Rusty Muck

Because Disney only treats WPVI as a budget line item that generates a boatload of money in revenue without any effort. Disney is only focused on Disney+ and the soulless meat packing plant that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That's it.

Unsurprisingly, Hank Price decided to humiliate himself in this op-ed claiming it will be a "body blow" to the megachains and depress salaries for talent, and openly pled for "an appropriate court" (translation: a right-wing court dominated by Republican appointees) to overturn it. It's easily the most depraved, tone-deaf and out-of-step reaction by a man who runs a website—TVNewsCheck—now wholly subsidized by rich old white males Perry Sook, Hilton Howell, Adam Symson and David Smith.

It does feel like there are three options for WADL since Mission is so badly handcuffed here: Sell it to another group owner—hell, even Gray!—who can run it as a CW affiliate Sell it to a Godcaster and sell the existing program inventory to Scripps/WMYD Convert it to a diginet tree and sell the existing program inventory to Scripps/WMYD There's no way in the world that Mission is going to want to run MyNet dreck with a terrible syndicated program inventory (although not as horrendous as WMYD's lineup by comparison!) on a station that has no facilities, doesn't own the transmitter tower, has an inferior signal and can't use Nexstar at all to extort cable companies for extra retrans revenue.

From paragraph 54: 15% of 168 hours means Nexstar cannot supply more than 25 hours and 20 minutes of programming per week. The CW primetime takes up 15 hours total per week, meaning they cannot program any more than 10 hours of sports per week or any NewsNation simulcasts. Mission got a greenlight to purchase a boat anchor for $75 million.

Surprise! The FCC approved the $75 million sale of WADL to Mission Broadcasting earlier today. But there's a catch: Nexstar is legally prohibited from directly being involved in Mission's operations of the station. I'd argue this is much worse for Nexstar than the WPIX decision, because Mission is incapable of operating a television station by themselves. Moreover, the $75M price tag does not include WADL's current facilities, all of which were retained by Kevin Adell.

So now we know Perry was that one superdonor that saved TVNewsCheck from oblivion. Sure helps to have influential people in your back pocket, doesn't it, Harry?

Excuse me? You really think Joe Sixpack of Anytown, USA, really gives a damn about the set design of Channel 2 News or the graphics or the music or if the station has the network logo in your preferred use? Come on. The TV fandom is a fringe community of people who have a massively oversized feeling of self-importance they don't deserve and posts like these are ironclad proof of this. And for the record, I am not an executive. But at least I have a job and a life. With all due respect, this is just ridiculous. The local news audience—what little of it still exists altogether—would not care. At all.

Modernism is what will keep the industry from becoming a museum piece that only people 65 and older give a crap about. What you're advocating for is a one-way ticket to obsolescence.

Contrary to the majority opinion in the fandom, I really don't think anyone but news nerds care about superficial things like that. They care if the news is treated like a joke or slathered with 3D graphics, dated music and trapped in amber since 1995.

Wasn't that because WJBK at the time used the EWN name? Of course with an anchor like Bill Bonds at the helm, it wouldn't have been a proper use of the EWN format anyway. Same with Irv at WKBW not exactly implementing the Action News format with the EWN name.

Why? Because they are dropping a name that hasn't really meant anything since Bill Bonds got fired 30 years ago? Good lord, this fandom is so unbelievably out of touch with reality.

The CityPulse format effectively died in 2005, right before Moses sold it. Or it died with Mark Dailey in 2011. It's not really good to pretend to be something you are not and have not been for a long time. And given the absolutely sorry state of Canadian television, chairs for CityNews anchors is far, far down on the level of importance.

And to think, all of this could have been prevented back in 2019 had Nexstar sold as many stations as possible to keep WPIX and retained KASW and WSFL. They have no one to blame but themselves for this level of short-sightedness, poor planning, and outright greed.

Unless they agree to subchannel affiliations with WDIV and WPLG, the CW is likely shut out from Detroit and Miami entirely.

It's a sore loser lawsuit. It's been repeatedly stated by company officials that Nexstar wants to own more stations and a second television network, as if their 68% national reach and multiple sidecars—let alone their largest station being one they don't really own—isn't enough. The heavily conservative judicial makeup of the 5th circuit already makes it known the fix is in. Only question is how much does that court kneecap the FCC from enacting any policy, or does the FCC simply defy the ruling and make their policies more punitive?

Y'all are going to be very disappointed when Scrippscasts become the industry norm, not the exception. If there's one thing local television enjoys, it's xeroxing the heck out of each other.

Same energy:

Isn't Nexstar paying for that ad inventory?

Fox News is the most profitable cable network not because of ratings or ad revenue (or lack thereof on the latter) but because it is the most expensive network a cable provider can carry. Those carriage contracts are extremely lucrative and make any advertising boycott levied by MMFA, et. al, completely useless. NewsNation runs with a fraction of the budget of Fox, and is able to get some blue-chip advertising as opposed to none with Fox. And even then, the carriage contracts for NewsNation is still what makes the most money. Do you have actual proof this is the case? Show me facts and figures, or this is nothing more than a "dude, trust me" claim.

Calling it a failure with nothing to back up those claims besides ratings—which anyone would say is an outdated form of measurement and a rather arcane form of guesstimating—is particularly dishonest. Any cable network can turn a profit if they run lean and mean, and in the case of the entire Paramount Global cable portfolio, run reruns of only one show for days on end. Why? Because it's all money that's taken directly from cable bills. We pay for these networks to be in the black and they collectively do nothing to justify it. I don't really care for cable news or whatever NewsNation actually does at this point. At least they're doing SOMETHING, which is something I can't say about much of the vast wasteland of zombie cable channels that SHOULD be dead and are helping to kill off the medium altogether. She was reassigned to host special projects and documentaries.

Ratings don't matter when you're profitable. Look at the entire suite of cable networks owned by Paramount Global; they all still exist because they command profits with no budgets and no effort given into programming. Which is just as well. Nielsen clamped down on the scraping of data that Mediaite used to do to get cable TV ratings, thus you don't hear much about ratings in general nowadays.

WGN America had a near-national reach but was run as a low-rent ION with expensive, lengthy syndicated contracts of mostly copuganda shows and a second-tier Tim Allen sitcom (as their inability to rid themselves of Blue Bloods clearly shows). It was incompatible with the rest of the Nexstar portfolio and needed to be blown up. NewsNation is also turning a pretty good profit.

Except there is zero to be gained by blowing up their lone radio station. Simple as that.

A call sign change (which won't happen to begin with) won't change the fact they're stuck with a standalone AM they can't sell, with demos older than dirt.

Absolutely no sane person, no person with a shred of mental competence, would willingly allow themselves to be made a target like David Smith has. This is worse than your typical delusions of grandeur that the likes of Elon Musk have. This has a good chance of not just killing the Sun outright, but coupled with the $500M in legal fees from Diamond's bankruptcy case, could damn well be the death penalty for hundreds of television newsrooms across the country, if not a financial death penalty for David Smith and Sinclair as a whole. I'm going to say it. Something is very, very wrong with David Smith and his mental state.