“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” will return to airwaves in the Roanoke-Lynchburg television market Friday night after ABC13 WSET’s corporate owner announced an end to its preemption of the talk show earlier in the day.
Sinclair Broadcast Group had been keeping Kimmel’s show off the air since Tuesday after he said in his Sept. 15 monologue, “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 gave an emotional apology during his Tuesday night show.
Sinclair, the second-largest owner of local TV stations in the U.S. and the owner of more than 30 ABC affiliates, said in its Friday announcement that it’s had “ongoing and constructive discussions with ABC.”
The company has also proposed to ABC and its parent company, Disney, “measures to strengthen accountability, viewer feedback, and community dialogue, including a network-wide independent ombudsman.”
An ombudsman is a person appointed to investigate complaints against an organization.
“These proposals were suggested as collaborative efforts between the ABC affiliates and the ABC network,” Sinclair said. “While ABC and Disney have not yet adopted these measures, and Sinclair respects their right to make those decisions under our network affiliate agreements, we believe such measures could strengthen trust and accountability.”
CBS, as part of settling a defamation lawsuit last year brought by President Donald Trump, recently hired an ombudsman who will review complaints about political bias at that network.
Maryland-based Sinclair owns, operates or provides services to 178 TV stations in 81 markets nationwide. 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.
The Roanoke-Lynchburg market comprises about 460,000 TV homes, making it the 70th-largest market in America out of the 210 designated by ratings tracker Nielsen Media Research.
The market stretches across 26 counties, including other population centers like Danville, Martinsville, Lexington and the New River Valley.
Two days after Kimmel’s comment about Kirk, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr suggested last Wednesday on a conservative politics podcast that the FCC may step in.
“We can do this easy way or the hard way,” he said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Carr then suggested that owners of local affiliates should preempt Kimmel’s show, because the affiliates are “running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if [they] continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.”
But Sinclair insisted in its statement Friday that preempting Kimmel “was independent of any government interaction or influence.”
“While we understand that not everyone will agree with our decisions about programming, it is simply inconsistent to champion free speech while demanding that broadcasters air specific content,” the company said.
Kimmel’s show begins at 11:35 p.m. and runs for an hour. WSET and the other Sinclair-owned ABC affiliates ran newscasts in that timeslot this week.
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