a lot of time explaining that it has always been committed to free expression, and other ideas that aren’t remotely controversial. It also doesn’t acknowledge that it made any mistakes when it dealt with controversial claims during the COVID-19 pandemic, or the claims Donald Trump and his supporters made about the 2020 election.

But Google’s letter, like Zuckerberg’s letter in 2024, does accuse the Biden administration of attempting to influence the way the company dealt with content on its platforms. Biden and his officials “created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms,” Google reports. (While we’re here, it’s worth noting that Zuckerberg’s letter was signed by Zuckerberg. The Google letter was signed by Dan Donovan, an attorney at King & Spalding who specializes in congressional investigations.)

If you’re jumping into this story without any history or context, Google’s statements might seem like a meaningful disclosure — that a giant tech platform says the last president tried to bend it to his will.

But the truth is that all of the Big Tech platforms actively and publicly sought input from the White House — during both the Trump 1.0 and Biden administrations — about the best way to handle claims about the virus. And all of them struggled to balance that guidance against what some of their users wanted to do.

How the platforms handled that debate — as well as one about the way to handle claims about the 2020 election results — is still an ongoing discussion.

But that’s not what Google is getting into here. It’s simply saying that it did its best, and that the Biden administration tried to sway it, and it makes no mention at all of what the Trump administration did.

Meaning that Google very consciously provided Jordan with a letter that would allow him to claim that Google says the Biden administration pushed it around for the last few years, even if that’s not really what it says.

Sure enough, that’s exactly how Jordan’s committee summarizes the Google letter. It notes that Google says “the Biden Administration pressured Google to censor Americans and remove content that did not violate YouTube’s policies,” and that “The Biden Administration censorship pressure was ‘unacceptable and wrong.'”

But, unlike Meta, Google did use the letter to announce an actual policy change: It is going to give YouTube users who were kicked off the platform for violating policies about COVID or the election “an opportunity” to come back.

A Google rep declined to explain how that opportunity would be administered, and whether it applies to everyone who’s ever been kicked off — or just people who were booted for violating COVID or election-related rules.

But it certainly suggests that high-profile conservatives like Dan Bongino — who was booted off YouTube in 2022, and is now the second-highest ranking official at the FBI — will be allowed back on the world’s biggest video platform.

The fact that Google booted a user four years ago, and is likely to reinstate him now, when he’s one of the most powerful men in government, is quite a story. It also nicely explains why Google and the other tech platforms are so uncomfortable with any kind of decision-making about the properties they own. Decisions that might have seemed OK in one political climate get reversed in a new one — so why make any calls at all?

Still, the YouTube news is less jarring when you look at the overall context: As the letter notes, YouTube and Google had already been removing restrictions about COVID and election speech in the last few years — before Trump was re-elected.

And as media reporter Oliver Darcy has noted, YouTube TV, the company’s pay TV offering, recently signed a deal with One America News Network — the same outlet YouTube had suspended during the pandemic (after Joe Biden’s 2020 election, but while Trump was still serving out his first term).

So this is the kind of concession that Google can offer Jordan, without making much of a concession at all: Your political opponents tried to pressure us, but we resisted. And we’re not saying we screwed up by kicking people off — but they can come back, anyway.

And that seems to be the way Big Tech is approaching government in general during Trump 2.0. You give the President and his allies something for public consumption — your presence at the inauguration, or a gold-and-glass bauble, a letter saying his predecessor acted badly — and you get to keep on doing business, more or less as normal.

Let’s see if that playbook keeps working.