More than a few viewers and observers, even some who work in the television business, were surprised that local station owners Nexstar and Sinclair made the first move in the Jimmy Kimmel saga by pulling his show off their air.
But warning signs of discord between networks and affiliates had been flashing for years. Although the Hatfield-McCoy relationship has been fraught since the birth of the medium, streaming and cord-cutting has turned financial skirmishes into an existential contest. There have recently been battles over the 10 p.m. hour and fights about the “leaking” of premium sports and prestige shows from broadcast to streaming. Late-night, then as now, has been a battleground. In 2020, NBCUniversal had to walk back plans to stream Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers at 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., respectively, on Peacock after an affiliate revolt even bigger than the one that greeted the ill-fated Jay Leno primetime experiment in 2009.
Money is at the crux of it, of course. Through all of the changes, and in a pay-TV universe that has shrunk from 100 million households to less than 70 million over the past decade, affiliates are asked to pay higher and higher fees for programming every time they re-up three-year agreements with networks. Because of those economics, “Right now, there is a lot of antipathy among the affiliates toward the networks,” Henry Jessell, founder of digital outlet TVNewsCheck, told Deadline in an interview.
Politics, however, can’t be subtracted from this equation. Sensitivities have been acute in the wake of the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. As Republicans mourned him, they also have called out anyone who, in their view, appeared to have an inadequately respectful response to Kirk’s death. Kimmel, after posting a message of support and love to Kirk’s family on Instagram in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, ventured into different territory this week. With information swirling and the news changing by the minute, including in the hours between the monologue taping and airtime, he joked about the “MAGA gang” scrambling to try to prove that alleged shooter Tyler Robinson is “anything other than one of them.”
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To many on the right, and in the generally right-leaning local TV business, the remark was more than merely insensitive. “He didn’t tell a joke – he told an outright lie,” TV station owner Armstrong Williams fumed on Friday in an interview on WBFF-TV in Baltimore, MD. “As a broadcaster, we are held to a different standard by the FCC. … We cannot allow lies and misinformation to populate in our markets.” FCC restrictions along these lines, he added, have been in place for decades, but “finally they’re being enforced.”
FCC “celebrating”
Brendan Carr, chair of the FCC, is “celebrating,” as Williams put it, after his threat against ABC and Disney set off a chain reaction that led Nexstar and Sinclair to make their move, followed by Disney. The station owners have reason to want to placate the Trump administration as they await regulatory approval for major transactions (including Nexstar’s $6.2 billion megadeal to acquire Tegna). As with most major station groups, their management teams are predominantly Trump backers, though Sinclair as a company has leaned more to the right than has Nexstar, most visibly during Trump’s first term.
Disney also has business before the government, though not with the FCC, with the proposed sale of 10% of ESPN to the NFL in exchange for assets including NFL Network. The media giant also has announced plans to acquire most of Fubo and combine the pay-TV operator with Hulu + Live TV, creating a formidable sports-centric combination that critics and at least one shareholder have assailed as a potential monopoly.
For its part, Nexstar maintains it is not coordinating any activities with the White House or the FCC. “The decision to preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live! was made unilaterally by the senior executive team at Nexstar,” the company said in a statement Thursday, “and they had no communication with the FCC or any government agency prior to making that decision.”
Together, the ABC affiliates of Nexstar and Sinclair reach about one-fourth of the U.S. That means if the diplomatic talks between Disney-ABC and Kimmel’s camp don’t include assurances of resumed carriage on Nexstar and Sinclair stations, any attempt to restore the show to its previous perch would fall short.
“The name of the game is clearances, they need the whole country, not just three-quarters of it,” one veteran local TV exec told Deadline. Agreed another, “It would upend all of the economics of what they’re charging for ads and a lot else.”
Programming flareups
The notion of two of the largest station groups working in concert to lash out at programming they object to is not a new one. In the three-network days and even into the cable era, affiliates had “considerable say on network programming,” notes Jessell, the former editor of Broadcasting & Cable magazine. “In the 1960s, Southern affiliates got CBS to fire Howard K. Smith because of his civil rights commentary, and they were a big factor in the cancellation of the popular Smothers Brother Comedy Hour because of its irreverent satire.”
The Kimmel situation differs from previous clashes, among them the cancellation of Politically Correct after controversial on-air remarks by its host, Bill Maher, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. In those instances, advertisers led the charge against programming or talent they felt should not be on the air. With Kimmel’s comments, there were some ad buyer complaints, but not at historic or especially public levels. “He’s said way worse in the past,” one ad executive said of Kimmel, now in his 23rd year hosting the ABC late-night show. “It’s kind of breathtaking that it would move this quickly based on 10 seconds out of an hour.”
For many stakeholders in the media business, the swiftness and suddenness of the cascading events have cast an undeniable shadow over their operations.
“This is way bigger than canceling a talk show,” one high-level executive at a company with local station holdings told Deadline. “Everyone’s starting to feel like, ‘Welcome to North Korea.’”
If Jimmy Kimmel Live! is unable to return, Disney could opt to move forward but then downgrade Sinclair and Nexstar to much lower “dot-two” digital tiers in retaliation, the executive speculates. ABC did raise eyebrows recently in the major market of Miami by parting ways with Warren Buffett-owned affiliate WPLG in Miami and setting a new plan for a differently constituted affiliate there.
Sports, one of the last bastions of bipartisan broadcast TV viewing, is apt to keep the network-station binary from completely dissolving. Disney, it is worth noting, has rights to the February 2027 Super Bowl, which will be just the fourth edition of the title game to appear on ABC and the first on ESPN. Despite all that is now in flux, local affiliates will surely still make it a priority to iron out any issues with the Mouse House by then.
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