He is not letting up in his attacks on Trump.
Now conservative networks Sinclair and Nexstar that own about 25% of ABC affiliates and who had vowed to not show Kimmel’s show have reversed course and now say that he will be back on.
In a statement, Sinclair said it received “thoughtful feedback from viewers, advertisers and community leaders representing a wide range of perspectives”.
“Our objective throughout this process has been to ensure that programming remains accurate and engaging for the widest possible audience,” the firm said.
The company said that it had “ongoing and constructive discussions” with ABC where Sinclair proposed measures to strengthen accountability and viewer feedback, including having a “network-wide independent ombudsman”. ABC and Disney have not agreed to the measures, and Sinclair noted that it “respects their right to make those decisions under network affiliate agreements”.
Nexstar separately said: “We have had discussions with executives at [Disney] and appreciate their constructive approach to addressing our concerns.”
I suspect that the ‘thoughtful feedback’ consisted of furious viewers yelling at them. Basically, they ended up getting exactly what Al Pacino offered a senator in The Godfather: Part II who tried to strong arm him into giving him a bribe.
I predicted that since money is their god, if Kimmel’s ratings stayed high, as they have, they would cave. It is interesting that they announced this decision on a Friday when most of the late night comedy shows do not have new shows, so that they would be spared immediate ridicule.
But I expect them to be mercilessly lampooned by all of them come Monday.
Trump must be bigly annoyed but hasn’t said anything yet.
“Don’t cross Disney” seems to be the lesson here.
Disney is a large army of corporate lawyers with incidental media output. Sinclair and Nexstar’s “thoughtful feedback” and “discussions with executives” probably consisted mainly of Disney outlining their breaches of contract when selectively airing some Disney content but not the whole package, and how Disney’s logical next step would be to revoke rights to broadcast any of the rest of it — they would be left with nothing worth watching.
“Thoughtful feedback” is probably a minor part of it. According to Keith Olbermann (who, whatever else you might think of him, knows the insides of the industry fairly well):
And I suspect that the preemption fee is on a per station basis.
I think Mano’s analogy confuses which side is Corleone, but whatevs X-D