Rusty Muck

Oooh ahhh **clap clap** Seriously, though, it could be worse. I'd say it's a few steps above soul-crushing generic.

Roger Ailes set up Fox as a network that carved out a definitive niche and imaged themselves as THE news outlet for conservatives, regardless of the age demo. And it worked... so much so that there any competition in the conservative TV news field (OANN, NewsMaxTV) cannot logically compete. It just so happens that the majority of Fox's audience skews old, but at the same time, the vast majority of people with conservative viewpoints will be predisposed to watch Fox or access their digital properties. It's all about brand loyalty and cumulative audience.

Only because Friends was the top-rated sitcom (and, for that matter, the top-rated show) on broadcast television at the time. It was totally unnecessary and a cheap marketing ploy that no other broadcast network has tried since. Who is in the White House right now? A 72-year old attention whore. Who runs CNN? An attention whore. Come on now. MSNBC and Fox are also guilty of overcoverage, for the obvious reasons... MSNBC is seen as having taken the anti-Trump bent (despite having quite a few conservatives as pundits and hosts, their prime-time lineup is still decidedly liberal). Fox has always taken a mostly pro-Trump bent, and water is wet. What really has CNN done but make a mockery of that polemic coverage? Consistently having six talking heads arguing back and forth and talking over each other is an outright parody and a train wreck of the worst sort. And that's just one facet of their overall coverage that is an embarrassment to the industry. Anyone can see that CNN has a big-time credibility problem. Thing is, it's totally overshadowed by Trump supporters mocking the network out of this perception that CNN "isn't fair" to Trump.

Trump and Zucker are kindred spirits. They both failed their way upward, both specialize in outrageous stunts for attention (Zucker with "supersized" episodes of Friends, doubling the length of Today, making a mockery of NBC's late night lineup, and just being at CNN ... and Trump simply by his very existing. I really wouldn't be surprised if Zucker and Trump have been collaborating on Trump's anti-CNN schtick. For someone with Zucker's mentality, he has to be relishing the free pub CNN gets every time. Who cares if Trump's supporters threaten the life of Jim Acosta when Acosta can milk that pub on Colbert, furthering CNN's brand awareness? If we're talking about when CNN "committed suicide," it was with the Malaysian Air fiasco. That was a deliberate admission that they no longer wanted to be the credible news outlet they long promoted themselves as, but as a goddam circus instead. And judging by the ratings, people aren't falling for it. Good.

For supposed "ombudsmans," Brian Stelter and Howard Kurtz fail spectacularly at those job positions. Kurtz gets ratings simply because of inertia: Fox could put in that timeslot a tap-dancing seal and a poodle riding a unicycle with a carnival music loop playing throughout ... and the ratings would still trounce CNN. They should be promoted and identified as who they really are: opinion hosts.

For some reason his show bombed on WEWS, to the point they flipped timeslots with it and a double run of Right this Minute (!). Oz has done well at WJW since they added him, however.

To be fair, WEWS has struggled in some way or form since the late 90s, right around the time WKYC managed to free themselves of the negative connotation of “NBC’s farm team station” and being “the third station” in the market. But that’s part of the story. WEWS has had a litany of general managers and news directors since the late 1990s. Their new news director is the second straight one to come from KMGH. It took them a year to find a replacement for longtime anchor Ted Henry, and that replacement - Chris Flanagan - didn’t pan out. Then the station lost Oprah, Dr. Oz bombed badly and WoF/J! were lost due to corporate meddling. Meanwhile, WJW took the clear and decisive lead in mornings - ground that WEWS had to cede completely when they were forced to move the groundbreaking “Morning Exchange” out of morning drive. WEWS has blown up their morning show roster at least half a dozen times over the past five years, and that’s not hyperbole. A badly generic logo is the least of Lotto 5’s troubles.

I regret I can only like this just once lol

It’s obvious Ernest wants to be the next Gene Scott and literally take the station into the grave with him. Even without the CW, it’s still a source of easy income, and he had to have foreseen that when he bought the license from Rex Humbard’s estate 35 years ago.

It’s the toupee, it makes him 40 years younger. Oh wait.

And this is the picture of Angely that they went with, which seems fitting. [spoiler=Don’t say I didn’t warn you...]

They still own KRON, and it’s even more of a laggard in market #8.

I didn’t say it was a clean situation lol. Mob + long-term economic depression = a mess.

Youngstown is - not joking - half the size it was about 40 years ago, but it’s voter base is so chaotic and politically unpredictable. (Hell, they supported Traficant’s toupee, I mean, Traficant, for decades...) Political ad spending in a market like that has got to be ridiculous.

Considering how utterly abysmal KABC 790’s ratings have been over the past decade (a mediocre AM-only signal in a really big market where talk stations struggle in), it almost sounds like Cumulus is slow-auditioning Edwards and Lucey to re-team with Jillian.

Only because he died and his family cashed in.

Didn't Gray make an attempt once to get the 4 PSIP ID back from KRDK for KXJB-LD?

The only reason why WUAB gave up The WB was because of their contracts to run both Indians and Cavs games OTA, which reaked havoc on juggling two networks with (at the time) partial schedules. Neither of those exist now, and MyTV is so irrelevant that it can be cleared between 1am-3am and no one would know otherwise. But switching affiliations this coming Monday? The CW must know something about WBNX that we don’t if they made a switch this abrupt.

Jim Rogers saw that coming almost a decade ago and tried to make KSNV as news-heavy as an NBC affiliate could possibly get (not unlike what NBC did with KCNC prior to trading it to CBS).

WOIO tends to get a lot of attention for being an “also-ran” in the market, but WEWS has been terribly unstable WRT management since at least the early 2000s.

It was Hugh Hewitt’s 30 minute show that got canned. Apparently no one noticed until now.

The funny thing is, KMOV rolled out that same exact design for their mobile app... what... two years ago? I'm fine with a logo evolution, and that's what this is, but the glaciers retreated from the Midwest at a much faster pace than this. The new logo features the KMOV calls prominently, so why not the KMOV4 brand?

Not just "two old men," they were lifers at the station - Tom Haley and Del Donahoo. That show was the first pre-8am local newscast in the Cleveland market (NBC slapped it on in 1981) and it only stayed on the air as long as it did because it wound up attaining a loyal following.

Wow. A comedian on a morning show. Why does that sound so familiar?

Thank god WCMH's website never became WeAre614OlentangyProud.com or some variation thereof.