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Rusty Muck

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Everything posted by Rusty Muck

  1. Rusty Muck
    This interview of CBS News and Station's Wendy McMahon reads not only as a direct indictment against CBS's prior management team, but a direct indictment on Soo Kim's short-sighted attacks on Dave Lougee and Tegna's attempts to modernize their newscasts. The second Soo throws Dave overboard, CBS will hire him in a heartbeat. And you watch as the former Tegna stations forced to adopt the formula perfected by WFXT, the sixth-place station in a five-station market, are subsequently crippled and stifled by a greedy private equity overlord who only wants to cash out in 1-3 years max. CBS's choice of KXTA as their central "news innovation" hub now looks more and more like the shrewdest move of all time. They're going to take advantage of WFAA's inevitable collapse under Apollo and might have seen this one coming.
  2. Rusty Muck
    lmfao WFXT, the "anchor of a new station group." I think it's be called the S.S. Titanic.
  3. Rusty Muck
    Easiest solution is to let Apollo talk full control of Tegna. If this FCC doesn't bat an eye then the ownership cap is worthless.
  4. Rusty Muck
    It would go away because Soo Kim doesn't care about broadcasting and has it in for Dave Lougee. Expect a massive disinvestment and abandonment of all digital aspects. It'll be an utter shame.
  5. Rusty Muck
    Not when they're operated by private equity vultures who seek to cash out for maximum profits. Soo Kim utterly ruined MediaGeneral and made a killing offloading it to Nexstar. They have to prove they aren't any more than a silent partner in this deal, which I don't think Apollo has the capability to do. I don't trust them for a second even if they eliminated the entirety of their stake in this dumpster fire of a purchase. As @Weeterssaid on the Discord, "If this goes through, the (39%) cap is proven to be entirely pointless". And he's right.
  6. Rusty Muck
    Apollo and Standard General will only be paying for the KPVI look, because KPVI News at 5 is News That Works For You
  7. Rusty Muck
    to be fair, there were two WBKBs in Chicago and the first ultimately wound up on channel 2 lmao Graham, Hearst and Hubbard have not participated in this M&A mayhem because they are diversified entities. I do believe that within 1-3 years, all three will be selling their TV chains outright.
  8. Rusty Muck
    Apollo needs to not have ANY stake in the new iteration of Tegna, and if that needs to be accomplished with further trades of Tegna stations to Apollo to recoup the balance of Apollo's planned stake, then so be it. Otherwise it'll be rejected on its face. For perspective, the Dumont Network died in part because the FCC considered them and KTLA and WBKB/2 Chicago to be co-owned because Paramount Studios (which owned both, neither of which were ever Dumont affiliates!) had a minority stake in Dumont. Thus, Dumont couldn't purchase any more O&Os when they desperately needed to.
  9. Rusty Muck
    The claim made in this filing is that both companies are going to be independent of each other and that Apollo's stake in Tegna is not of importance because they'll not be holding any voting stock. I don't believe it for a second.
  10. Rusty Muck
    The DOJ and FCC should be rejecting this deal outright. It's an atrociously structured deal that benefits no one but the stockholders at Apollo and Standard General. It will cripple local news in a way we haven't seen in a long time. It's also the logical end result of the M&A mania of the past few years, where there's no one left to buy stations but private equity vultures. (BTW, the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates today, so this was filed right at the deadline.)
  11. Rusty Muck
    Standard General can't afford to buy Tegna on their own, so Apollo is allegedly a silent partner with no voting stock (*SNERK*). These station trades are proof of this; Apollo and Standard are simply picking the company apart just to buy it. Nevermind that Byron Allen offered significantly more for Tegna and was rejected.
  12. Rusty Muck
    I can absolutely see Hilton Howell hiring Dave Lougee the second Soo throws him overboard.
  13. Rusty Muck
    The marketplace has clearly collapsed when two private equity vultures are attempting to pick apart a company too big to fail like this. It's an atrocious deal that'll set back local news in a time when they can't afford to. Soo Kim and Apollo are buying Tegna merely to gut it, starve it, then break it up.
  14. Rusty Muck
    One thing people forget is that, for the headlines WKYC had with their makeover, WEWS did similarly with Scripps getting their stations to veer away from flashy crime-heavy headlines in favor of “meat and potatoes” news… and WEWS didn’t ballyhoo it at all.
  15. Rusty Muck
    Weigel doesn’t need to buy the station if they’re able to get H&I, Movies! and Decades cleared. And they’d be the only one capable of buying the station if they wanted.
