ABC License Renewal Threats Getting Serious

Politics & Elections
1

FCC orders early review of ABC’s broadcast licenses

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.

2

And it’s of course no coincidence that this comes as he First Lady rails against Jimmy Kimmel, who hosts a tv talk show on ABC.

I predict that Kimmel’s announced firing is imminent.

Yes, it really is that petty.

3

First amendment, schmirst amendment.

4

And the way that they’re violating the “prohibition on discrimination” is by being woke and hiring minorities, which discriminates against white men.

5

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.

6

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.

7

Disney would likely win if they fight, the real question is will they?

Brian

8

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.

9

Disney suspended Kimmel last year. Over bullshit.

Their bravery is suspect.

10

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.

11

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.