In March, hundreds of broadcast TV executives gathered at the Salamander DC, a luxury hotel just a few minutes’ walk from the Washington Monument, to talk politics and policy. The National Association of Broadcasters was hosting its annual State Leadership Conference, and speakers included Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D-Washington).
According to an attendee, the mood was upbeat as execs gathered in the Marina Room to watch President Trump address a joint session of Congress. His victory in November was widely seen as a preamble to deregulation, with broadcasters set to benefit. “Consolidation” was the word on everyone’s lips, and a light touch from the FCC under new chairman Brendan Carr would help broadcasters compete in a media world at risk of leaving them behind.
Amid years of frustration, national TV networks had been in something of a cold war with their station groups, and now the tide might be turning.
Owners of local TV stations were forced to let their network partners negotiate distribution deals with such streaming services as YouTube TV and Hulu With Live TV, taking key negotiations out of the hands of station owners and permitting perceived conflicts of interest around streamers owned by the network’s parent companies (station groups still negotiate deals with cable and satellite providers).
And networks had become more and more aggressive about pursuing ever higher affiliation fees (to air programming) and reverse compensation fees, which are a cut of the fees that local stations receive from distributors for their stations.
Meanwhile, networks seek those higher fees while putting their programming on their own streaming services, essentially competing with their station partners and undercutting the exclusivity of their deals.
Since that gathering in March, what had been a cold war has gone hot. Carr has been far more activist than many observers expected, with his efforts seemingly aimed more at national networks, not stations. One local TV source describes Carr as a “steadfast ally” in the fight against Big Tech and Big Media.
And, to be certain, broadcasters view the fight as existential.
Which is why the (extremely!) public fight over ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! has thrust station owners, and specifically the two largest owners — Nexstar, led by Perry Sook, and Sinclair, led by Chris Ripley — into the national spotlight.
Kimmel’s short-lived suspension was sparked in part by a decision from Nexstar and Sinclair to preempt the program (their post-return preemptions were also short-lived). It also followed a comment made by Carr on a podcast in which he seemed to call for exactly that action.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead,” Carr said. “Frankly I think it’s past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney, and say … ‘we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out.’”
Carr later clarified that he believes the dispute can be resolved through conversations between local station owners and national networks, without the FCC necessarily getting involved, but he nonetheless celebrated the decisions, telling The Hollywood Reporter in a text message after Nexstar said it would preempt Kimmel that while it “may be an unprecedented decision, it is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming that they determine falls short of community values. I hope that other broadcasters follow Nexstar’s lead.”
The message being sent is that the FCC is deputizing station owners to take on their network partners. And while the Kimmel pushback ended up being just three shows, they do expect stations to be more aggressive in opposing what they see as overreach, both culturally and competitively, from their partners.
“It is becoming increasingly clear that bias acknowledged and now admitted in editorial coverage by legacy national networks, false information provided by AI and social media disinformation are making it almost impossible for Americans to distinguish between fact, opinion and fiction,” Nexstar’s Sook said Aug. 7 during a call with Wall Street analysts.
And that pushback coincides with a deregulatory push that is all about scale. Nexstar is in the midst of a $6.2 billion deal to acquire Tegna, one that would require the FCC’s 39 percent ownership cap to be expanded. Carr on Tuesday advanced a motion to revisit the current ownership rules, paving a way toward changes on that front.
“I think that the administration and Chairman Carr wants to make sure that the relationships are in some semblance of balance,” Sook added. “It is a symbiotic relationship. The networks need us to distribute their programming and their advertising. We rely on the networks for programming.”
According to disclosure reports, Nexstar and Sinclair have spent more than $2 million lobbying government officials through the first half of 2025. The NAB itself spent another $6 million; that’s big-money lobbying to support even bigger-money deals.
Of course, the relationship between local stations and national networks remains multifaceted and intertwined. Affiliates are limited in what they can do when it comes to preempting primetime programming or national network programming at other hours, though they can do so for bona fide public interest reasons (like, say a debate between local political candidates) or if they believe that content does not serve their local communities.
Increasingly, the frustrations are boiling over. As the FCC has weighed whether to raise ownership caps, affiliate groups repping the ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox station owners joined the NAB in sending an Aug. 22 letter to the commission, making their case and dismissing their “partners” as “Big Media Conglomerates.”
“Internet media companies and Big Media Conglomerates from the East and West Coasts have been permitted to gain massive scale and scope at the expense of local broadcasters, all while the government has prohibited broadcasters from achieving the same,” they wrote. “They have no interest in serving local communities or becoming a vital part of the fabric of America’s cities and towns.”
The FCC is poised to give them the green light for more scale, as long as it determines it can do so legally (Congress might need to step in to raise the cap itself).
But regardless of how things play out, the media business appears to be entering an era in which network affiliates are not sitting back and waiting for the sector to disappear into oblivion. The Kimmel pushback, brief as it was, could actually be the start of a longer-term battle, and there is little doubt which side the FCC will be on in that fight.
This story appeared in the Oct. 1 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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