With football season looming, pre-season games are starting. In my market, the local CBS affiliate has twice pre-empted episodes of Big Brother in prime time in order to air live coverage of an NFL team based in this state. They run the tape of the missed BB in the middle of the night a day or two later.
I assume that local affiliates are contractually bound to carry a certain percentage of the network’s programming as it is fed to them at the regularly scheduled time. But how much leeway are they allowed in this? Has a major network ever pulled the plug on a local affiliate for preempting its programming too often?
In Salt Lake City, when I lived there, the ABC affiliate didn’t run Nightline. This was a pain in the neck – we got reruns of Fantasy Island instead (Insert your joke here)
I believe that wasn’t the only affiliate that didn’t run Nightline in the country – I understand there were others. There have been some very extreme cases. I heard of one station out in the boondocks somewhere that was able to pick and choose from all three major networks.
Of course, that was all some time ago. I have no idea what the current rules and requirements are. But in the not-sp-distant past, affiliates were pretty free in what they could do. The fact that the network was providing the feed, and that they
d have to come up with the money to purchase material from elsewhere was a big factor, I suspect, in keeping the affiliates broadcasting from the network feed.
But in the instances I’m describing, it’s pre-season games and they are not on the CBS network. The games originate from the team’s own broadcast arm and are carried by the local CBS affiliate pre-empting the CBS network’s programming.
WGN (the local Chicago version, not the cable superstation version) is the CW network affiliate here in Chicago. They will frequently preempt CW shows in order to show Cubs or Bulls games (running the preempted shows either late at night or on the weekend).
When I was growing up in Wisconsin, the NBC affiliate there would, several times a year, preempt network shows in order to run Billy Graham specials.
Network affiliates in various markets (most frequently in the Bible Belt, or in Utah) have been known to pull specific episodes of shows which they consider to have content which their viewers would find objectionable.
So, there’s two separate sorts of issues:
a) they preempt a program, and run it later
b) they refuse to run a program entirely
I’ve never heard of an affiliate losing their affiliation with a network for either sort of issue; I imagine that both sorts of issues are covered in network / affiliate contracts.
Here in the heartland of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the ABC affiliate does indeed run Nightline. But not before they push it back half an hour, to 11:05 Central time. Why? Because they have to get their Two and a Half Men on first, of course. Seems to me in the recent past Nightline was aired even later than that, as the local station was making more money selling ads on whatever syndicated reruns they put on after the late news. And going even further back, I think I recall a time when they didn’t run Nightline at all. But I’m not 100 percent positive about that.
In my younger days, growing up in southern Iowa, our antenna could only really pull in one station. That was the ABC affiliate based in Kirksville, Missouri (with a newsroom/sales office in Ottumwa, Iowa). Back when Soap debuted, this affiliate refused to air it due to the ‘racy’ content (Billy Crystal’s gay character simply gave us poor southern Iowans the vapors, don’t you know). I don’t remember if that lasted the entire first season … I don’t think so. I think Soap started airing on that station a couple of months after it premiered. Once they realized the audience wasn’t turning gay nationwide just by watching it, I suppose.
Around that same time, I also remember a couple of ABC movies that were pre-empted by this station due to their “immoral content,” although I can’t remember exactly what those movies were. It has been a long time. I do remember one of the movies the station aired in place of the network content was Pillow Talk. With that noted he-man heterosexual Rock Hudson. And the racy telephone scene with Doris Day in the bathtub. Much better moral lessons for our sensitive young children than whatever ABC TV movie was being foisted on the rest of the nation.
Yeah, I never considered myself living in the Bible Belt … but I guess I wasn’t all that far away.
Way back when, the local NBC affiliate stopped airing Late Night with David Letterman entirely for year or more so they could run old movies (and local ads) in that time slot. They finally put Dave back on at 12:30 AM and carried him until his NBC run ended. I always assumed that was because NBC demanded they carry it.
