Barstool Sports chief Dave Portnoy is doubling down on his claim that the loss of airtime Jimmy Kimmel is facing is not in any way a free speech issue.
Portnoy took to his X account on Thursday to reiterate that Kimmel is not suffering any loss of free speech at all, despite the fact that his show was removed from the air over the late-night comedian lying and saying that Charlie Kirk’s assassin is a MAGA voter.
“We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them…”,” Kimmel said, characterizing the murderer as a member of MAGA during his monologue on Monday.
In his video message, Portnoy stated that Kimmel’s situation is “not cancel culture” and explained that cancel culture is about retribution.
“What cancel culture is, is when you don’t like someone. Say me. ‘We want to get rid of Dave. So we are going to comb through everything Dave has said for the past 20 years, and we are going to find things we don’t like that don’t fit in this time period,’ whatever. That’s cancel culture to me,” he said.
“This, what happened to Kimmel, I would say, is consequences for actions in real time,” he continued.
“Statements in real time. He made jokes people didn’t like. He tried to say the assassin was a part of the far-right MAGA. He’s not. And then Sinclair communications was like, ‘This is garbage our people in our markets don’t want to see this. We are preemptively pulling him off the air,’ forcing ABC’s hand,” Portnoy added.
“This is not a free speech issue to me. I have always said to our employees, you can say whatever you want on your personals, but your speech has consequences. If advertisers or people start putting pressure on me because you’re saying things that they don’t like, this is a capitalist market — if the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, decisions have to be made,” he said.
“His ratings are clearly down, he’s making a ton of money. He’s creating, clearly, headaches for ABC and the affiliate. He’s not a journalist. This isn’t freedom of the press,” Portnoy explained.
“This isn’t freedom of speech,” he reiterated. “This isn’t cancel culture. This is Jimmy Kimmel, who isn’t being successful enough right now, right here in time for all of these headaches to be worth it to keep him on the air. Anytime you work for somebody else, anything you say that creates giant headaches for your boss could end with career repercussions.”
“With Kimmel getting canned, I’m seeing lots of people talking about the hypocrisy of cancel culture,” Portnoy said in the original tweet. “To me, cancel culture is when people go out of their way to dig up old tweets, videos, etc., looking for dirt on somebody they don’t like in an effort to get them fired,” he said.
Portnoy concluded, saying, “Like if Kimmel got canceled for shit he did on the Man Show, that would be cancel culture. But when a person says something that a ton of people find offensive, rude, dumb in real time, and then that person is punished for it, that’s not cancel culture. That is consequences for your actions.”
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