Sinclair has itself to blame, but also has Rupert Murdoch to share it with them. The company chose to grow its station portfolio as fast as it did, even though it had not long before its 2010s buying spree, had quite a bit of debt on its hands.
On the RSN front, Sinclair chose to partner with Allen Media to buy the Fox Sports regional networks at a time when cord-cutting was increasing, and exacerbated things by, not long after taking over the company, making fee demands that wound up greatly reducing Bally Sports’ vMVPD distribution to where DirecTV Stream was the only live TV streamer carrying them; this, in turn, made it nearly impossible for the company to be able to pay down the debt it inherited from the purchase.
By the time Diamond Sports got Fubo to bring back the Bally Sports networks a few months ago, cord-cutting had reached a point where the costs of a company like Sinclair operating an RSN became prohibitive. Diamond’s financial issues must have some ripple effect on Sinclair’s bottom line to where it’s making cuts to try to recoup the losses, on top of the affected stations’ moribund performance. Of course, a better solution to repay the losses would be to try to divest stations to AMG or other groups with significant cap room and use the proceeds to lower its debt load.
I doubt Fox Corporation would’ve made the same mistakes that Diamond/Sinclair did if it had chosen to keep the RSNs; had it still owned them and floated a DTC offering for the RSNs at the same time WarnerMedia, Disney, Paramount and NBCUniversal/Comcast decided to venture into their own streaming services, such a move at an earlier point in time probably would have helped what became the Bally Sports networks and other RSNs weather the impact of cord-cutting somewhat better. Fox would have also had better leverage to secure DTC deals with MLB teams, compared to Diamond, which doesn’t even have groupwide streaming rights for all the teams that Bally Sports holds rights to.