Federal Communications Commission Chairman (FCC) Brendan Carr has been watching for major television networks to make a "wrong move" so he can pull the plug, an FCC source told the Daily Mail last month.

Sure, President Donald Trump was happy about Stephen Colbert's show getting cancelled (due to low ratings, not his political speech), but the source thought there would be another casualty soon.

"I told you so," the source emailed the outlet on Thursday after Kimmel was indefinitely suspended due to the outcry from comments he made about the murder of Charlie Kirk at an outdoor event.

The offensive comment from Kimmel:

The MAGA gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

Pressure campaign

Carr has a personal connection to right-wing host Benny Johnson, who campaigned "all day" after Kimmel's comments for him to be taken off the air. He was joined by so-called "MAGA twitter" in putting pressure on ABC stations.

Local syndication groups Nextstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group both said they would take Kimmel off the air at their stations even if ABC didn't, and this seems like more of a decision point than Carr's comments (hopefully).

It doesn't seem like a good idea to have the FCC chair pressuring ABC to remove shows or personalities, although Carr said it was because Kimmel lied about the Kirk shooter being "MAGA," which he definitely was not.

Still, it smacks of the kind of censorship that conservatives fumed about the Obama and Biden administrations doing when they pressured Big Tech to shut down Trump's social media accounts after January 6 as well as the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story right before the 2020 election.

Tit for tat?

Maybe this is tit for tat, or just how the game is going to be played now that Democrats broke the system, but what will that do for free speech?

Something about the way it went down doesn't sit exactly right, although Kimmel absolutely deserves to be taken off the air just for his dismal ratings, let alone his repeated insensitive and downright misinformative political comments, and not just the ones about Charlie Kirk.

Politicians used to avoid the appearance of impropriety, but I guess those days are over.

Now, anything goes as long as it can't be proven illegal in a court of law. Leaders have taken the maxim, "It's better to ask forgiveness than ask permission" to heart.

Like Trump, I want the television airwaves to be neutral and unbiased, the way they were meant to be. If not neutral and unbiased, they need to declare their bias instead of hiding behind a mask of false neutrality.

Finding a way to do that without violating the First Amendment should be the FCC's top priority, and so far it seems like things are moving in the right direction.