ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” is about to have its highest-rated episode in years.
Pittsburghers can see his return to the airwaves following a four-day suspension Tuesday at 11:35 p.m. on WTAE, which is owned by Hearst Broadcasting. However, some viewers won’t be able to watch on ABC affiliates owned by Sinclair Broadcasting and Nexstar Broadcast Group.
WTAE’s signal covers the Pittsburgh Designated Market Area (DMA), which includes Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Clarion, Fayette, Forest, Greene, Indiana, Lawrence, Venango, Washington and Westmoreland counties in Pennsylvania; Monongalia and Preston counties in West Virginia; and Garrett County in Maryland.
Further afield, the ABC affiliate in Johnstown-Altoona is owned by Sinclair, so Kimmel’s show won’t air there. Johnstown viewers will be able to watch Tuesday’s episode on Wednesday at ABC.com or via Hulu.
The same is true for ABC affiliates owned by Nexstar Media Group in Wheeling, W.Va., Steubenville, Ohio, and Erie. They too have said they will not air Kimmel’s show Tuesday night. Last week, Nexstar was the first station group to pull Kimmel’s show. The company is in the midst of attempting to get government approval to buy rival station group Tegna.
The ABC affiliate in Youngstown, Ohio, is owned by Vaughan Media, LLC, which has joint sales and shared services agreements with Nexstar.
The whole Kimmel imbroglio began last week. On the Sept. 15 episode, Kimmel said, “The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” which some took to imply Kirk’s assassin was MAGA while others recognized it as a critique on MAGA-allied responses that stopped short of assigning motivations to the killer.
Kimmel’s show aired Sept. 16 as usual. But on Sept. 17, after President Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr publicly suggested Kimmel should be suspended and invoked FCC oversight of local TV stations, ABC pulled Kimmel off the air. This resulted in significant pushback from viewers concerned about First Amendment freedoms – Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz also sounded a warning about First Amendment implications – and from the Hollywood creative community that Disney-owned ABC relies on to make its programming.
It’s unclear what the future holds for Kimmel’s show, but even if Sinclair and Nexstar refuse to air the program, Sinclair ABC stations reach only 13.6 percent of the country and Nexstar stations reach just 8.6 percent of American TV homes, per Joe Flint of The Wall Street Journal.
And media writer Paul Farhi notes that network affiliates can’t contractually pre-empt network programming indefinitely.
“A network affiliate like Sinclair can pre-empt a network show a limited number of times (depends on the contract), but then is in breach of its affiliate agreement and faces penalties or cancellation,” Farhi wrote on X/Twitter Monday. “So Sinclair is likely on a short leash here.”
