Local ABC Affiliates Are Getting Slammed

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.