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Early this week, at an ABC affiliate owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the phones were ringing off the hook. Every two minutes, someone was calling to complain about Jimmy Kimmel’s show being suspended from their local station. On Monday afternoon, an announcement had been made: ABC was going to put him back on air Tuesday night. But not Sinclair and Nexstar, which together own seventy partner stations, according to Reuters, representing more than 25 percent of ABC affiliates nationwide and reaching 23 percent of American households. “Managers were just kind of scrambling to figure out if they needed to get it into the newscast, and then we got word from corporate that we had to wait, and everyone was just really frustrated, and remarking about how ridiculous the situation was,” a reporter at the station said.
Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has framed the conflict—one that he started last week, when he said on a podcast that Kimmel’s comments about the killing of Charlie Kirk represented “the sickest conduct possible” and posed a strong case for action—as a struggle between local stations and national programmers. For the first time, he’s argued, affiliates have now felt able to push back against their overlords. “And that is a good thing because we want empowered TV stations,” he declared on X. “After all, local TV stations—not the national programmers—have public interest obligations, and they should be making decisions that in their view meet the needs of their local communities.” But that dynamic is complicated by reality, as local stations field an onslaught of complaints from viewers, many of whom struggle to grasp that the decision was not theirs to make.
Fewer and fewer local broadcasters are independently owned: “In the early eighties, it was north of fifty companies that owned or controlled 90 percent of broadcast media. And I think over the last decade or so, it’s become five or six, depending on how you break it down,” Reed Showalter, the former antitrust enforcer now running for Congress in Illinois, said. Nexstar is pursuing a six-billion-dollar merger with Tegna, a competitor, which owns thirteen ABC-affiliated stations—a number that would put their shared total above the national cap and require Carr’s blessing. The Sinclair employee said that, as messages pour in, they are passed up the corporate ladder, but what happens from there is opaque; there has been no company-wide email providing employees with guidance on how to respond to frustrated audience members.
Scripps, which owns eighteen ABC-affiliated stations, likewise fielded a major outcry over ABC’s suspension of Kimmel: “These responses included calls from people who, not understanding the relationship between the ABC network and ABC affiliates, asked our stations to reinstate Jimmy Kimmel—many citing free speech,” Rebecca McCarter, a spokesperson, said. “Other calls to our ABC stations threatened boycotts of ABC and protests outside ABC stations until Jimmy Kimmel was reinstated.” For its part, on Tuesday, Scripps followed ABC in bringing him back on air—a move that elicited both calls in support and demands that the company preempt the show.
“From a decency standpoint, we feel Mr. Kimmel was out of line and that the healing of our country doesn’t seem to take much importance with some of our leading media personalities,” Louis Wall, the president of Sagamore Hill Broadcasting, a privately owned broadcaster in Georgia, said. But Wall, who considers himself to be “very supportive” of the First Amendment, has suddenly had to navigate a complex and often contradictory set of political, ideological, and financial concerns. “Broadcast is under attack from so many different mediums and video sources, we don’t need another piece of our armor or another piece of our programming to be lost,” he said. “If we lost Jimmy Kimmel, the industry would lose too, as a side product of the decisions of the political brass, and we would be losing an audience that would be starting to look in other places.”
Consider Nexstar’s announcement that, if you really want to see Kimmel, you can skip local television—even the television set altogether—and watch his show on one of the streaming products offered by Disney, ABC’s corporate parent. The companies that own local affiliates “depend on viewer loyalty,” Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a senior counselor at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, a nonpartisan advocacy nonprofit, said. “If the viewers go watch or go to YouTube to watch Kimmel, they may never come back.”
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