The qualifications for Kimmel

New York (AP) -Jimmy Kimmel is back in her ABC show at the last minute of the night, but it is still a mystery when, or yes, spectators in cities like Washington, Seattle and St. Louis can see it again on their televisions.

The ABC stations owned by the Nexstar and Sinclair corporations took Kimmel out of the air last week the same day that the network suspended him for comments that angered the supporters of the murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Those stations kept him out of the air on Tuesday, when ABC lifted the suspension. The unusual dispute attracted the attention of American senators, who said they wanted to investigate the relationship between affiliates and the administration of President Donald Trump.

Kimmel returned without apologies, but in an emotional monologue where he looked close to tears, the host said he was not trying to joke about the murder. He also paid tribute to Kirk’s widow.

And he got a large audience, with ABC informing almost 6.3 million people tuned only in the transmission, despite the blackouts in many cities. As is the case with the monologues of the night hosts, there was a broader audience online, with more than 15 million people seeing Kimmel’s opening comments on YouTube on Wednesday night. ABC says that more than 26 million people saw Kimmel’s return on social networks, including YouTube.

Usually, he obtains around 1.8 million viewers every night on television. The numbers published by ABC do not include the transmission services audience.

A Nexstar spokesman said Wednesday that Kimmel will continue to be advanced from his stations while the company evaluates his show. Together, the Nexstar and Sinclair groups represent approximately a quarter of ABC affiliates, many in smaller cities such as Nashville, Tennessee; Lubbock, Texas; o Topeka, Kansas.

“We are involved in productive discussions with the executives of (ABC Parent) Walt Disney Co., with an approach in ensuring that the program reflects and respects the various interests of the communities we serve,” said Nexstar.

Randy Holmes through Getty Images

The dispute highlights the relationship between local networks and stations

The dispute focused attention on commercial relationships between television networks and local stations that carry their programming. In the past, the local stations occasionally resisted the issuance of a network network, but it was generally an individual market or two worried about overcoming the limits in sexual language or content, Ted Harbert said, former to the maximum executive of ABC and News.

The different thing is that this time they are groups that have engulfed multiple stations that act collectively in content for political reasons.

“This is how much the country’s political divisions have been included in something that has been, during the last 50 or 75 years, a relatively ordered business,” said Harbert.

The leadership of the property groups is generally more conservative than the media and entertainment figures in the stations they transmit, said Ken Basin, author of “The Business of Television.” Both Sinclair, with conservative political content, and Nexstar have reasons to cure the Trump administration, he said. Nexstar is looking for regulatory approval for the purchase of an opponent, he said.

“I worry that this is not the only dispute of this nature in the coming years,” said Basin.

Disney may play hard if negotiations on Kimmel’s return are prolonged, such as threatening to retain another ABC programming, including the “nuclear option” of football games. It is not clear how affiliate agreements are written.

But Matt Dolgin, a senior capitalist of the Morningstar Research Service, said he doubts that the dispute reaches that point. The station groups have a much less diversified commercial portfolio than Disney, and the expiration of affiliate agreements next year is coming as a deadline, he said. They have few good options if they lose the ABC programming.

“From a commercial perspective, the best course on this topic (for Disney) is to stay above the fray,” said Dolgin. “The dollars associated with this show are very low.”

As they upload, the surprising number of YouTube views of the Kimmel monologue serves to make television transmission less important, harming the position of negotiation of the stations.

For the station groups, the most important objective must be negotiating your departure from this, while finding a way to save your face, he said. Initially, Sinclair adopted a strong position, saying that Kimmel would not return to his stations without apologizing to Kirk’s widow and donate money to Kirk’s political organization. That is not likely to happen.

Via News

Kimmel ran the risk of losing the show completely

Last week, Kimmel seemed to be in real danger of losing his program completely until the defenders of freedom of expression protested, including many of those who canceled subscriptions for Disney services.

“The reaction was stronger than they expected, stronger than I expected,” Basin said. “There was a feeling of despair within the industry that this was a moment of ‘Canarian in a coal mine’.”

Four Democratic senators said Tuesday night that they wanted to analyze what happened with the station groups.

“If Nexstar or Sinclair exchanged the censorship of a critic of the Administration for the official acts by the Trump administration, their companies are not only accomplices of an alarming trampling of freedom of expression, but also run the risk of running in the anti-corruption law,” Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Ron Wyden and Chris Van Hollen to the companies.

On Wednesday, another group of senators led by California Democrat, Adam Schiff, said they wanted to interrogate the president of the FCC, Brendan Carr, about the “implicit threats” to Disney about Kimmel.

In his monologue on Tuesday, Kimmel tried to thread the needle between both sides at a raw political moment, and seemed to realize his difficulty.

“I don’t think what I’m going to say will make a big difference,” he said. “If you liked it, you liked it. If you don’t, no. I don’t have illusions about changing anyone’s mind.”

In a matter of hours, many demonstrated their point. Andrew Kolvet, a turning spokesman Point USA, the organization that Kirk founded that he is now headed by his widow, published in X that Kimmel’s monologue “was not good enough.”

In another corner of social networks, the Ben Stiller comic published that it was a “brilliant monologue.”

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