WJTV Channel 12 Removed from Direct TV And U-Verse

Contract negotiations have caused DirectTV to drop local news station WJTV 12 in Jackson.  People are upset. They want their “Young and Restless” and their “The Bold and the Beautiful.” Also lost are local favorites “Family Feud” and local news reports.

WJTV 12 responds on their website

The dispute has broken out between DirecTV and Nexstar broadcasting group, which states that more than 120 stations in 97 markets across the United States have been impacted by an outage that began at midnight, July 4. Both sides blame the other for the outage.

On Independence Day, Nexstar tried to paint the outage as a result of the AT&T market position following its $80 billion-plus acquisition of Hollywood giant Time Warner. AT&T is DirecTV’s parent company.

“A little more than a year after putting DirecTV together with Time Warner, AT&T appears intent on using its new market power to prioritize its own content at the expense of consumers, and insisting on unreasonable and extreme terms that are totally inconsistent with the market,” Nexstar stated on its website.

AT&T, via its website, put the blame squarely on Nexstar. ” We had hoped to prevent Nexstar from removing its stations from your TV channel lineup. We even offered Nexstar more money to keep their stations available. However, Nexstar simply said no and chose to remove them instead. By doing so, Nexstar has put you in the center of its negotiations.”

In the past, both companies have resolved similar blackouts in short order. AT&T stated that such disputes “are often resolved quickly,” while Nexstar said it “remains eager to complete an agreement.”