tyrannical bastard

I've been watching the coverage and WKRN had drone footage from "Drone 24", with their logo looking like WATN's.....even though they are no longer co-owned. Looks like sister stations are starting to send in people from other markets too... WSMV had a reporter from St Louis (KMOV) and Alan Sealls has been sent up from Mobile to help WZTV with coverage.

https://www.ftvlive.com/sqsp-test/2020/3/3/isnt-that-a-month-late The Tegna-fication begins Wednesday at noon. Here's hoping it's ONLY the graphics.... UPDATE....according to reporter Ally Gallo...THE MUSIC IS STAYING!!!!!

WRAL and WTVD are some of the few stations that have affiliated with all 3 major networks at one time or another. I believe the record stands with WTTV in Indianapolis, having not only affiliated with ABC, NBC and CBS, but also with UPN, WB, CW, as well as their time as an independent. (They were actually owned by WRAL's parent company from the late 80s to early 90s, before being sold to River City Broadcasting)

Aside from the affiliation swap, there have been many changes within both stations. WNCN went from being "WNCN" to CBS North Carolina and now is CBS 17. The latter was a change by Nexstar as they merged with Media General. WRAL moving to NBC probably played a role with sister station WILM ceding CBS to WWAY's DT2 since NBC was firmly aligned with longtime affiliate WECT. And WRAL has kept their ownership and dominance despite a large number of key anchor departures, most notably, the exit of longtime chief meteorologist Greg Fishel due to a "personnel matter."

We've seen the occasional station....like WOAY that abandoned their longtime channel number and PSIP mapping in favor of their digital allocation (channel 50). Well, as of their repack date, they have had to abandon channel 50, and they are once again....branded as channel 4! A definite improvement over their prior logo!

Surprised that WGNO didn't opt for "Mardi Gras with a Twist".... Meanwhile over in Mobile, the "real" home of Mardi Gras, WPMI and WALA went with 4 hours of coverage from 10 to 2, and WKRG did their annual 9 to 5 coverage.

When you multiply that saving across hundreds of WRDS, not to mention the cheap talent, inbred programming, and god willing, the coffee (or lack thereof) and ply of the TP....

I'd like to buy a vowel..... Maybe Tegna is saving money by cutting them out.... Oh wait....

And it was Bob Dyer at the Akron Beacon Journal that brought the scandal out into the open, and that's when the other media outlets began covering the story. This was back when the Beacon was its own paper, and before it was sucked into the Gatehouse-Gannett behemoth. Ernest Angley and his church have always been local fodder, even though the most visible sign isn't even owned by him...the unfinished tower that Rex Humbard wanted to build.....locals refer to it as Rex's Erection . Had it not been for the New World deal, would WBNX have ever been a factor in the ratings? WUAB needed to dump a network and WBNX was in the right place to take it. Otherwise, Silver King could have snatched it up for WQHS, or even WAKC could have been made into a factor instead of it being PAXxed... Getting the Fox Kids programming, the WB, and overall doing a better job than WUAB of running a station than Raycom put WBNX on the map. It still benefits from every other station in town dumping shows for their own inbred efforts, but the operation begins to crumble.... someone's going to need to step in. And given all of the negative press the other outlets have levied on them, would WBNX refuse to sell out to them or vice versa? It may take an FCC do-over to see the station live on under someone else's control.

About time! I wonder how much longer until WSAZ gets a new Gray graphics package. They got a new set last year. And now that I think of it, The NBC Collection lasted nearly JUST AS LONG as Signature on WSAZ! Signature was from 1993 to 2006 and NBC Collection was from 2006 to earlier this month. It just seemed dated since the Balls & Walls lasted a good decade on WSAZ before they refreshed the look in 2003.

I'm surprised there are stragglers like WSAZ that haven't switched BACK to Stephen Arnold. The way they used Signature before the great SESAC disaster of 2006 may have qualified it for the KOTA/WIVT award for longevity....

The next chapter in the Ernest Angley saga is due to unfold in a Common Pleas Court-run mediation session. https://www.beaconjournal.com/news/20200213/grace-cathedral-former-minister-face-off-over-sordid-accusations?fbclid=IwAR37R35Gvm_GSy02J15ZyH8uQ5YKUpl-CUAbfc0hkUq67dteIlLXORzs580 Disturbing and sickening details aside, the accuser wanted to oust Angley or be compensated for his damages. And of course, the cult...i mean Church is standing behind Rev. Angley and his flock. He is now almost 98, and will not take part in any depositions due to "age-related maladies". In fact, the church has been run by a board of church-members since last year due to Rev. Angley's deteriorating health. Now let us pray that this situation comes to an end and someone other than a ministry or infomercial purveyor ends up with WBNX.......

