The stations concerned are WABC-TV New York, KABC-TV Los Angeles, WLS-TV Chicago, WPVI-TV Philadelphia, KTRK-TV Houston, KGO-TV San Francisco, WTVD-TV Raleigh-Durham and KFSN-TV Fresno. While other ABC stations aren’t directly affected, I doubt ABC would be economically viable without these flagships.
I think today’s action is too critical for me to just add it as one more “compendium of horrors” post. Without real media capture, the Trump project is likely to fail.
Maybe we are just looking at a different side of the same elephant. But it isn’t petty to me. Without capturing mainstream media, dictators cannot stay in power for long.
Bari Weiss is working on CBS.
Paramount is about to get CNN.
That leaves ABC and NBC as the biggest legacy networks they need to control.
I realize that the internet means that capturing the legacy outlets I name doesn’t guarantee long life for the incumbent regime. Victor Orban knows all about it. The internet makes it harder for dictators to kill free media. But if they could just get most of the outlets to be pro-Trump, that’s big.
Kimmel of course is the kind of excuse they always were going to find.
Disney already went through this – and they lost so many streaming subscribers that they immediately reversed their decision. I think Trump is a lot weaker, politically, now than at that time before, so I think Disney is more likely to ignore these threats.
Paramount Skydance, owner of CBS, is a tiny company compared to Comcast (owner of NBC Universal) or Disney (owner of ABC). Both of the latter can more easily shake off Trump’s threats.
Trump is trying to do in a few years something that usually takes would-be dictators a few decades. At Donald’s age, he doesn’t have the time Putin and Erdoğan had. So maybe legacy media will manage to shake off most of Trump’s threats until such time as a Democratic president rescues them. I deny that it will be easy.
What they demonstrated is that they are more afraid of lost subscriptions than they are of the Trump administration, because they reinstated Kimmel as soon as they realized the cost of getting rid of him.
Scared people fight too; a cornered rat isn’t dangerous because it’s brave.
A note: tonight’s episode of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show will feature all the current late-night hosts. Also, ABC’s Kimmel is airing a rerun on Colbert’s last night, 5/21, so as not to take viewers away from Colbert:
I would assume that ABC had to okay the use of a rerun, given that the choice could negatively affect their bottom line. One could infer that they are standing behind Kimmel.
(Also, I’m guessing the guys may have a thing or two to say tonight about the ABC license renewal threats from Donald & Co…)
The filing for ABC was submitted by attorney Paul Clement, who served as US solicitor general under President George W. Bush; and Jennifer Tatel, who was an FCC lawyer during the Obama administration and for part of Trump’s first term. Tatel was promoted to acting general counsel in 2017 by then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who said she “is known for her legal acumen, FCC expertise, and careful judgment.”
That might not matter. Last Sunday’s John Oliver show featured a potentially very relevant main story on the Trump regime’s extraordinary use of the Supreme Court “shadow docket”, essentially a shortcut to getting a quick and allegedly “interim” ruling in emergency situations, which SCOTUS has generally been happy to go along with due to the Trumpist majority. These “interim” rulings are usually issued without explanation and may persist for years while the final ruling slowly wends its way through the normal processes.
What this means in this situation is that even if ABC wins their case in a lower court, Trump may use this trick once again to overturn it.
The only solution in the foreseeable future is for Congress to end this corruption at the Supreme Court, which might be possible after the mid-terms. Right now the Trump regime in effect substantially controls all three branches of government.