Rusty Muck

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.

Allbritton wanted to sell the company as a whole from day one. Sinclair was the only logical buyer.

Good luck with that. None of the suspected companies (Nexstar, Sinclair, Gray, Scripps, etc, &c.) want radio stations and with Apollo wanting to sell the company as a complete unit, there are no available buyers, cap or no cap. And the industry dies outright with two or three companies too big to fail that are crippled when the networks abandon OTA for streaming, taking the last of the younger audiences with them.

I’m going to be very blunt and say that, given what Apollo has to offer—a slightly above average group of television stations with an over-performer in WSB-TV and an unappealing laggard in WFXT, coupled with a whole bunch of radio stations—they’ll be lucky to find any buyers to speak of. Who’d want that hodgepodge of stuff? it would not be surprising to see Apollo take Cox off the market because no one wants it. They waited four years too late to sell and aren’t going to get another novice like INSP that is willing to burn $400M just for the ego boost of owning TV stations. Gray, Scripps and Nexstar don’t need them at all (and they ESPECIALLY do not want the radio stations) and Hearst doesn’t buy stations, period.

What in the hell possessed INSP to incinerate $393M like that in less than three years? That's Enron levels of fraud. Did Marc Rowan (Apollo's CEO) have incriminating evidence against INSP CEO David Cerullo and threatened to release it if INSP didn't blow all that money on KOKI, WHBQ and a bunch of spare parts and scrap? Cause there's no other way to explain why they would engage in such a horrible transaction.

Outside of KPVI (which is itself in a small market) those stations are super small and borderline afterthoughts. Does WICZ/WSYT have any local output to speak of? The funny thing is I bet INSP didn't get anything close to a return on their investment a few years ago.

I cannot think of anything more value destructive. Just because Ed Ansin got away with it twice doesn't mean it can work when the product is diluted this much. In a billingual market, no less. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised to see Warren Buffett take the L after a year or two and unload WPLG to Mission so Nexstar can have a CW O&O for Miami. He's had some bad business moves re: media (buying the Media General newspaper chain, helping Scripps buy Ion) but this might be the biggest oopsie.

If WSVN had to choose between Fox and the CW, what would they pick? There's a reason why WHDH never took the CW when they lost NBC as a Family Feud x 2 strip at 8pm clearly rates better than the CW ever has, even when they put out high-quality direct-to-Netflix fare.

That's going to be because the CW primetime lineup is a giant blackhole of cheap, forgettable programming and Canadian imports, not out of anything on WSVN's part. It's the Ollie's Bargain Outlet of broadcast networks.

It's not even a question! Nexstar was acting out of utter desperation and paid through the nose in the process with those CBS renewals. Paramount held all the cards and if they walked away, then Nexstar would kiss NASCAR's junior circuit and WWE NXT goodbye because the affiliate map would be missing two top 20 markets! To whom? It's no longer a buyer's market for TV stations and dumps like WUPA, KSTW and WTOG are unsalable. Paramount and that Ellison kid is stuck with them. And Paramount Global got a hefty payday from a desperate Nexstar. It's a big slice of humble pie from Perry Sook and the other morons at Nexstar corporate that thought they could play pretend media moguls when in reality they couldn't back up their bravado.

It always never fails to see certain people in this fandom bleat the age old cry that mOaR lOcAl nEwS is what the marketplace needs. Sure, let's divvy up a shrinking pie of TV viewers even further while overstretching existing personnel to do more work for less pay and merely rehashing the same content with the same McStation graphics and same unimaginative cuts from another generic Stephen Arnold music package. YAWN. Here's a news flash: if either big three network pulls out of programming the 10pm hour, that's nothing but a devastingly dire outlook for the entire industry. It means that local television is in trouble and in an unsustainable path to insolvency unless you implement the Scrippscast model (or even the Rogers CityNews model) across-the-board or utilize AI to do everything for less. But then again, it's not the first time the TV fandom has been so utterly detached from reality.

WSVN is a station atypical of the norm, in every way possible. That's all that needs to be said. That they are a solid #2 among English-language outlets in Miami—in spite of the lack of any synergy opportunities or not being in any larger chain—speaks to how well they read the market and shaped it in a way to also be heavily atypical of the norm. You don't have to be a cheerleader of the station to realize that.

Not a surprise at all. That 2 was an appendage that needed to go and the new logo—with the Chicago flag stars—is more Chicago-y than any other Chicago station.

Skydance is run by an idiot who has lots of money thanks to his more successful dad. What more needs to be said. Partnering with Jeff Zucker on anything negates whatever else they've done.

If not non-existence, it'll wind up as non-viable outside of poor, rural areas. And that's what makes this purchase so foolish and stupid: Skydance is going to find out the hard way that they bought a company centered around cable channels that are hurtling to obsolescence and are stuck with them. But if Larry Ellison wants his Oracle fortune to be squandered like this, then who am I to judge.

The only one I can think of is Megan Ellison, and she has a vanity film studio (Annapurna) that I doubt has ever made a profit and probably wouldn't have existed otherwise. What has Skydance realistically done besides buy Paramount?

It'd still be incredibly messy as content libraries span both Paramount and CBS. Good luck splitting those up (again) and finding out which company gets what. KKR would only take CBS if they could find a buyer, and even they would know better than that. Then again, they fucked up royally selling Storer Broadcasting to junk bond denizen George Gillett 35 years ago. Otherwise, Larry Ellison's trust fund kid is screwed.

CBS is unsalable because no buyers exist. So Larry Ellison's trust fund kid is stuck with it for the long term.

Larry Ellison's trust fund kid is going to wind up as the Tony Khan of the media landscape. But that's what the Penske family media apparatus wants, so good luck with that.

Because the mass consolidation of the past decade eliminated the available pool of buyers for the network and owned-stations. Think about it, Nexstar is going to lose WPIX because they refuse to sell anything and Sinclair can't sell their small-market stations which have been on the block for months.

Why did the Ford Motor Company not buy up horse-and-buggy dealerships of their choosing in 1924? The answer should be fairly obvious. Because MTV, VH1, Comedy Central and Teen Nick are unsalable assets no one in their right mind would want to buy. Simple as that. To be very blunt, Larry Ellison's money can not save this dumpster fire of a company, no matter how much his trust fund kid wants to play pretend media mogul.

Does that really matter? NFL games are still NFL games and WFXT will carry several Patriots games anyway.

Apollo Global Management's eviceration of Cox Media is probably delayed because no buyers exist for that station.