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Let me see if I can help you here. The rule is that a single entity can't own full-power broadcast licenses that combine to cover more than 39% of the country. (There are some nuances here like the UHF discount, duopolies, Class A stations, etc. But that is the basic rule.) The broadcast networks are subject to this same rule. Their O&O stations can't reach more than 39%. What is not covered in that 39% is programming reach. The broadcast networks, and syndication programmers for that matter, can set up agreements to have their programming broadcast by stations covering 100% of the country. So NBC Prime or Live with Kelly & Mark don't have a limit on their national reach. But NBC and ABC can't directly own stations that reach more than 39% of the country. Hope that helps!

Per Deadline, with some cozy revisionist history on the failed Standard General (and Apollo Global Management) takeover of Tegna to boot. I find it hard to have sympathy for groups like Nexstar, Sinclair and Tegna that bought stations for the sake of buying them with zero strategy or consideration. Just because you took advantage of companies that didn't want to exist anymore like Belo, McGraw Hill, Allbritton, LIN and Tribune didn't make the future any brighter. The problem facing local television is the same crisis facing newspapers and commercial radio and public radio, and no amount of deregulation the likes of Dave Lougee and Perry Sook are openly coveting right now won't be able to paper over it. All you'll get are larger dinosaurs with bigger, more oppressive debt loads.

Broadcast TV is likeky long past its chance to be broken up by the government. When Ma Bell (AT&T) was broken up into the RBOCs, it only took 20 years for many of them to merge back together as....AT&T. By then, cellular phones were a regular part of life and customers had options. Nowadays, the very POTS that comprised phone service is a rarity that has been largely replaced by VOIP and cellular. At least we still have competition in TV, even if it's the same three owners and many markets. The stations are going to have to start falling before anyone intervenes. I think on the internet end we could start seeing some regulation since the content pool is getting smaller.

The nerve of the government for preventing companies from monopolizing the public airwaves so an oligopathy of companies can't control the flow of information to the public Pardon my lack of knowledge. So local station owners can't broadcast to more than 39% of Americans, but the national television networks can? Is it legally okay for networks to do so because they don't own all stations they broadcast on?

Since the NYC weekday edition of NewsNation Now debuted last year, they kept this strange dichotomy where the Chicago edition with Nichole Berle features a logo with white text on a blue background, while the NYC edition with Connell McShane features a logo with blue text on a white background. I figured they might go for a unified look on the weekends, but nope. The NYC edition hosted by Anna Kooiman uses the blue text w/white background logo, while the brand-new Chicago edition hosted by Adrienne Bankert uses the white text on blue background logo, despite the fact that the NYC/Chicago timeslots are reversed on weekends. Looks like it's the originating city, and not the timeslot, that determines the logo.