channel2

Somebody would probably want the spectrum... Also you've gotta love big corporations and their aversion to paying taxes. They'd rather be in a cash crunch than pay taxes!

Doesn't Paramount need money bad? Wouldn't selling off KSTW or WTOG for cash help with that?

They hold some minority interest in Sarkes Tarzian, Inc.

They own WKSY-LD in Rome, which is part of the Chattanooga market.

I say this as someone with no ties to DFW, but my heart doesn't exactly flutter over the prospect of KXAS's star 5 being canned.

CBS owns the "Eyewitness News" name.

KCNC has been calling itself "CBS 4" since 2003 (and switched from "News 4" to "CBS 4 News" in 2005), so it's not that big a leap. It wouldn't be the first time they had to adapt to a longstanding part of their identity being dropped (they had to drop the KOA calls because GE let Belo keep them for the radio station). But I do think trying to force the major affiliate groups to drop, in some cases, decades' worth of brand recognition and give up at least the appearance of an autonomous newsroom potentially problematic. There are a lot of people who are still, almost 20 years later, distrustful towards CBS News (rightly or not) over their handling of the Killian documents. Plus if CBS News gets into hot water again, why make it harder to distance yourself from the network? The O&Os have every reason to align themselves with the network, being owned by them and aggressively branded with the Eyemark and "CBS" visually or verbally. But if your newsroom is independent from the network, why act like it's not? Wasn't the longstanding "A CBS AFFILIATE" marker meant to indicate exactly that? Also, it sounds eerily similar to NBC's failed gambit to make Young sell KRON to them at a loss. "Call yourself 'NBC 4' and pay us $10 million a year or we're pulling our affiliation." The alignment of the O&Os with the network also serves another purpose I haven't seen theorized: It helps CBS News look like it's "in touch" with large swathes of the country. Over the last decade or so, the national news media seems to have retrenched into a handful of large metropolitan strongholds: New York, LA, San Francisco, Washington, maybe Chicago. Touting a presence in places like Detroit or Pittsburgh or Baltimore or Denver is huge, especially considering the national media's disinvestment in the Rust Belt and general ignorance of the Intermountain West.

It was pointed out that Universal Television wouldn't be happy with having fewer slots to sell shows to NBC in. I'm sure a lot of Hollywood types would need to be pacified as well... (Then again, none of them had any advance knowledge of The WB and UPN joining forces!)

They own a bunch of non-commercial licenses that I can't imagine it would be easy to strip of the non-com designation to widen the pool of potential buyers...unless it's more advantageous to donate them instead of selling them as prime real estate.

Telemundo must be big business for them - or, at least, it has a ton of upside!

Any idea why?

Do they not know their own history? Have they forgotten that this is how they killed UPN? (And arguably got the CW created in the first place?)

I get the impression that NewsNation isn't thought of too highly at Nexstar stations...

Because as the big chains have learned over the last decade, you can replace proven syndicated product with cheap substitutes and people will keep watching. /s

Why would they care about that?

It's not a "waste of space" if you own it.

WOI and WZDX both use TEGNA's preferred sans serif in their branding: Proxima Nova!

They want the web presence...

@Samantha says hi...

And what if he didn't?

Sometimes I forget that the average viewer doesn't memorize callsigns like we geeks do. Those horrible domains hadn't even occurred to me as a problem, so much as just stupid.

I believe it was The WB that gave Sinclair the sweetheart affiliation deal. The network, famously averse to compensation, agreed to fork over $64 million to Sinclair over a ten-year period in exchange for affiliations!

They can't have a Dabl station on a plum channel number but ION can just keep on doing what they do...

Can't believe Weigel lost ground to themselves...

Somehow I hadn't heard about River Mile before now... Surprised Kroenke's actually seeming to gain any traction with it! People seem to consider Elitch's this beloved institution, even though it's...really not great. Also I have never set foot inside KCNC's building.