Nextel, Sinclair Fold On Kimmel Ban, Showing Once Again That If You Fight Trumpism, You Usually Win

from the community-“service” dept

There’s a bit of a trend emerging: when you decide to stand up and fight against Donald Trump and his parade of dim authoritarian sycophants, you usually win. If you fecklessly fold (like CBS, Meta, Columbia, and countless others), these annoying assholes just keep pushing you harder for concessions.

That’s certainly the lesson from ABC’s effort to ban Jimmy Kimmel for no good reason.

The flood of public outrage at the Disney/FCC suspension 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.

And while local right wing broadcast affiliates Nexstar and Sinclair tried to impose their will and extend the ban, that didn’t work out well either. Both companies continued to “pre-empt” Kimmel last week with reruns and game shows, but announced on Friday they’d be returning his program to the air after annoyed locals had some success convincing advertisers to pull their funding.

Both companies were hoping to curry favor with the Trump administration, which is planning to eliminate the country’s remaining media consolidation limits and rubber stamp another round of mergers that will make U.S. local broadcast journalism worse than ever. And while both companies may have convinced Donald they’re very obedient poodles, their efforts clearly came with a public cost.

In internal memos and public statements, both companies tried to insist they were simply trying to protect local communities from dangerous comedians despite the fact Kimmel said absolutely nothing remotely controversial. Sinclair put it this way in a statement issued last Friday:

“Our objective throughout this process has been to ensure that programming remains accurate and engaging for the widest possible audience. We take seriously our responsibility as local broadcasters to provide programming that serves the interests of our communities, while also honoring our obligations to air national network programming.

…As a company rooted in local stations, Sinclair remains committed to serving our communities with programming that reflects their priorities, earns their trust, and promotes constructive dialogue.”

This line of bullshit is particularly amusing given Sinclair’s history of airing everything from dangerous election fraud conspiracy theories to dangerous right wing medical disinformation. That’s stuff that really does harm the local communities they “serve,” but because it’s in line with management’s radical right wing ideology, it apparently gets a pass.

Sinclair then proceeds to pretend that this had nothing to do with government censorship, insisting they’d decided to engage in stupid behavior all on their own:

“Our decision to preempt this program was independent of any government interaction or influence. Free speech provides broadcasters with the right to exercise judgment as to the content on their local stations. While we understand that not everyone will agree with our decisions about programming, it is simply inconsistent to champion free speech while demanding that broadcasters air specific content.”

This too is amusing, given that all of the major broadcasters, Sinclair, Nexstar, and Tegna, are all pushing the Trump administration to let them merge into one even bigger, shittier, company. Similarly the big four networks (ABC, FOX, CBS, NBC) have been lobbying the Trump administration to eliminate other protections banning mergers among media’s biggest companies.

Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr clearly was (once again) abusing his agency’s merger approval authority to bully companies into doing the administration’s bidding if they want their mergers approved, which is illegal censorship and a trampling of the First Amendment regardless of whether Sinclair and Nexstar executives are feckless dipshits who were enthusiastic about the whole thing.

Brendan Carr had been hinting for months before the Kimmel ban that one of his top priorities would be to strengthen local right wing broadcasters trying to dress up right wing propaganda as journalism. Both by rubber stamping their harmful mergers, and by giving them greater government support in their battles for concessions with their nationwide affiliate partners.

Carr clearly saw the Kimmel situation as an opportunity to test the waters. It went… poorly, with Carr and the agency receiving massive, unprecedented public backlash from Republicans and Democrats alike. Carr’s now making the rounds trying to lie about what happened, hoping to fend off several fledgling investigations into his clearly illegal abuse of FCC power and waste of taxpayer resources.

Filed Under: brendan carr, bullies, censorship, comedians, cowards, donald trump, first amendment, jimmy kimmel, journalism, local broadcasters, media

Companies: abc, disney, nexstar, sinclair, tegna