WVUE is in a VERY good place right now. They are essentially the #1 station for the first time ever after Tegna had trashed WWL and WVUE can do the things that WWL can no longer do on WWL. WDSU is a solid runner up, and well, sooner or later Nexstar will figure out what to do with WGNO.... Hopefully when change comes to WVUE, it will be a good one graphically, and the effect will be minimal in their on-air product. Over in Biloxi, even though the WLOX packages is a major downgrade from what they had before, they still dominate that market and make WXXV look like the 5th place station in a 2 station market.

Jeez....at least the other two networks are in 1080i that carry the Super Bowl, so there's less "conversion" involved....the interlacing is not as bad as the outright scaling of the picture down to 720 while keeping the same frame rate. I had two sources to watch the game live on....WALA in Mobile and WXXV in Biloxi/Gulfport. WALA has 3 other subchannels in SD, and WXXV has two others in 720p. I used to complain that WXXV had an AWFUL picture quality trying to broadcast two 720p streams and a 480i (FOX & NBC and CW). They've since made CW HD and the encoding has made all three streams much better. I just hope we're not getting into a world where Broadcast TV loses the Super Bowl. It's so prevalent in our daily lives, it's like our tax dollars are paying for it!

There's also two identical WJBF mic flags, and two ones for KSNT's Fox affiliate (FOX 43) next to each other with one in white plastic, and the other with black plastic. Unless I'm missing some other FOX 43 somewhere (it's not WVBT and definitely not WPMT).... And since "The Big Game" has begun, doe's anyone else's over-the-air picture look like garbage? I'm watching on WALA and WXXV, and both pictures look very compressed. I'm thinking it's a network thing, having to downconvert from 4K for all of the people streaming on their firesticks....

WJW and WGHP are nearly identical logos. I'm sure the average viewer couldn't tell the difference. Even the variances both stations use make them virtually identical.

WKRG's mic flag is old, they replaced it when they changed to the CBS package 2 years ago. For as penny-pinching a company Nexstar is, you would think that buying a single electronic LED mic flag that you could instantly change the logo on would be more cost effective than shipping and changing out hundreds of mic flags....

In the annals of history, although Fred Silverman didn't make all of the right moves at the time, some of them led on to bigger and better things. Flash forward to Jeff Zucker, and as he fell upward, everything he touched turned to . That followed him to CNN too. If if wasn't for a certain reality show he helped launch, we may not have a certain orange-haired being in the oval office.

Casey Kasem (who also voiced Shaggy) was also the voice of NBC in the late 70s...I wonder if Silverman was responsible for this too?

NBC did try to promote themselves like the other networks by the late 70s. Looking at the stuff they were putting out in the early to mid 70s, it was very plain and boring. The first sign of any real effort (aside from the trapezoid "N" logo) was in 1978 and NB-See-Us, followed by several years of Proud As A Peacock, which brought back a simpler peacock, combined with the "N" to create the "Proud N" which would last into 1986. Silverman's tenure at CBS and ABC included a conceited effort to rebrand virtually every year and generate excitement for their programming. NBC's lax efforts combined with stale and unfocused programming led to their fall and cratering, which Silverman was recruited to try and fix. Unfortunately, many of these risks were even costlier and performed worse. It said something when Redd Foxx was lured back to do a reboot of his original show, minus Demond Wilson.

It definitely was at it's nadir when Silverman was there. But several of the shows he greenlit including Hill Street Blues began to thrive when Grant Tinker and Brandon Tartikoff took over. Semi-related was the implosion of SNL at time, with Lorne Michaels leaving and Jean Doumanian replacing him. Only Eddie Murphy survived the total recasting, and Al Franken lampooned Silverman in the infamous Limo for a Lame-O monologue, which cost him any chance of helming the show. The death knell was Charles Rocket dropping the F-Bomb on air which got Doumanian and most of the cast ousted. And perhaps the most infamous piece of Silverman's tenure was this.... (As an aside, broadcast tv has fallen so far that any network would kill to have an 18 rating/14 share these days)

While most of his NBC efforts were his kryptonite (and not out-sucked until Jeff Zucker was in charge), he was a legend who redefined CBS and brought ABC into prominence in the 70s. He had a mess at NBC to clean up after some costly bombs before his tenure and losing the 1980 Summer Olympics to the US not participating.

I wonder how much this is the case at some of Tribune's newer acquisitions that Tegna picked up. I guess it depends how much Tribune put into their stations, whether they were legacy or Local TV acquisitions...

...and if it was 20 years ago, it would be... Who Wants To Be A Millionaire-ish...