The Right Wing Zealots At Sinclair & Nexstar Push Their Luck, Refuse To Put Jimmy Kimmel Back On The Air

from the good-luck-with-that dept

The flood of outrage at the Disney/FCC cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel ultimately forced the company to retreat and put Kimmel back on the air. Disney apparently didn’t much like the wave of folks cancelling their Disney+ streaming video subscriptions in response to the government and a major corporation coordinating a frontal assault on the First Amendment.

Some insiders at Disney indicated that Disney had a planned Disney+ price hike coming this week, and executives worried the backlash to both was going to cause significant financial harm to their quarterly numbers, as revealed by independent journalist Marisa Kabas.

Indeed, on Tuesday morning the price hike was confirmed.

Local ABC broadcast affiliate owner Sinclair Broadcasting, however, appears intent on pushing its luck. We’ve long pointed out how the right wing broadcaster is basically GOP propaganda pretending to be local news. The company has an extended history of kissing Trump’s ass, airing all kinds of pro-Trump propaganda (the company’s infamous “must run” segments), and is often cozy with white nationalists.

Sinclair says it will continue to “pre-empt” Jimmy Kimmel Live! as some sort of misguided punishment for Kimmel’s (fairly tame) criticism of their beloved President:

“Beginning Tuesday night, Sinclair will be preempting Jimmy Kimmel Live! across our ABC affiliate stations and replacing it with news programming. Discussions with ABC are ongoing as we evaluate the show’s potential return.”

Soon after Sinclair’s announcement, Nexstar followed suit and said it would also not show Kimmel’s show despite the high ratings it was guaranteed to get last night.

Sinclair owns 39 ABC-affiliated stations across the country, including WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C. The company, along with the nation’s other major right wing local broadcaster, Nexstar, originally demanded Kimmel issue an apology (for doing nothing really wrong), and donate to Charlie Kirk’s right wing outreach (and dim college kid disinformation project), Turning Point USA.

Nexstar is pushing for Trump FCC approval of a $6.2 billion deal merger with Tegna, which is part of a massive new wave of harmful media consolidation under Trump 2.0. The Kimmel saga began when FCC boss Brendan Carr, once again abused the agency’s regulatory approval powers to convince Sinclair and Nexstar that pre-empting Kimmel for criticizing the President would be in their best interests.

That’s clearly an illegal government effort to cancel free speech, and Disney has paid the price already. The censorship effort saw widespread, bipartisan backlash, including (somewhat surprisingly) from the likes of Senators Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell, and former Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson. They’re at least aware enough to know that this sort of abuse of government power could inevitably be turned against them.

Sinclair likely still believes that pushing its luck and continuing to “pre-empt” Kimmel gives them additional leeway within the Trump administration, cements their power in the right wing propaganda ecosystem, and makes merger approval more likely. But that’s going to come with an obvious ratings cost, and any costs incurred by those identifying Sinclair stations and contacting their advertisers to complain in the weeks to come:

Ultimately Sinclair and Nexstar may get more harmful media consolidation approved, but it’s likely going to be more trouble than it was worth. The MAGA set clearly thinks they can exploit Charlie Kirk’s death to escalate their war on their ideological enemies, but having been pickled in their own propaganda, one gets the sense they’re really not tuned into how violently unpopular their “movement” is becoming (something set to get worse as the impacts of things like tariffs, the elimination of all corporate oversight, and the evisceration of the social safety net begin to arrive in concussive waves).

Meanwhile, local broadcast television was also already seeing steady viewership declines as their mostly older audience dies off; advertising yourself as a bunch of weird censorial zealots engaged in fake journalism in service to an unpopular idiot king isn’t likely to help the company make inroads with a younger target demographic essential for the company’s longer term survival.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, brendan carr, censorship, fcc, jimmy kimmel, journalism, local broadcasting, mergers, speech

Companies: abc, disney, nexstar, sinclair, tegna