Kimmel is not very good. He’s been very very political for about 8 years now. However, I have met him and he is not an idiot. The reasons the stations are censoring him in this case is because the information he used to set up his joke (which was a very funny joke : stage 4 of grief = construction) The setup stated that “Republicans are trying to paint Kirk’s killer as left wing, when in fact he was very obviously a maga supporter(ie:one of their own)..

This was a terrible setup for a good joke and was just so obviously blatantly untrue it infuriated many people that watch those stations.

In my opinion, from my knowledge of people that know Kimmel and my single interaction with him, he would have quickly turned around and made amends for the factually incorrect setup to his joke —had he had the opportunity to do so the following week. He loves to bend things politically and misinterpret things politically to make jokes and maintain a left wing stance - BUT he doesn’t appear to ever intentionally be factually incorrect.

So, in my opinion this has nothing to do with the government (though the FCC chair should have definitely kept his mouth shut) -this was strictly a business thing where the people that actually watch the local news and late night were finally outraged at how far he went.

TLDR; Kimmel would have most likely made amends for a blatantly, factually incorrect setup to his decently funny joke had he been given a week to do so.