Rob Weisbord, COO and President of Local Media at Sinclair, insisted that the local TV station giant’s recent clash with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was “never about the First Amendment.”
In meetings with ABC after pulling the show from its affiliates, the company emphasized its “heritage of serving our communities with trusted content,” Weisbord recalled. An FCC license requires Sinclair to “not bring any biases with us” and being “fact-checked and telling you the truth.”
Kimmel was yanked (and later returned to the air) after an offhand joke about Donald Trump supporters’ political maneuvering after the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Initially, Sinclair said it would put a Kirk tribute special in Kimmel’s timeslot, but it later backtracked on that plan.
Weisbord was asked about the situation during a wide-ranging panel Wednesday at the NAB Show New York. In the days after Kirk’s shooting, “There was a moment, and there’s this discourse happening in the country, where you can’t make light of somebody being murdered, assassinated, in front of their kids and their wife,” Weisbord said. (Kimmel later clarified that he was not aiming to make light of Kirk himself.) “The show is titled late night entertainment, not a political nature. If you want to go and have a spat, go to social media, because there’s no constraints on social media.”
The Sinclair exec noted, “We didn’t tell them to suspend Kimmel. That’s, uh, that was an ABC/Disney decision, not a Sinclair decision at all.”
Catherine Badalamente, CEO of Graham Media Group, later voiced concern about the FCC’s risk of “overreach.” While she didn’t invoke FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s role in the Kimmel suspension (which began with the chairman’s appearance on a far-right podcast attackaing the host’s monologue), she alluded to generally unsettling signs.
“I will not lie and say that we don’t sit there and think about all of the concerns we have when it comes to maybe FCC getting into a lane that I don’t know they should be spending as much time on, personally,” Badamalente said. She went on to acknowledge the FCC’s role in making sure station owners meet their obligations as licensees. “It’s at the center of everything, the First Amendment, and making sure that we can tell truthful stories. … As long as we continue to do that, I think that, you know, and we don’t have issues when it comes to telling those stories, and we don’t have people overreaching and maybe potentially getting involved in things that I think might be overreach on their side, we’ll be okay.”
Panelists were asked about their dealings with Carr’s FCC, which has taken a far more aggressive approach to media regulation than at any other time in its generally staid history. While Carr has championed deregulation and abolishing the current 39% cap on station ownership, ideas cheered by many broadcasters, he has also fronted efforts seen as clashing with stations’ First Amendment principles. Along with the Kimmel saga, he has accused CBS News and other broadcasters of “news distortion” and often ventures outside of his jurisdiction, recently blasting YouTube TV during its carriage fight with Fox News’ parent company.
Symson maintained that “nothing has changed” about the FCC’s involvement in stations’ business operations. “The regulator’s role is to regulate us,” he said. “We have a duty, a fiduciary duty to our shareholders, as well as a duty to the communities we serve, to operate in a way that works within the rules of the regulator. But I don’t see that in conflict with the First Amendment.”
Industry consolidation promoted by Carr and major station groups gives Badalamente reason to “worry,” she said. Nexstar’s pending offer to acquire rival Tegna, as proposed, would give Nexstar a massive station portfolio reaching 80% of U.S. households.
“Fewer voices in the community, fewer voices in the market is a concern,” Badalamente said. Graham, whose small portfolio is known for punching above its weight, has persevered through previous rounds of contraction. Still, Badalamente said, “Today it’s a lot harder for me to imagine that world where I can have seven stations in six markets. … We want to make sure that there’s going to be a diverse number of owners out there and that we aren’t just consolidating to one or two.”
Adam Symson, CEO of large station owner E.W. Scripps, argued that the realities of the current business climate are forcing top players to expand. “There’s so much fragmentation out there relative to news consumers and advertising audiences that we are in a very, very different competitive environment than we were when I got into this business,” he said. “And, you know, I don’t know if there is enough capital to deploy in a market to support five television stations doing exactly the same thing, competing with each other.”
Station groups and Carr have focused attention on the fact that broadcasters compete for attention with Big Tech, which is not limited by geography. “Can you imagine if the folks who built Netflix were constrained to only do so, over the internet, to 39% of the country?” Symson said. “The economics wouldn’t allow them to actually create the business they had there. And that’s the competitor that we’re dealing with. I mean, that’s the environment that we’re operating in.”