  16. Rusty Muck
    Well given the very questionable financial situation Sinclair is currently in—and it’ll get even worse with no MLB this year—the networks may be simply biding their time.
  17. Rusty Muck
    From how the Marquette fiasco seems to have gone, the mass renewal is less “despite WJMN” and more “because WJMN”
  18. Rusty Muck
    Plus Circle is one of the better diginets out there, mostly thanks to the Ryman-WSM connections.
  19. Rusty Muck
    Thing is, Shep is hosting a specialty show on a business channel that’s running up against one of MSNBC’s star opinion hosts (Joy Reid). I doubt there were any expectations for his show in the first place, certainly nothing like NewsNation had. Nexstar may have no choice but to sell off the transponder space. What do you do with a channel that just blew up their prior identity and is slowly shedding their non-news program inventory? They can’t just snap a finger and go back to WGN America. I think what’s striking here is how Perry and Sean Compton are totally repeating the mistakes that doomed Al Jazeera America five years ago, when the lessons were blatantly obvious in this Broadcasting & Cable op-ed:
  20. Rusty Muck
    The Pax TV—i—ION metamorphosis is very interesting to look at in retrospect. You could argue that Pax TV was a diginet 25 years ahead of its time with a lineup heavy on reruns (albeit with a few new productions) and in which the affiliates all but carried the core schedule with no deviations whatsoever. Problem was, Pax TV was a money loser from the get-go, so much so that they turned to NBC for a capital investment that wound up with NBC suing Paxson a few years later for a redemption of their investment (and vice versa) with an NBCU board member succeeding Bud Paxson as chairman. Indeed, i had a programming deal with WBTV for a number of sitcom reruns but it clearly didn’t last long at all, as the lineup became nearly subsumed by infomercials near the end of the 2000s. Rebadging as ION and focusing on procedural reruns has given them an identity they never had prior, and it now adds a piece to the overall pie of genre channels that Scripps/Katz aims to offer.
  21. Rusty Muck
    It may take a year or two but I gotta believe that the ION stations—both Scripps-owned and Inyo-owned—will ultimately follow the same subchannel mux, with any co-owned stations that use the parent station’s spectrum filling in any gaps. For example, WDLI 17.1 as CourtTV transmits over WVPX’s spectrum, which has a 23.3 subchannel missing (but RF wise is over a 22.9 subchannel). But definitely, Doozy and Defy look to be in-house replacements for HSN and QVC. And for those ION outlets with only one of those shopping channels currently, they can carve out 480p subchannel space to accommodate.
  22. Rusty Muck
    The likeliest outcome does not involve the mass selling of stations, but is twofold: 1.) The holding company for the RSNs goes bankrupt and taken over by creditors who can resolve debts. In fact, that happened with Comcast’s ill-fated Houston RSN. If Sinclair were to offload their stake now, they would be getting hosed big-time. 2.) Sinclair winds up like Granite, but in too big to fail mode. (Actually, a better comparison would be iHeart and Cumulus when they entered Chapter 11. You’ll note that there was never a fire sale of stations for either radio operator but it killed off whatever M&A mindset existed for the radio industry.) But indeed, there are multiple stations that Sinclair can cut to the bone like Granite did to WKBW. Sure, a white knight investor like Byron Allen could swoop in, but only if the Smith family is stripped of control of the company. But by then, would it be worth it for Byron?
  23. Rusty Muck
    Some of the Scripps-owned ION stations did dump QVC in early January, including WPXN and KPXN. So it’s starting to look like the bulk of the HSN and QVC contracts run out at or near July 1.
  24. Rusty Muck
    It should be noted that the Scripps/Katz networks and ION are all genre channels: Newsy -> all-news, no frills Grit -> westerns Laff -> sitcoms Bounce -> African American-focused Court TV -> trial coverage and analysis Court TV Mystery -> reality crime ION -> procedurals/drama Doozy -> the “true reality” A&E library Defy -> the “true reality” History library The purchase of ION Media was for the OTA clearances (and with Inyo as a de facto shell for Scripps without the need for SSAs/JSAs). ION is destined to become the flagship Scripps/Katz brand, assuredly with more acquired rerun programming and less reliance on day-long marathons of the same shows, but the genre won’t change.
  25. Rusty Muck
    Between WOIO's lone syndication strips being WoF and J! and WUAB having a ghastly amount of paid programming on the weekends (not like WOIO is any better, but at least THEY have CBS fare) it's truly sad.
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