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NEW YORK \u2014\u00a0Jimmy Kimmel\u00a0is back on his\u00a0ABC late-night show, but it’s still a mystery when \u2014 or if \u2014 viewers in cities such as Washington, Seattle and St. Louis will be able to see him again on their televisions.<\/p>\n
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<\/center> ABC stations owned by the Nexstar and Sinclair corporations took Kimmel off the air last week on the same day the network\u00a0suspended him\u00a0for comments that angered supporters of\u00a0slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Those stations kept him off the air Tuesday, when ABC lifted the suspension. The unusual dispute attracted the attention of U.S. senators, who said they wanted to investigate the relationship between the affiliates and President Donald Trump’s administration.<\/p>\n Kimmel returned\u00a0with no apologies, but in an\u00a0emotional monologue\u00a0where he appeared close to tears, the host said that he was not trying to joke about the assassination. He also paid tribute to Kirk’s widow.<\/p>\n And it got a large audience, with ABC reporting nearly 6.3 million people tuned in to the broadcast alone, despite the blackouts in many cities. As is often the case with late-night hosts’ monologues, there was a larger audience online, with more than 15 million people watching Kimmel’s opening remarks on YouTube by Wednesday evening. ABC says more than 26 million people watched Kimmel’s return on social media, including YouTube.<\/p>\n Typically, he gets about 1.8 million viewers each night on television. The numbers released by ABC do not include viewership from streaming services.<\/p>\n A spokesman for Nexstar said Wednesday that Kimmel will continue to be preempted from its stations while the company evaluates his show. Together, the Nexstar and Sinclair groups account for about a quarter of ABC’s affiliates, many in smaller cities such as Nashville, Tennessee; Lubbock, Texas; or Topeka, Kansas.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are engaged in productive discussions with executives at the (ABC parent) Walt Disney Co., with a focus on ensuring the program reflects and respects the diverse interests of the communities we serve,\u201d Nexstar said.<\/p>\n The dispute focused attention on the business relationships between television networks and the local stations that carry their programming. In the past, local stations occasionally balked at airing a network show, but it was usually an individual market or two worried about pushing boundaries in language or sexual content, said Ted Harbert, a former top executive at ABC and CBS.<\/p>\n What’s different this time is groups that have gobbled up multiple stations acting collectively on content for largely political reasons.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is how much the country’s political divisions have seeped their way into something that has been, for the last 50 or 75 years, a relatively orderly business,\u201d Harbert said.<\/p>\n Leadership of ownership groups is generally more conservative than the media and entertainment figures on the stations they broadcast, said Ken Basin, author of \u201cThe Business of Television.\u201d Both Sinclair, with conservative political content, and Nexstar have reason to curry favor with the Trump administration, he said. Nexstar is seeking regulatory approval for the purchase of a rival, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cI worry that this is not going to be the only dispute of this nature in the years ahead,\u201d Basin said.<\/p>\n It’s possible that Disney could play hardball if negotiations on Kimmel’s return drag on, such as threatening to withhold other ABC programming \u2014 even the \u201cnuclear option\u201d of football games. Its unclear how the affiliate agreements are worded.<\/p>\n But Matt Dolgin, senior equity analyst at Morningstar Research Service, said he doubts the dispute reaches that point. The station groups have a far less diversified business portfolio than Disney, and the expiration of affiliate agreements next year looms as a deadline, he said. They have few good options if they lose ABC programming.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom a business perspective, the best course on this issue (for Disney) is to stay above the fray,\u201d Dolgin said. \u201cThe dollars associated with this show are very low.\u201d<\/p>\n As they climb, the stunning number of YouTube views of Kimmel’s monologue serve to make television broadcasting less important, hurting the negotiating position of the stations.<\/p>\n For the station groups, the biggest goal should be to negotiate their way out of this \u2014 while finding a way to save face, he said. Sinclair initially took a strong stance, saying Kimmel would not return to its stations without apologizing to Kirk’s widow and donating money to Kirk’s political organization. That’s not likely to happen.<\/p>\n Last week, Kimmel seemed to be in real danger of losing his show entirely until advocates for free speech protested, including many who canceled subscriptions for Disney services.<\/p>\n \u201cThe backlash was stronger than they expected, stronger than I expected,\u201d Basin said. \u201cThere was a sense of despair within the industry that this was a \u2018canary in a coal mine\u2019 moment.\u201d<\/p>\n Four Democratic senators said late Tuesday that they wanted to look into what happened with the station groups.<\/p>\n \u201cIf Nexstar or Sinclair traded the censorship of a critic of the administration for official acts by the Trump administration, your companies are not only complicit in an alarming trampling of free speech but also risk running afoul of anti-corruption law,\u201d Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Ron Wyden and Chris Van Hollen wrote to the companies.<\/p>\n On Wednesday, another group of senators led by California Democrat Adam Schiff said they wanted to question FCC Chairman Brendan Carr about \u201cimplicit threats\u201d made to Disney over Kimmel.<\/p>\n In his monologue Tuesday, Kimmel tried to thread the needle between both sides in a raw political moment, and seemed to realize its difficulty.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think what I\u2019m going to say is going to make much of a difference,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you like me, you like me. If you don\u2019t, you don\u2019t. I have no illusions about changing anyone\u2019s mind.\u201d<\/p>\n Within hours, many proved his point. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, the organization that Kirk founded that is now headed by his widow, posted on X that Kimmel\u2019s monologue was \u201cnot good enough.\u201d<\/p>\n In another corner of social media, comic Ben Stiller posted that it was a \u201cbrilliant monologue.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source spectrumlocalnews.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NEW YORK \u2014\u00a0Jimmy Kimmel\u00a0is back on his\u00a0ABC late-night show, but it’s still a mystery when \u2014 or if \u2014 viewers in cities such as Washington, Seattle and St. Louis will be able to see him again on their televisions. What You Need To Know ABC stations owned by the Nexstar and Sinclair corporations took Kimmel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2047814,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[22793,22694,22800,315634,22804,269828,22691,21741,21738,105894,22048],"class_list":["post-2047813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-all-markets-rank-everywhere","tag-app-arts-entertainment","tag-app-for-your-consideration","tag-app-national-politics","tag-associated-press","tag-c-block-national","tag-california","tag-entertainment","tag-news","tag-nnt","tag-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Jimmy-Kimmel-is-back-on-ABC-to-big-ratings.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2047813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2047813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2047813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2047814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2047813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2047813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2047813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n<\/div>\nDispute highlights relationship between networks and local stations<\/h2>\n
Kimmel was at risk of losing show entirely<\/h2>\n