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The entire reason Scripps gobbled up ion was to get signals to put their diginets on, not to launch (from scratch!) a bunch of news operations. Maybe you'll see a half hour of Newsy on the main signal at some point during the day. Maybe you'll see a new newscast from any new Scripps-owned sister stations in the market. But we're not getting any new news departments out of this.

If you watch the clip, what most likely set her off was a phrase written on the teleprompter that made her slip her tongue. I don’t know if that phrase was poorly written, or if there was an extra word in the phrase that shouldn’t have been added, but regardless, it was wrong for Morgan to lose her temper at the crew like that.....

I recall a side-effect of the implementation of retransmission consent. The stations began running joint ads telling consumers to urge their cable companies to keep their channels on cable. This was at least a decade before Perry Sook starting directly shaking down cable companies for money. For whatever reason, WEWS which was on channel 9, got moved to 11, and WJW moved from 11 to 9. WOIO and WUAB traded spots as well on 6 and 13. Poor shielding was why 3, 5 and 8 were on 2, 11 and 9. 3 was WDLI, 5 was WVIZ, and 8 was WBNX. On the flip side, WOAC was added on channel 12 and several years later, WQHS was added to channel 7 (replacing QVC) and WAOH got a full time slot on channel 15 (after part time carriage on the access channel). These latter moves were part of must-carry, except for WAOH, which was low power. Years later, these were all changed after Time Warner took over the Adelphia systems in Cleveland, and the lineups were more standardized. Spectrum has really made things worse with their packages and poorer service than Time Warner had.

They can't. At least not yet. The stations were operated as one giant feed. Currently, there's no way to interrupt one station without broadcasting it to the entire country. At least that's what we were told.

I still remember the days where we had to have a box because our city's build out had "A" and "B" lines which required an A/B switch and made recording from a VCR a guessing game (I went on a vacation hoping I recorded the ALF finale movie on ABC on the A side...only to come home to two hours of Saturday night CNBC on the B side). Despite that, we still had some split channels into the 90s until Charter bought our provider and implemented one-line service, then digital cable. And we didn't even get BET until 2012 locally. And in that time, we've lost channels because our city was classified as a Milwaukee market city, but Green Bay channels are also in our market, so as networks who don't care about decades-long relationships between viewer and stations, we lost the UPN/MyNet, CBS and Fox stations from Green Bay because of network greed. Thankfully streaming for most of them makes catching their news easy (except for Nexstar stations), but it's aggravating to pay so much a month for all this service and your provider doesn't want to deal with blackout hassles just to keep offering a Fox station from out-of-market, lest they lose Fox News next time because of bitterness on Rupert's end.

Remember the stations Comcast wanted to kick off their system and changed their mind? Well, some are still going away after all... Despite all of the options out there, there still seems to be no perfect TV option. Going way back into the dark ages of cable tv (for me) was the 40-channel Warner cable lineup that split CNBC with WKBN out of Youngstown and C-SPAN 2 with BET. That soon expanded to 70-ish channels with a new fiber optic platform, and to the temporary disgust of their customers, a cable box REQUIRED for any channel above basic. They soon relented, and moved the expanded basic back to unscrambled, and kept the higher tiers on the box. This was a good 15 years before the cable companies decided to "box" everything, and when they could do so, completely scrambled their content by going full-on digital. I've said it a million times. It is entirely possible to make the system a-la-carte. But no company wants to because they will lose the goldmine of fees they "must" charge the consumer for the privilege of being their only choice.

NBC will air the Tokyo 2021 Opening Ceremony live. Set your alarms.