the network suing the government over censorship told rosie o'donnell no. she ran the segment herself.

via The Daily Beast, HuffPost and LateNighter.

On August 18, Disney walked into federal court in Washington and accused the United States government of running a retaliatory campaign against ABC over what ABC chooses to put on the air. That same week, ABC was on the phone to its guest host, telling her what she could not put on the air.

Rosie O'Donnell spent a week in August behind Jimmy Kimmel's desk. She told the Jann Arden Podcast, in an episode picked up Monday, what she had wanted for the final night. "My idea for the last night was to do the Epstein reveal, and they said that they were certain that could not happen," she said. Her answer, per HuffPost: "Well, then I'm going to do it myself."

Which she did, somewhere the network could not reach. On September 3 she posted a video of herself with several Epstein survivors, all in white, singing Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman." It went around. What was not public until this week is that you were watching a segment a broadcast network had killed.

The Epstein piece was not the only casualty. Before her first taping, she said, the network pulled "Donnie Boy," her parody of "Danny Boy," leaving her with "five minutes to prepare a different monologue for an ending to the monologue." She sang it on her last night anyway and closed by telling the president to resign.

She has had a complicated fortnight in the gay press for unrelated reasons. Clay Aiken spent the weekend saying she outed him on live television in 2006, though he thinks she meant well. On this one the antagonist is not in doubt.

Disney's complaint says the administration "has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts." FCC chair Brendan Carr calls the suit meritless. Both halves can be true at once, and appear to be. A network can be genuinely persecuted by the government and still do the government's job for it over the phone, quietly, to the guest host it hired to fill the chair. Every network walked out of the White House pool over this principle. The call still came.