Name: 'This is much bigger than late night': Ex-FTC on Kimmel feud's impact on TV business
Uploaded: 2025-11-17T17:32:52.000Z
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And we're back with the money lead and the Jimmy Kimmel show suspension.

Adverbs of degree

As we've been laying out for a couple days now, there's a very obvious money trail.

Nexstar, the biggest owner of local TV stations in the country, needs the FCC to approve their effort to buy their biggest rival, Tegna.

And this week, nexstar followed the lead of FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who said he wanted local TV stations to announce they were no longer going to air Kimmel by announcing that their ABC affiliated stations would preempt Jimmy Kimmel because they said they objected to Jimmy Kimmel's comments.

With us now is former Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya.

He was fired by the Trump administration this past March.

We should just clarify that you were with the ftc, Federal Trade Commission, not the fcc, the Federal Communications Commission.

But either way, some of these mergers and such would probably need FTC approval as well as, well, there's a lot of money to be made.

Nexstar has ample reason to try to endear itself to the fcc.

So does Bob Iger and Disney, for that matter.

What do you think's going to happen next?

So I don't know what will happen with this, but

I can tell you that this is much bigger than late night, because maybe you go to bed at 10, maybe you just don't have cable, but

you do buy groceries, you do have prescription medicine.

And what this president is doing is using these rules that are supposed to protect the public against mergers that are going to hurt them or raise prices.

And he's using those rules to hurt his enemies and help his friends.

And so it's not going to matter if grocery prices go up or drug prices go up.

What's going to matter is who's given how much to the president and his friends.

Because just to reiterate for people, the more companies there are, the more competition there is, and

that keeps theoretically, prices as low as possible, unless there's, you know, antitrust violations going on.

And you posted on social media that you think that this is broader than censorship, broader than late night.

50 media companies controlling 90% of the market, down to 5 companies controlling 90% of the market.

It used to be 40 years ago 50 companies were around controlling that market.

If you censor company number 50, good luck with the other 49.

But now we have a situation where There are just five media conglomerates controlling 90% of the market.

And the president can literally hold out his hand and say, we got Colbert Kimmel's next.

So people need to understand that this has been years in the making and that consolidation not only is bad for free speech when a couple people control what we watch on television, it also paves the way for this kind of censorship and overreach.

And we should note that when you say Fallon and Myers are next, the late night comedians on NBC, you're quoting him.

But beyond that, I think one of the things that people might need to understand why Colbert first?

There are opportunities to squeeze these companies because of mergers.

It's happening now with Kimmel and Disney and nexstar.

The reason it hasn't happened to the NBC guys is because their parent company isn't trying to merge with anybody right now.

there are actually tapes where he's saying, don't mess with my guys when it comes to their merger.

And so what used to be a process that was supposed to protect the American consumer, make sure people had choices with respect to their media, with respect to their grocery stores, has basically been hijacked to advance this president's agenda.

And the one thing I will say is that this is years in the making.

And Republicans and Democrats have created a legal system that kept on letting these companies get bigger.

The Telecommunications act in 1996 paved the way for each of these companies to gobble each other up more and more.

And that's because a lot of these telecommunications agencies gave a lot of donations to Republicans and Democrats alike.

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'This is much bigger than late night': Ex-FTC on Kimmel feud's impact on TV business

obvious

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