I was fairly incensed last week when ABC decided to suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s show. As someone with an associate’s degree in journalism, the importance of the freedom of speech was drilled into me. (I’m not interested in debating the reasons why Kimmel’s show was suspended. Now here, anyway.) Instead of shouting into the void of Twitter, I decided to put my money — or rather, wallet — where my mouth was and show my displeasure by boycotting the people behind this. That turned out to be more difficult than it sounds.

According to their site, ABC’s highest rated programs include High Potential, Abbot Elementary, The Rookie, and Shifting Gears. Based on that I would say ABC is not a particularly difficult channel to boycott. One of my guilty pleasures is prime time game shows, and while ABC is currently airing new episodes of Press Your Luck, I’d be fine with watching old episodes from the 80s. They’re also airing new episodes of The Match Game, which everyone should boycott regardless. Much harder to give up would be college football, which often airs on ABC, and Monday Night Football which I enjoy, but there’s always Thursday Night Football plus the three or four games that air on Sunday. I’d live.

So while boycotting ABC would be slightly annoying, it wouldn’t be impossible. The problem is that ABC is owned by Disney, and it was Disney who directed ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel. Disney is a big more difficult to boycott. I mean, it would be simple for me to announce I won’t be visiting Disneyland this year, mostly because I wasn’t going to anyway. The problem is all the things Disney owns, which includes (but is not limited to): ESPN, Lucasfilm (which includes all Star Wars properties), Marvel Entertainment, Pixar, 20th Century Studios, FX, and Hulu. That’s a wider umbrella.

According to news reports, Disney leaned on ABC to suspend Kimmel’s show because Nextstar said viewers were threatening to boycott ABC stations. Now, Nextstar is an interesting company.

Nexstar Media Group currently owns 197 television television stations in the United States. Their stations currently reach 70% of all households. Here in Oklahoma Nextstar doesn’t own KOCO, our local ABC affiliate; instead, they own KFOR (our NBC affiliate) and KAUT (the CW). So now I’d have to boycott NBC as well as ABC. This is getting complicated.

In reality Nextstar doesn’t really care about people threatening to boycott ABC stations. What they really care about is their pending merger with Tegna, which would give them a total of 265 stations reaching 80% of all households in the US and making them the largest television station owner in the country. This pending merger has to be approved by the FCC… and that’s where everything comes together. When the FCC began threatening licenses, someone at Nextstar called someone at Disney, someone at Disney called someone at ABC, someone at ABC called Jimmy Kimmel, and Jimmy Kimmel called his travel agent. Pretty simple.

I remember a few years ago when people began boycotting Jimmy John’s after the owner posted pictures of big game he had killed on a hunt. Years prior, people boycotted Subway for a different reason. Last year, Kid Rock led a (rather successful) boycott against Bud Light after they publicly congratulated a transgender woman. Boycotting a single product is pretty easy. Boycotting a store like Walmart or Amazon in today’s society is a little more difficult and may take sacrificing some convenience, but it’s doable. Boycotting a company that owns 197 television stations, plus Disney, is a lot to bite off.

Perhaps the only way to do it is to turn the television off altogether, which might not be a bad idea anyway.