Meghan McCain and Roseanne Barr know better than most what it’s like to feel forced out of a job on the ABC airwaves. That didn’t earn ousted late-night host Jimmy Kimmel any sympathy from the former network stars.
The outspoken conservatives celebrated Kimmel’s indefinite suspension from the airwaves on social media, with both celebs calling it a long-overdue taste of progressive Hollywood’s bitter medicine.
In a post to X, Barr sarcastically lamented Kimmel’s situation.
“Yeah, imagine an administration putting pressure on a television channel to fire a comedian they didn’t like,” she wrote.
Barr’s eponymous ABC sitcom was cancelled after she compared Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, to an ape. In a series of posts to X following Kimmel’s ouster, Barr misrepresented the posts that led to her show’s cancellation, saying she was fired for criticizing a deal between the United States and Iran. She also implied she was fired because Obama pressured the network.
Reporting on the end of “Roseanne,” which was the most-watched scripted show on broadcast television in its final season, found that Barr’s comments disgusted the writer’s room. At the time, Barr repeatedly apologized for her post and blamed it on taking the sleep aid Ambien.
I can’t believe they fired @jimmykimmel for saying Valerie Jarret’s Iran deal was an existential threat to Israel.
— Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) September 18, 2025
McCain painted ABC’s decision as just desserts for what she saw as the network’s animus toward the GOP.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I’ve been warning everyone for years how much ABC hates Republicans,” she wrote on X. “One way or another, it was always going to inevitably have ramifications.”
McCain left her job as co-host of “The View” of her own volition after a contentious stint on the daytime talk show. Though McCain was far from the first conservative to sit down at the show’s “hot topics” table — Elizabeth Hasselbeck co-hosted the show for a decade, and current co-host Alyssa Griffin served in the Trump administration — McCain felt she was targeted for her political beliefs.
“I was working on the show as the only conservative during the Trump years. I felt like a lot of people took out their anger on the administration on me because I was the only person in the building who was a Republican,” she told Variety in 2021. “I felt like I was too many degrees of separation close to Trump, despite the fact that everyone who worked on the show saw firsthand how much President Trump and his family put me through emotionally.”
Neither McCain nor Barr spoke much about the key difference between Kimmel’s exit from ABC and theirs. They were not targeted by a sitting presidential administration or threatened by a government official who could revoke ABC’s broadcast license.
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