Sinclair and Nexstar capitulate, agree to resume airing Jimmy Kimmel Live -- without Sinclair's demands being met

The two venal broadcasting conglomerates responsible for goading Disney into temporarily suspending ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! last week are reversing course and will start carrying Kimmel’s show again, with their opportunistic executives apparently having realized that a lot more people are unhappy with them for undermining freedom of speech than are happy with them for doing Brendan Carr and Donald Trump’s bidding.

Sinclair Broadcasting and Nexstar Media Group each own groups of ABC affiliates. Nexstar wants to merge with Tegna, another owner of local television stations, like KING5, and needs the FCC’s sign-off to do so; it was the first to drop Kimmel last week.

Sinclair, which has executives and controlling interests who are very right wing, promptly followed suit and even smugly served up a short list of unreasonable demands which it said Kimmel would need to meet to be carried again. Today, the order was reversed: Sinclair went first in announcing that its stations would carry Jimmy Kimmel Live, leaving Nexstar as the sole holdout… and not for very long, either.

“Sinclair today announced that it will end its preemption of Jimmy Kimmel Live! and the show will return, this evening, on Sinclair’s ABC affiliates,” a statement from the company began before then alluding to behind-the-scenes pressure from Disney: “Our objective throughout this process has been to ensure that programming remains accurate and engaging for the widest possible audience. We take seriously our responsibility as local broadcasters to provide programming that serves the interests of our communities, while also honoring our obligations to air national network programming.”

https://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2025/09/sinclair-and-nexstar-capitulate-agree-to-resume-airing-jimmy-kimmel-live-without-sinclairs-demands-being-met.html