From Columbia Journalism Review

Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, promised to bring power to community stations. But it’s their corporate owners who make the big decisions—while regional reporters and station managers take the heat.

Early this week, at an ABC affiliate owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the phones were ringing off the hook. Every two minutes, someone was calling to complain about Jimmy Kimmel’s show being suspended from their local station. On Monday afternoon, an announcement had been made: ABC was going to put him back on air Tuesday night. But not Sinclair and Nexstar, which together own seventy partner stations, according to Reuters, representing more than 25 percent of ABC affiliates nationwide and reaching 23 percent of American households. “Managers were just kind of scrambling to figure out if they needed to get it into the newscast, and then we got word from corporate that we had to wait, and everyone was just really frustrated, and remarking about how ridiculous the situation was,” a reporter at the station said.