Similarly, the local CBS affiliate used to delay the Friday edition of The Late Show with David Letterman by half an hour so they could air a locally produced high school football show which consisted largely of teenagers screaming. A few years ago they decided to minimize the 11:00PM news broadcast to 10 minutes and fill the remaining 20 minutes with the football show so that Letterman could air at 11:35. Again, I assumed this was because CBS demanded it, but who knows.
During March Madness whichever local network affiliate which is airing the games routinely shifts the regular prime time shows to start at something like 2:37 am. Since even then they hardly ever start at the scheduled times, I have to set my DVR to record an extra 30 minutes so I don’t miss the ending (I used to set it at 15 minutes until I once missed the plot resolution when the show ran 20 minutes late).
It is covered in the standard network/affiliate contract, which goes into great detail about scheduled pre-emptions, non-scheduled pre-emptions, joining a program in progress, whether it’s primetime or another daypart, first-run or rerun, etc., etc.
Back when I was doing station logs (in radio) we had to do a monthly affadavit for the network and it had categories like:
Pre-empted for news
Pre-empted for sports
Pre-empted for other programming
Pre-empted for technical problems
Interrupted for news (at what time)
Interrupted for sports (at what time)
Interrupted for other programming (at what time)
Interrupted for technical problems (at what time, and what time resumed)
Delayed (until what time)
Those are just the categories I remember. I’m sure our contract covered every conceivable category.
OP, you should take pride in your uniqueness in being among that slim percentage of folks that would rather watch Big Brother than a football game.
I imagine the local affiliate was able to charge much higher ad rates (based on viewership) for the football game than they could for Big Brother, hence the pre-emption.
Pre-empting network shows for sports used to happen quite a bit in my town back when they were carried on broadcast channels and I’ve never heard of the local affiliate being penalized for it. This was especially common during baseball season. Now most games are carried by cable channels.
Something I forgot to mention. When a local station schedules a pre-emption of a network show, the contract usually allows the network to offer it to another station in the market. It doesn’t happen that often, but you’ll sometimes see an independent station pick up a network’s Sunday afternoon golf match when the local station is running a football game all afternoon, or something like that.
For waay more info than you ever needed to know about network preemptions, read this thread. CalMeacham the station you’re thinking about was WAGM in nothern Maine. Since it was the only over the air station in the market, the networks allowed it to be an affiliate of all three networks. Two networks sharing a station in a small market was common in the 60s and 70s; now of course cable and digital subchannels have made that obsolete.
Stations getting their affiliation yanked for too many preemptions is rare but has happened. I rememer reading KXLY (Spokane) got kicked off the CBS network for this in the mid70s
WDIV in Detroit used to push Late Night w/Conan O’Brien back until 2am so they could follow Leno up with Jenny Jones and a half hour infomercial. As O’Brien got more and more of a following he slowly got pushed back up, first to 1:30am, and then ultimately back into the 12:30am slot, and Jimmy Fallon is still there today, but there’s still some sort of gap between the end of that and Carson Daly or whatever is supposed to follow.
When Letterman moved to CBS, the local affiliate actually aired his show at 11pm instead of 11:30 for a while, due to not having a local newscast on the station. Eventually they moved him back to 11:30 and started running sitcom reruns at 11. I think it was Seinfeld at first, now it’s 2.5 Men.
Austin wasn’t quite the only city of its size with only one TV station. As late as 1970, it only had about 250,000 people, and most of them could pick up signals from San Antonio, Waco or Bryan. LBJ’s station remained the only VHF station in Austin until the switch to digital TV. But there were UHF stations in Austin starting in 1965.
Madison, WI is in a similar situation, although Madison was smaller than Austin.
Even network Owned and Operated stations sometimes preempt network programming. WLS-TV in Chicago (owned by ABC) has, since the beginning, shown Jimmy Kimmel Live not-live an hour later to make room for a re-run of Oprah. Now that the reruns of the final season of Oprah are finishing up, they will for the first time begin showing Jimmy Kimmel Live live. WLS-TV was where Oprah was first hired to do a local morning show.
A few years back, WMAQ-TV (owned by NBC) preempted NBC Thursday night programming for football. They showed the regularly scheduled NBC programs (in English) on the local Telemundo station (Telemundo is owned by NBC).