“Beginning Tuesday night, Sinclair will be preempting Jimmy Kimmel Live! across our ABC affiliate stations and replacing it with news programming,” the company said in a statement. Nexstar said its affiliates will also pre-empt Kimmel’s return to TV, “pending assurance that all parties are committed to fostering an environment of respectful, constructive dialogue in the markets we serve.”
For those in #Sinclair and #Nexstar markets…. #Boycott the advertisers!! After all, Disney got the message that way! There may be some you can’t, but there are some you can!
Essentially, these two media giants are siding with Trump over Disney, fearing the FCC more than the mouse. While this was a pretty shocking instance seeing America’s most litigious company get strong-armed like this, we have a century of evidence demonstrating how you really do not want to push Disney to utilize the full force of its power, because so far, no one has been able to survive it. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently learned in a messy showdown that both sides wanted to end of how taking Disney to court is like taking them to Disneyland.
Sinclair and Nexstar media executives are kidding themselves if they think that Disney doesn’t have its own serious trump card to play here, but theirs is potentially far more lasting. We know Disney will be around in five years, whether the Trump administration will be is anyone’s guess. Sinclair and Nexstar are clearly betting that it will or at least its policies will endure, and if they’re wrong, their entire business model could be at stake because they are directly competing with Disney whether the dinosaurs guiding this short-sighted decision know it or not. There’s a reason why when I try to watch the Saturday ABC game of the day on my phone in my cable/satellite provider’s app, it’s often blacked out on that platform, and I get pushed to watch it in the ESPN app, and that reason is not good long-term for Sinclair and Nexstar who run those local ABC stations.
Professional sports are going through a serious local TV upheaval because of how much chord cutting has fundamentally altered the business of TV. If the most lucrative television contracts on planet earth are at risk because 83 percent of Americans say they watch streaming services, versus just 36 percent who say they subscribe to cable or satellite TV at home, what makes these Trump bootlickers so special? Know where people in the markets that Sinclair and Nexstar pre-empted Kimmel can still watch Jimmy Kimmel Live!? On Disney+. On Hulu. On Sling TV. These media giants are not the only game in town anymore, and if they want to play hardball with the mouse, the mouse has a very good hand to play here.
Awful Announcing published a good article about the sports angle to this, where we are one step closer to a world where Sinclair and Nexstar are not awarded the very lucrative college football and NFL games that ABC and Disney control in retaliation for those companies pre-empting other Disney programming. They are allowed to pre-empt Disney programming a certain number of times, but over that limit, they are in violation of their contracts with ABC, and this is where the Disney lawyers put on their superhero capes and haunt people’s dreams. For example, #4 LSU travels to #13 Ole Miss for this weekend’s second biggest college football game on ABC (#6 Oregon at #3 Penn State later that day on NBC/Peacock has game of the year potential written all over it), and the more that Sinclair and Nexstar push Disney, the more Disney’s interests align around withholding big games like LSU at Ole Miss from their affiliates and telling viewers in those markets to bypass Sinclair and Nexstar altogether and watch them in the ESPN app.
We are in the very early days of this squabble, so perhaps this is just a token gesture from Sinclair and Nexstar to Brendan Carr of how much they tacitly agree with Trump’s authoritarianism in hopes they can avoid the FCC’s ire before they return to their contractual obligations with Disney. But if this saga endures, each day becomes more dangerous than the last for Nexstar and Sinclair. At the very least, what the last 24 hours have proven is that Disney cannot always trust its business partners to do what Disney wants them to do. With so much programming moving to streaming already, especially with sports, there exists a tipping point where Disney concludes that it’s better to push their so-called business partners out of their business, and either absorb it themselves or get a less intransigent local station owner in place. If there is one thing that history has taught us, it’s that you do not fuck with the mouse’s money and get away with it.
Awful Announcing believes that Sinclair could likely benefit in the short-term should Disney pull games like LSU at Ole Miss off their affiliates, because Sinclair and Nexstar customers could still watch it on these streaming services, but that just further incentivizes Disney to do what they want to do long-term and conquer the whole world through their streaming platforms. In their ideal scenario, there is no Nexstar or Sinclair (or Peacock or Prime or Netflix, etc…), and everyone watches their programming directly through properties they own like Disney+, Hulu and FuboTV.
What Sinclair and Nexstar are doing right now is emblematic of the broader short-term focus from corporate America that led to the downfall of the American empire as we know it. In a world where major executive compensation is rooted in the stock market, the only incentive has become to boost tomorrow’s stock price. This has led to a short-term corporate focus that is antithetical to everything I was taught in finance school about sober analysis and ten-year planning. Nexstar and Sinclair are currently doing the equivalent of selling physical newspapers in 1997 while betting that Trump can reverse the endless march of time. The chord-cutting phenomenon has long trended against their chord-based businesses, and they are threatening to accelerate it, seemingly in the hopes that dear leader Trump can save them from the inevitable global takeover that Disney has been plotting for the last century.
