Rusty Muck

It looks like they just lumped KQTV into the Media General divestiture package because, let's face it, it IS St. Joseph, Missouri. That small a market wouldn't give that much cap relief even though it would be... what... five or six WJMNs? Imagine Scripps repurchasing WPIX, divesting WPXN to an unrelated third-party, and relaunching WPIX as a sports-heavy indie.

Because Perry Sook is a greedy, stupid idiot who has long promulgated the lie of himself being this suave, savvy businessman. Obviously he won't sell any stations because of a loss of clout with retransmission revenue against the telecoms. Plus he's been used to past FCCs that didn't give a flying crap over how many rules he violated or loopholes he exploited, and now the chickens have come home to roost. Nexstar has only willingly sold two stations in the company’s history: KBTV and WJMN. That tells you all you need to know. I expect him and Nexstar to completely fumble and bumble this and WPIX winds up being forced to be sold to a company hostile to Nexstar and the CW, and he can kiss the network's flagship goodbye.

Not only that, it would undermine every single one of their current Z-level sports deals. Why would NASCAR want to be with a network that no longer has two top 20 affiliates? Or the ACC? Or the PAC-2? And just imagine the hell that will come when Mission is forced to sell WPIX to a company hostile to the CW, like Scripps or Tegna.

They really should be begging on bended knee to find any affiliate in Detroit, Tucson and Miami, because there's no options available in either of those markets and they can't buy their way out of this crisis they placed on themselves, nor do they have Gray or Sinclair ready to bail out their sorry butts this time. But I guess Uncle Perry wants to play pretend media mogul because something something "plan".

The problem is young people watch shows on streaming. Young Sheldon actually had changing demos when reruns went to Netflix. From the New York Times: The show also struck a chord with viewers under the age of 34, according to Nielsen. Mr. Molaro, the show’s co-creator, said the Netflix bump became apparent to him when the crew was shooting a scene recently near a church in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. “Young Sheldon” had filmed in that location dozens of times without incident. But this time, roughly five months after the show began streaming on Netflix, it was a vastly different situation. “There were hundreds of kids at the fence screaming for Wallace Shawn,” he said, referring to the 80-year-old cast member. “We were like, ‘What is happening?’” So yeah, linear television is in a very bad state right now, and the last thing the affiliates need is for the networks to give up on them, because they have no Plan B. And contrary to the sentiments of a few people in this fandom, MOAR NEWS is not, I repeat NOT, an acceptable Plan B.

Bold of you for assuming that Nexstar thought any of this through to begin with when they wanted to be the leader of forgettable Z-level sports. But "all part of the plan," I guess.

Shut up. I'm not magic wanding anything. You have no idea what in the hell you're talking about. This is not a speculation thread. You are clueless and have no idea how things work. They will buy these stations and you will be disappointed when reality slaps you across the face. I will only ask this once. Do not quote me and try to prolong this as your time here may be severly limited.

Totally irrelevant to the topic field. Disney won't be looking at these stations. Stop this magic wand wishcasting right now. I'm not "cheering" anything, I'm just not engaging in magic wand thinking and foolishly spouting off "Hearst! Graham! ABC!" when the facts state otherwise. They aren't buying a bunch of laggards, or anything else, for that matter. You are really getting on my nerves and I would strongly suggest refraining from making more posts like these.

Disney is, and has always been, wholly uninterested in buying any TV stations. It'll never happen. INSP and Coastal/Vision are the likeliest candidates for KATU. Who else wants it?

Please don't post walls of text irrelevant to the topic thread for the sake of posting walls of text. It's honestly deeply aggravating. This is a thread about Sinclair Broadcast Group, not an invitation to spout off verbal diarrhea about whatever the CBS stations are doing. Who freaking cares? Like Scott Fybush said in reply to you in RadioDiscussions: "Going forward, the discussion on this site needs to more than just 'lists of things.'"

With all do respect, the only purpose of commerical broadcasting is to make money. "Public good" is secondary, if it is even a factor.

Irrelevant to the topic at hand. They also have money and incentive. That's why EMF, Relevant Radio and Daystar have vacuumed up oodles of stations over the years. I'm not "beign jealous" of anything, I'm simply existing in the real world, not fantasy-driven wishcasting of groups buying a bunch of basketcase stations from a bush league owner. Have you ever heard of "return on investment"? Again, totally irrelevant to the topic at hand. With all due respect, do better.

