First, this was The Atlantic who publish a lot of left-leaning commentary and perspectives.Might depend on the contract they have with ABC and how willing they were to drive away viewers from traditional broadcasting.
Nexstar and Sinclair Lost Their Game of Chicken
Broadcast-media companies may be growing, but they still couldn’t afford to reject Jimmy Kimmel forever.www.theatlantic.com
A look at the economics of the standoff helps explain why. Although losing potential Kimmel viewers in the markets served by Sinclair and Nexstar put ABC in a tight spot with advertisers that expect a minimum number of viewers, the boycott was more costly to the broadcast stations, which have drawn many fewer viewers this week with their replacement programming (typically more local news, which they’ve had to pay to produce) than they would have with Kimmel—particularly now, when millions more people are tuning in as a result of the controversy. Late-night TV shows are far less popular than they used to be, but Kimmel still pulls in 1.6 million viewers on an average night and, according to the ad-data provider iSpot, has generated $70 million in ad revenue this year.
Sinclair and Nexstar may be potent media players, but they would have run into serious problems if they had preempted Kimmel’s show for an extended period of time. The terms of the contracts that affiliates sign with the networks are confidential, but they typically limit the number of times a station can refuse to air a network show. When a station violates its contract, a network can inflict both financial penalties and other problems by denying the station some of its programming.
In ABC’s case, its most dire threat would have been to pull college football and Monday Night Football from Sinclair and Nexstar stations. That would be painful to local stations; football is perhaps the most valuable property they have. “You can’t watch Oklahoma-Texas on our station this Saturday because we think it’s more important to not show our viewers Jimmy Kimmel” was not a message that was going to win over viewers, even conservative ones.
Worse, if viewers hadn’t been able to watch college football on their local ABC station, they could have always tuned in to Disney’s ESPN app. Viewers who couldn’t watch Kimmel on their local ABC station this week were able to find him on DirectTV, Disney+, and Hulu. The longer the standoff continued, in other words, the more incentive viewers would have had to seek out alternatives, and the clearer it would have become that they don’t actually need to watch broadcast TV to watch most of what’s on traditional TV.
Second, one of our members could have put this together. It's more the author's view of what he thought happened.
Third, was there anyone close to the discussions quoted? It's behind a paywall in the U.S. so I can't tell.
Last but not least, how do we know the objective was to cancel Kimmel? That's kind of a big presumption of the author. I have not seen any indication that was the objective.
This all could have been Nexstar and Sinclair signaling to Disney-ABC and Kimmel Don't alienate half our audience. (probably more in their markets) Make people laugh.
