MAGA’s Little Media Helpers

When Jimmy Kimmel made his dramatic return to ABC’s airwaves on Sept. 23, I was eager to be one of the over 6 million who tuned in. Only I couldn’t, at least not on TV.

That’s because the local ABC station in the Washington, D.C., area, WJLA, is owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Network. And the right-wing network refused to air the “Jimmy Kimmel Show!” on any of its 38 ABC affiliates.

Every few years, a controversy like Kimmel’s suspension erupts and Sinclair is briefly in the headlines. (The last big one was in 2018, when Sinclair made its anchors across the country read from the same Trumpian script, which looked like proof-of-life hostage videos.) Then the news cycle moves on, and Sinclair slinks out of sight … where it seems to only grow stronger.

In the wake of Kimmel’s (innocuous) comments following right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s death, Sinclair wasn’t the first ABC affiliate owner to suspend his show. That honor goes to Texas-based Nexstar, which made the move earlier the same day on Sept. 17.

Nexstar’s announcement came only hours after President Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, publicly threatened ABC stations if they didn’t yank Kimmel. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr famously said.

Nexstar had financial incentive to accede to Carr’s demand. Already the largest network of local TV stations — with 200 nationwide — Nexstar is looking to grow even bigger by gobbling up a competitor, Tegna, for $6.2 billion. But there’s a problem with this deal: It’s illegal.

Prior to 1996, when President Bill Clinton teamed up with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich to pass the “corrupt” Telecommunications Act, “a company could own only 12 TV stations nationwide — not 200,” FAIR founder Jeff Cohen wrote in Salon.

Today, a company can’t own stations reaching more than 39% of U.S. households. This law prevents a company from directly accessing most American homes via TV — which seems like a reasonable safeguard against, say, an authoritarian putsch.

But this sort of media consolidation is precisely what Trump is aiming for, so long as his friends are in charge, as they increasingly are.

‘100% MAGA-related’

In July, Trump’s FCC approved the $8.4 billion sale of Paramount, which owns CBS, to Skydance Media, which is owned by David Ellison, the son of Trump confidant Larry Ellison, who is the co-founder of software giant Oracle and second-richest person alive.

Shortly before the sale, Paramount announced it was canceling “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” beginning in May. “Many suspected that Colbert’s head was a gift to Trump by the company’s new owner, David Ellison,” the Financial Times reported.

Trump celebrated the announcement, then quickly pivoted to another late-night host who regularly poked fun at him. “Jimmy Kimmel is next,” Trump posted.

Presently, Trump is steering another major media property into the maw of his cronies. While specifics on the forced sale of TikTok are hard to come by, investor Ashwin Binwani told Bloomberg it “could be the most undervalued tech acquisition of the decade.”

TikTok’s Trump-approved owners likely include Larry Ellison, as well as Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, owners of Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.

When asked if TikTok will now bend the knee to him, Trump said the expected thing: “Every group … will be treated very fairly.” But that was only after he said the quiet part out loud: “I always like MAGA-related. If I could, I’d make it 100% MAGA-related.”

To be clear, such media consolidation was a problem long before Trump came on the scene. But Trump has hastened this consolidation, while making no secret that he’s doing so in service of his own interests. Which brings us back to Nexstar.

If it buys Tegna, Nexstar will surpass the 39% ownership limit by a country mile, creating a company with direct television access to 80% of U.S. homes, more than double what’s legally allowed at present.

From Trump’s point of view, what’s not to like? Nexstar is led by a conservative, Perry Sook, and the company has shown it is willing to play ball by suspending Kimmel on a moment’s notice. In light of this, the only surprise would be if Trump’s FCC doesn’t OK the merger.

‘Always in deal mode’

Like Nexstar, Sinclair also had financial incentive to jump when the FCC chair said to, since the company is “always in deal mode and in need of regulatory OKs,” the New York Post noted.

Indeed, if the Nexstar-Tegna merger falls through, Sinclair is ready to scoop up Tegna’s 64 stations for itself, which would make it larger than Nexstar. Of course, that deal would also make a mockery of the TV ownership limit, and would therefore also need the FCC’s blessing.

But even without the financial incentive, I think Sinclair might still have suspended Kimmel. That would certainly be consistent with the network’s long and partisan track record.

With that history in mind, when I saw reports on Sept. 17 that Nexstar would not carry Kimmel’s show, I knew Sinclair couldn’t be far behind.

True to form, Sinclair not only followed suit, but one-upped Nexstar by demanding Kimmel “make a meaningful personal donation” to both Charlie Kirk’s family and his far-right organization, Turning Point USA. (David Smith, Sinclair’s longtime leader, personally donated $250,000 to the group last year.)

Nexstar and Sinclair were flexing in once unimaginable ways in part because they have grown unimaginably big over the past two decades. Today, Nexstar and Sinclair together own around 25% of all ABC affiliates. And combined with Gray, the third-largest station group, they own around 40% of all local stations nationwide.

“That consolidation has given them more leverage over the networks than local stations once had,” wrote James Surowiecki in the Atlantic. When Nexstar and Sinclair suspended Kimmel’s show, “they effectively chose to play a game of chicken with ABC.”

But the station groups blinked first. Three days after ABC returned Kimmel to air, Sinclair and Nexstar relented and did the same. It was “a striking about-face,” the New York Times reported.

In Trump’s good graces

To grow bigger, Sinclair and Nexstar need to stay in Trump’s good graces to ensure FCC approvals. To survive, however, their ABC affiliates need national programming, especially live sports, and the NFL in particular.

Along with political advertising, live sports are one of the only things keeping the TV industry from flatlining amid widespread cord-cutting. And the national broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox — all have major contracts to broadcast pro sports, which their affiliates rely on to attract viewers and sell ads.

If Sinclair and Nexstar had continued to suspend Kimmel’s show, ABC could have retaliated by withholding other national programming from their affiliates, including “Monday Night Football,” which would have severely hurt their bottom lines.

ABC’s financial exposure from an extended standoff, on the other hand, wasn’t as great, since Nexstar’s and Sinclair’s ABC affiliates are all outside the top 20 markets, with the exception of WJLA in D.C. and KOMO in Seattle. ABC was also buffered by owning and operating its own stations in four of the top five markets — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth and Philadelphia.

Even if Sinclair and Nexstar could hold out for a year, an analyst told Variety, Disney, which owns ABC, “would be out only a few million dollars.”

That’s nothing compared to the $4 billion in market valuation Disney lost over the six days it suspended Kimmel. During that time, “Disney saw more than 1.7 million paid streaming cancellations” across Disney+, Hulu and ESPN, Marisa Kabas reported.

Disney, for its part, is also doing a careful dance, as it too wants to stay on Trump’s good side — in part to ensure its merger with the sports streaming service FUBO goes through. This helps explain Disney’s willingness to hand Trump 16 million in December to settle his frivolous defamation case against ABC, as well as its suspending Kimmel after Nexstar and Sinclair forced its hand.

“Kimmel is the beginning,” Danilo Yanich, a professor of public policy at the University of Delaware, told FAIR. Now that Nexstar and Sinclair have established a precedent for pushing a network around, “Kimmel is not the end.”