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KOMO says "Accept these substitutions." FCC clarifies!



ICYMI, KOMO ran a local newscast, solo anchored by Preston P. with Shannon on weather, followed by one from the Sinclair National Desk, to fill the hour usually occupied by Kimmel.  Did the same in DC, according to a fellow blogger there, and I assume KATU in PDX.   Will be interesting to see how long Sinclair can buck ABC with what could become significant pre-emptions.    They are allowed based on  their contracts, but then the network can strike back for breach.   Protests continued Tuesday night outside KOMO Plaza on Denny Way, trying also to get advertisers to abandon the station.

While we're debating all of this, I see FCC boss Carr WALKED BACK his statements that started the melee:

"At the Concordia Summit in New York on Monday morning, Carr denied he had threatened to pull licenses of ABC stations if they did not fire Kimmel. He said that “did not happen in any way, shape or form.”

Carr said that “what I spoke about last week is that when concerns are raised about news distortion … there’s an easy way for parties to address that and work that out. In the main, that takes place between local television stations that are licensed by the FCC and what we call national programmers like Disney. They work that out, and there doesn’t need to be any involvement of the FCC.”

Look what he said in 2019:

Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not.

The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the “public interest.”https://t.co/j4o2lA6LiL

— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC)




Comments

  1. I reckon Sinclair will eventually put Kimmel back on the air, but it will likely take ABC threatening to take legal action or even pull affiliations for it to happen.

    As for Nexstar, I get the feeling they will get Kimmel back on the air once the Charlie Kirk story fully winds down. Its already starting to.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for showing your readers what Carr said in 2019 and what he said on Monday. It shows that he is a bit all over the place when it comes to the regulation of speech on television.

    ReplyDelete

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