Rusty Muck

With all do respect, the only purpose of commerical broadcasting is to make money. "Public good" is secondary, if it is even a factor.

Irrelevant to the topic at hand. They also have money and incentive. That's why EMF, Relevant Radio and Daystar have vacuumed up oodles of stations over the years. I'm not "beign jealous" of anything, I'm simply existing in the real world, not fantasy-driven wishcasting of groups buying a bunch of basketcase stations from a bush league owner. Have you ever heard of "return on investment"? Again, totally irrelevant to the topic at hand. With all due respect, do better.

Why? Because they are the only ones who would want to buy these stations that, for the most part, have no local news presence, little viewership or zero infrastructure. The spectrum hogging would matter more, and it does with a bottom-feeder like INSP. Well, I live in the real world, and these stations being sold are those the megachains or the networks would not want. Hearst is not going to spend money on a bunch of fixer-uppers or total rebuild projects, and neither would Gray, Graham, Scripps or Tegna.

INSP, Coastal and Daystar are the most likely buyers of these stations. Standard General is a company in limbo since they failed to get Tegna (with the current farce that is MediaCo, Standard clearly has no idea what their plans are in any aspect of mass media) and the stations they currently have are low-budget, low-rated dumps. Plus Apollo is not going to spend money on stations that sorely need investment in or need totally new infrastructures altogether.

Even without the links to Old Scotty's blog, it's fairly obvious that Byron Allen is overleveraged and likely is being crushed by debt. One could argue that his fruitless "bids" to buy ABC, Tegna and Paramount Global have been simple distractions to hide what is a much more serious problem.

Byron Allen is too badly overleveraged and has acquired a bad reputation for talking up deal after deal and failing to actually make them. He is not a credible candidate for anything.

Thank you for saying that. I don't know if it's a bug or a feature about the TV fandom in the present day but it has also irritated the moderators over there considerably.

Sinclair is what would have happened had a miserly 1980s-era owner like TVX Broadcast Group or Media Central somehow existed into the present day.

Serious question: why in the wide wide world of sports would any of those groups want basketcase stations that need a massive amount of investment just in order to be remotely competitive in a declining industry? Plus Apollo Global Management isn't buying anything and Byron Allen is too badly overleveraged. With all due respect, what makes anyone think Apollo is going to have the soulless husk of Cox Media Group buy anything or that Byron is going to do anything but make vacant empty promises he can't deliver?

It won't. While the company is looking over the Sony-Apollo bid, it is out of courtesy alone and will be rejected as soon as practicable. That being said, Apollo is more likely to sell off Cox Media Group than they are going to have them buy anything. Cox Media is stagnant, faltering and running on fumes.

That's been an industry problem for over 35 years. Everyone has tried to be a knockoff of WSVN and local news has been stuck in the same old, same old. It's why viewership is collapsing.

Private equity isn't going to want to bother with television station ownership after the FCC let the Standard/Apollo buyout of Tegna die on the vine. (Standard General, particularly their MediaCo subsidiary, is a ghastly basketcase right now, so count them out, too.) It is not outside the realm of possibility that Daystar buys all the stations and flips them immediately to godcasters. Also... it's 2024. Interest rates are not near zero like they were a decade ago. It is not financially productive or possible for a singular buyer to emerge for these stations. The investment banker advising Sinclair right now assuredly told them this hard truth.

Why? Because they actually modernized production for their newscasts and thus made themselves a target of a has-been blogger who wants things to remain stuck in 1989 even as viewing habits have collapsed across the board? In the real world, the only real weak spot is the Ion stations, and that's because of the soft national ad market.

I think a lot of people are going to be severly disappointed when a bottom-feeder no-budget company like INSP or Vision/Coastal winds up buying these stations instead of these pie-eyed fantasies. Instead of playing speculator, let's just look at these indisputable truths. And they aren't pretty: The television industry is not a buyer's market in any sense of the word and hasn't been since interest rates got raised substantially The few remaining megachains—Scripps, Tegna and Gray—are either too built up or are already in many of these existing markets. Hearst doesn't buy anything unless it's a gigantic waste of money like spending $200M+ for freaking WBBH in a older market in a permanently uncompetitive state politically. Great thinking there, y'all. Apollo Global Management isn't buying anything and may be forced to sell off Cox Media Group if their stupid fever dream of buying Paramount actually happened. Graham isn't buying anything because they just don't. The networks ain't buying anything, and one of them (CBS) is in limbo right now since Shari Redstone took it off the market. The FCC might just repeal the UHF Discount rule (again) just to further erase anything Pai did and not grandfather a thing The continued diminishing returns of retransmission revenue is only going to get worse. Those golden geese are no longer not laying eggs, they're entering hospice care and the likes of Nexstar don't have a plan B. So as you can clearly see... Sinclair is absolutely screwed.

Not only will he not get it, he'll stubbornly refuse to sell anything in order to buy it. This is the same clown who runs a company that proudly boasted on their own website they could buy ABC "with little friction". And no one has seemingly considered this is why the FCC has started to crack down on them.

It's gonna be hilarious when one of the pay TV companies permanently lock him out because retrans revenue is nothing more than diminishing returns. Nexstar is the Blockbuster Video of the television industry. And where's Blockbuster now?

Perry's fully subsidizing TVNC and paying industry has-beens Harry Jessell and Hank Price to write drivel advocating for unfettered deregulation. Reality and logic do not apply in that joke of a website. Let's check in a year or two when the CW is bereft of affiliates in multiple major markets and his "grand plan" with the CW winds up being a total dud.

Pretty simple here: the CW winds up without a Detroit affiliate.

Who really wants to see Washington State and Oregon State play each other for 13 straight weeks? Geez.

Doesn't WPIX use the Nexstar copyright endcap for their newscasts?

Given how badly the affiliation base has been degraded and continues to be degraded, Nexstar really needs to stop the Sam Zell-era double standard and impose the network branding on their biggest stations. That absolutely means KRON, KTLA and WGN. Like, come on. Make it so people know your network actually still exists. Because right now they don't.

Nexstar foolishly boasting about wanting to use KUSI as a CW-owned station three years ahead of the fact all but ensured Tegna mass disaffiliates from the network when their contract ends in 2026.

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.