> is that MAGA is playing politics by arguing about attribution.
Arguing about attribution would only be wrong, or worth pointing out, if they had a "MAGA" dead to rights about it. The context is a show that frequently bashes "MAGA", Trump and that entire political alignment, and only gets significant viewership when doing so.
> in the early hours it did look like the shooter might have been a groyper
This was a strained interpretation essentially based on the idea that groypers immerse themselves in 4chan political memes, as if it were exclusive to them. They have an /lgbt/ board.
But even if that had panned out, groypers are a separate, barely-comprehensible "far group". Rounding them off to "MAGA" would still be wrong.
> The "offensive" content needs to be deliberately inferred
No, it doesn't. It's an ordinary reading of a common idiom on these sorts of political punditry shows. If you're accusing someone of "trying to characterize X as anything other than Y", this accusation has force because you allege that X is Y, that the truth of this is plain, and that the person you accuse is trying to hide an inconvenient truth. And we know that this was intended as an accusation of doing something harmful because he described the "MAGA gang" as "hitting a new low" in doing so.
Kimmel's statement projected an unjustified and irresponsible confidence in something that now appears to have been clearly wrong.
> and the appropriate response is to clarify and apologize.
I see no reason to suppose that this would have happened. It also would have to be a retraction, not a clarification, because pointing out that the argument about attribution was justified cannot be a "clarification" of describing that act of attribution as "hitting a new low".
> We all know what actually happened isn't about what Kimmel actually said.
I agree that other reasons existed to fire him, mainly, declining ratings.
The guy also just isn't funny. He doesn't demonstrate any wit. He was just providing a space where people who wanted to mock Trump (or hear such mockery) could feel validated. There isn't exactly a dearth of such spaces.