Why? Because they are the only ones who would want to buy these stations that, for the most part, have no local news presence, little viewership or zero infrastructure. The spectrum hogging would matter more, and it does with a bottom-feeder like INSP. Well, I live in the real world, and these stations being sold are those the megachains or the networks would not want. Hearst is not going to spend money on a bunch of fixer-uppers or total rebuild projects, and neither would Gray, Graham, Scripps or Tegna.

INSP, Coastal and Daystar are the most likely buyers of these stations. Standard General is a company in limbo since they failed to get Tegna (with the current farce that is MediaCo, Standard clearly has no idea what their plans are in any aspect of mass media) and the stations they currently have are low-budget, low-rated dumps. Plus Apollo is not going to spend money on stations that sorely need investment in or need totally new infrastructures altogether.

Even without the links to Old Scotty's blog, it's fairly obvious that Byron Allen is overleveraged and likely is being crushed by debt. One could argue that his fruitless "bids" to buy ABC, Tegna and Paramount Global have been simple distractions to hide what is a much more serious problem.

Byron Allen is too badly overleveraged and has acquired a bad reputation for talking up deal after deal and failing to actually make them. He is not a credible candidate for anything.

Thank you for saying that. I don't know if it's a bug or a feature about the TV fandom in the present day but it has also irritated the moderators over there considerably.

Sinclair is what would have happened had a miserly 1980s-era owner like TVX Broadcast Group or Media Central somehow existed into the present day.

Serious question: why in the wide wide world of sports would any of those groups want basketcase stations that need a massive amount of investment just in order to be remotely competitive in a declining industry? Plus Apollo Global Management isn't buying anything and Byron Allen is too badly overleveraged. With all due respect, what makes anyone think Apollo is going to have the soulless husk of Cox Media Group buy anything or that Byron is going to do anything but make vacant empty promises he can't deliver?

It won't. While the company is looking over the Sony-Apollo bid, it is out of courtesy alone and will be rejected as soon as practicable. That being said, Apollo is more likely to sell off Cox Media Group than they are going to have them buy anything. Cox Media is stagnant, faltering and running on fumes.

That's been an industry problem for over 35 years. Everyone has tried to be a knockoff of WSVN and local news has been stuck in the same old, same old. It's why viewership is collapsing.

Private equity isn't going to want to bother with television station ownership after the FCC let the Standard/Apollo buyout of Tegna die on the vine. (Standard General, particularly their MediaCo subsidiary, is a ghastly basketcase right now, so count them out, too.) It is not outside the realm of possibility that Daystar buys all the stations and flips them immediately to godcasters. Also... it's 2024. Interest rates are not near zero like they were a decade ago. It is not financially productive or possible for a singular buyer to emerge for these stations. The investment banker advising Sinclair right now assuredly told them this hard truth.

Why? Because they actually modernized production for their newscasts and thus made themselves a target of a has-been blogger who wants things to remain stuck in 1989 even as viewing habits have collapsed across the board? In the real world, the only real weak spot is the Ion stations, and that's because of the soft national ad market.

I think a lot of people are going to be severly disappointed when a bottom-feeder no-budget company like INSP or Vision/Coastal winds up buying these stations instead of these pie-eyed fantasies. Instead of playing speculator, let's just look at these indisputable truths. And they aren't pretty: The television industry is not a buyer's market in any sense of the word and hasn't been since interest rates got raised substantially The few remaining megachains—Scripps, Tegna and Gray—are either too built up or are already in many of these existing markets. Hearst doesn't buy anything unless it's a gigantic waste of money like spending $200M+ for freaking WBBH in a older market in a permanently uncompetitive state politically. Great thinking there, y'all. Apollo Global Management isn't buying anything and may be forced to sell off Cox Media Group if their stupid fever dream of buying Paramount actually happened. Graham isn't buying anything because they just don't. The networks ain't buying anything, and one of them (CBS) is in limbo right now since Shari Redstone took it off the market. The FCC might just repeal the UHF Discount rule (again) just to further erase anything Pai did and not grandfather a thing The continued diminishing returns of retransmission revenue is only going to get worse. Those golden geese are no longer not laying eggs, they're entering hospice care and the likes of Nexstar don't have a plan B. So as you can clearly see... Sinclair is absolutely screwed.

Not only will he not get it, he'll stubbornly refuse to sell anything in order to buy it. This is the same clown who runs a company that proudly boasted on their own website they could buy ABC "with little friction". And no one has seemingly considered this is why the FCC has started to crack down on them.