View / Disney could have sold ABC. But then where would we be?

“Free speech insanity aside, this absolutely makes the case for spins/sales,” one media banker texted me late last week. He was talking about Disney’s Jimmy Kimmel brouhaha and noting, correctly, that if Bob Iger had jettisoned ABC and its other TV channels, as he considered doing after his return as CEO in 2022, he’d have $10 billion and one fewer headache.

The business reporter in me agrees. Pesky media businesses are liabilities for companies like Disney, whose fortunes lie in theme parks, cruises, and movie studios (which carry their own free-speech pitfalls, but at least they’re profitable). CNN accounts for maybe 2% of David Zaslav’s revenue, but a huge share of his problems. Those problems will soon be someone else’s.

But from a free-speech perspective, it’s worth asking who that somebody else is and what their incentives would be to put Kimmel back on the air, as Iger did — and let him cast Robert De Niro as a mob-boss caricature of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. A more focused owner of ABC would be even more beholden to Carr and the affiliate networks whose blackout threats set the whole affair in motion.

That’s a feature, not a bug, of spinoffs, which don’t so much solve a problem as move it and magnify it. Spinning off ABC would let Disney not care what Carr thinks. But it would require ABC to care only about what Carr thinks. Iger might worry about President Donald Trump sending the Coast Guard after a Disney cruise ship, but that’s a longer shot than the FCC making life impossible for a pure-play broadcast network.

If backlash from Hollywood talent or streaming customers canceling their Disney+ influenced Iger to reinstate Kimmel, the conglomerate model served a purpose — maybe not for shareholders, but for society.