Rusty Muck

Better Gray buys them than Coastal, who is the only other plausible buyer. Not even Marquee would waste money on these clunkers.

It absolutely has. Those stations are permabroken and destined to be rumps of their former Gray competition. No one else is going to waste their money on properties Byron Allen squandered.

Why would Hearst—or any group not named Gray—waste money like that? Allen destroyed those stations to the point where any buyer is going to have to burn money just to get them back up to par. Talk about a money pit. The only obvious outcome is Gray buying the OW stations (along with the rest of the Allen stations) and they become shells of WSAW and WMTV. They all qualify for failed station waivers.

So they can all run MeTV off the bird? Why would Hearst waste their time with the beyond-broken OW stations? They don't need full-power satellites for WISN, which is all they would be.

Not only is CBS unwilling to buy anything (they haven't since ... what, when they merged into the first Viacom?? in 2000??) they're also stuck with three stations they can't sell: WUPA, KSTW and WTOG. I betcha if no regulations existed anymore, Nexstar would have grabbed WUPA and KSTW as CW-owned stations. But since the 39% cap still exists, CBS can't get rid of them. Putting CBS on WUPA is the path of least resistance, plus it gives this miasma soon to be known as ParamountSkydance another local digital platform to have once viewership totally dries up and CBS becomes nothing more than a brand name for P+ and Pluto.

Yeah, it was WCIX that was irrelevant because of a poor signal and limited resources for their news department. Once Steve Maudlin came in as GM by 1998, they became competitive.

It's not like Gray has a regional sports channel in their cluster that could be accessed for programming...

I don't see CBS buying KIRO (they couldn't for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with Brendan Carr). At the very least it heavily influences Apollo's attempt to sell off Cox Media and makes it very very hard to sell a station that might be stripped of a network affiliation. Especially if CBS extorts the buyer to make massive reverse compensation payments in order to keep the affiliation, that would make KIRO radioactive to anyone not a competing network. And since Nexstar can't legally buy into Seattle at this time...

Just move the CW to 46 and put sports PBP on 17. Simple enough and it would make WANF a news-intensive CW station just like WPIX, KRON, KTLA and WGN.

The least surprised person has to be @Weeters, he suggested to me privately that WUPA easily could become CBS-owned after WWJ-TV finally got a news service. Or that they'd be used as a bargaining tool with the other groups. Now it's a matter of when WTOG and KSTW become CBS-owned, not if. As KIRO is already for sale; things could get spicy...

Tegna is a non-factor in Tucson as KMSB-KTTU are fully shelled out to Gray. They wouldn't waste money on an unfixable station like KVOA. Think about it. Who else would want KVOA or any of the other Allen stations? Coastal? Marquee? NP&G? Gray is IMO the prohibitive favorite and the only buyer who would continue to operate the stations with any semblance of locality.

They're all Gray's to lose. KVOA can be a subchannel of KOLD, WJRT can be a subchannel of WNEM and the OW stations can be rumps of WSAW and WMTV. It's a perfect test case for the NAB begging for full dereg, especially with how much Byron completely destroyed the viability of each and every one of those stations.

He was hired as damaged goods on the cheap. There is no way he's being paid what he made at CNN. Come on.

I don't see Apollo being anywhere close to that smart, they'd rather take Cox off the market entirely than concede the bloody obvious that no one wants the whole group as-is. And even Connoisseur's purchase of Alpha is fraught with a lot of problems; Jeff Warshaw is either going to have to shut down a lot of small-market stations (many of which Alpha destroyed entirely) or sell them for a pittance just to make it work.

Let me know when you find this mythical buyer for the radio stations. Radio is even more of a declining asset than television and the only people buying up stations are Godcasters like K-Love or Relevant Radio. Let's be real: Nexstar, Gray, Tegna, Sinclair and Sinclair know they can't find a third party for the radio stations and they aren't going to bother with Cox. NewsNation is cheap and they hire cheap talent. They make good money on retransmission revenue from cable companies and don't have to pay for acquired programming like movies. That's the only reason why it's around. I hope you are aware that younger demos and more and more of the 25–54 "money demo" are abandoning linear television for streaming. The audience for local television is getting smaller and grayer and the industry is on an unsustainable course with pushing endless local news to markets that can't support it. Nexstar, Gray, Tegna, Sinclair and Scripps are all destined to be too big to fail. As for Apollo, they are only guilty of being 10 years too late buying Cox and four years too late trying to sell it.