Hold up - it goes a layer deeper and is actually fairly similar to what happened to Colbert.
ABC had their hand forced because of a pending merger between Nexstar Media Group and Tenga, which once the FCC approves it, would place Nexstar in ownership of 80% of local TV channels in the US. Nexstar is based in Texas, so it’s not exactly ABC-Disney friendly.
So they threatened to censor Kimmel themselves on local TV stations unless ABC did it for them. They had on the ground infrastructure power to do this.
And yes, we’re 100% there. The key point is to understand that while everyone sees ABC as the Big Bad here, it’s the infrastructure companies that have leverage and no one knows their names or how much they actually own.
Hold up - it goes a layer deeper and is actually fairly similar to what happened to Colbert.
ABC had their hand forced because of a pending merger between Nexstar Media Group and Tenga, which once the FCC approves it, would place Nexstar in ownership of 80% of local TV channels in the US. Nexstar is based in Texas, so it’s not exactly ABC-Disney friendly.
So they threatened to censor Kimmel themselves on local TV stations unless ABC did it for them. They had on the ground infrastructure power to do this.
And yes, we’re 100% there. The key point is to understand that while everyone sees ABC as the Big Bad here, it’s the infrastructure companies that have leverage and no one knows their names or how much they actually own.
Edit: Just saw this - Sinclair’s local ABC affiliates are replacing Kimmel reruns will air their own CK tribute show, just on their own whatever, fuck ABC’s programming.