Jimmy Kimmel will be back on the air, but not in nearly half a million Virginia homes.
WSET, the ABC affiliate in the Roanoke-Lynchburg television market, will not air Kimmel’s late-night talk show Tuesday night, according to a corporate decision.
Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns Channel 13, announced Monday night its 30-plus ABC-affiliated stations will not carry “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” because of a comment he made on the show following conservative commenter Charlie Kirk’s assassination two weeks ago.
“Beginning Tuesday night, Sinclair will be preempting Jimmy Kimmel Live! across our ABC affiliate stations and replacing it with news programming,” the company said. “Discussions with ABC are ongoing as we evaluate the show’s potential return.”
WSET General Manager George Kayes did not immediately respond to The Roanoke Times’ request for confirmation that the 11:35 p.m. timeslot will indeed change locally.
Leading conservatives and Republicans, including President Donald Trump, criticized Kimmel after he said on his Sept. 15 show, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”
Kimmel’s remark and its backlash sparked a national conversation about free speech after Sinclair and fellow local TV giant Nexstar said they would stop airing Kimmel’s show on their ABC affiliates.
The ABC network then decided to pull the show after pressure from Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission.
Roanoke-Lynchburg is the 70th-largest TV market in America out of the 210 designated by ratings tracker Nielsen.
The 26-county area covers about 460,000 TV homes, and its other population centers include Danville, Martinsville, Lexington and the New River Valley.
Patrick County is in the Winston-Salem TV market, where Sinclair also owns the ABC affiliate, WXLV Channel 45.
Sinclair owns or operates nearly 200 TV stations across more than 80 U.S. local markets, per its website. The Maryland-based company also owns some national TV networks, most notably the Tennis Channel.
WSET is Sinclair’s only ABC affiliate in Virginia. It also owns the NBC station in Bristol, the Fox affiliate in Richmond and the ABC station in Washington, D.C.
Sinclair’s corporate operation has long been criticized for imposing a rightward political lean on local stations’ airwaves.
For years, Sinclair stations across network affiliations were required to air “must-run” segments, including conservative commentary pieces produced by corporate to wrap up newscasts.
Multiple peer-reviewed studies have also found a rightward slant.
For example, a 2019 study published in the journal “American Political Science Review” found that when Sinclair buys stations, their content becomes less local and more conservative.
Researchers from Stanford University and Emory University found “substantial increases in coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics [and] a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage.”
Sinclair is America’s largest owner of ABC affiliates and second-largest owner of local TV stations overall, behind Nexstar, which owns Roanoke’s WFXR Channel 27.
Nexstar had not announced by publish time late Tuesday morning whether it, like Sinclair, would stick with its original plan to preempt “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
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