Rusty Muck

Sinclair is not a buyer, they are very much a seller. They aren't selling Dielectric (nor is David Smith selling the Baltimore Sun) but Sinclair is not going to be able to compete with Nexstar and Gray after their mergers get approved. In the economy of scale game, Sinclair is going to be left behind. Big time.

WANF, Your Official Shovelware Station!! Seriously... they knew this was coming and this is the best they could do??? Gray might as well have moved Peachtree Sports to 46.1. Would have saved them a lot of time and trouble. What a freaking waste.

I can't believe that people are under this belief that a court ruling will stop this when this regime has purposely ignored all court rulings they don't like. Let alone this false hope a decimated and useless FTC and Patel/Toasterhead DOJ will do anything. It's a fait accompli and exercise in right-wing political patronage. The worst part won't be the shuttering of newsrooms wholesale, it'll be when the remaining newsrooms will be weaponized as a front for far-right propaganda, which Uncle Perry will gladly engage in.

Gray could merge into NBCUniversal so Comcast gets a definitive a leg up on datacasting.

... and now the countdown has begun for when Skydance offloads CBS in a fire sale. I give it six months, give or take.

What proof exists that Skydance wanted the network and that it wasn't some tagalong because Shari Redstone didn't want to just simply sell Paramount Pictures to David Ellison? And after Ellison was humiliated by Trump and Carr over CBS News, of course he'd be dropping a giant "for sale" sign in front of CBS right away and disposing of it at their earliest convenience to make the shareholders happy. CBS still has 12.5% of the CW. There's more than enough motivation.

Exactly. It's meaningless Kabuki theatre just like the same crap Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell (no longer a senate leader) pull so they can give the illusion of acting under their own free will and give the illusion of a sure-fire passage of an awful bill being "in doubt". But when push comes to shove, they'll fall in line with the regime. It's in their DNA.

It's so cute that everyone is just casually assuming that Nexstar would be obligated to sell anything when this merger is announced. The cold hard fact is Brendan Carr—a total right-wing hack of the worst sort—along with his lackey Olivia Trusty, will do all they can to get this cleared and approved as quickly as possible and will ignore any protests to the contrary. Why? Because Nexstar is the quintessential Republican company led by a typical Republican (Perry) whose lone purpose is to buy shit up. It's a company Brendan Carr loves and adores. We've seen in full display what he'll do with companies he doesn't like. Who cares if the current legislation doesn't allow it? No one else in this regime gives two shits about laws on the books they don't like, let alone one shit. Congress, who already just destroyed public broadcasting with a glint in their eye, wouldn't care if Carr superceded them (beyond the meaningless whining from the likes of Susan Collins or the tone-deaf tweets of an enriched, oblivious Charles Schumer) and you know it.

Here's the WSJ story from MSN.

CBS is going to be sold as quickly as possible because Skydance flat out doesn't want it, and Nexstar is the only buyer available. Doing the math, Nexstar will have a CBS-CW O&O duop in Indy after that happens.

That's been a fait accompli since Nexstar was gifted the CW. When Nexstar buys CBS and the owned-stations they can toss the Fox affiliation over to WISH.

If I were Gray, I'd be licking my chops at getting WISH-WNDY from DuJuan McCoy, potentially for a song.

With political hacks Brendan Carr and Olivia Trusty running the FCC into the ground, expect no sacred cows. It'd be enough to get Congress and the Senate to rubber stamp any legislation removing all cap restrictions.

Painfully small markets, though. And it got them a triopoly in Lafayette. Scripps now dominates much of rural Colorado in addition to their Denver duop. Gray must be angling for a swap that gets them in Salt Lake or to someone willing to get that unbuilt CP they got from Marquee (which also saw them hightail it out of rural Wyoming).

Gray + Allen would result in a NBC/ABC/Fox/CW triopoly in Fort Wayne, right next to their incoming Big Four WLIO/WOHL duop in Lima. Plus it'd marry WJRT with WNEM and WCOV/WIYC with WSFA. Given how badly Allen ran those stations into the ground, integrating them might be an easier process than you'd think. And thanks to pure political favoritism at the hands of hacks Brendan Carr and Olivia Trusty (let alone the disemboweling of the DOJ and FTC), this and all other deals will clear with total ease.

I'd bet my entire next paycheck on that not happening. This FCC is corrupt and slimy and they want triopolies and quadopolies and quintopolies in every market when the buyers are companies they like. These purchases are coordinated and deliberate.

They will be changed and Louisville will probably be the first market with an actual triopoly. The bloodletting over there will be the first of a nationwide gutting of newsrooms all over. And it is entirely 100% political favoritism at the hands of Brendan Carr.

The few Tegna-owned CW affiliates left, including WCCT, are good with the network until 2026. And Perry already said two years ago that KUSI would take the CW affiliation from KFMB .2, so Tegna can't wait to rid themselves of the network group-wide. (NOT counting KTTU, which is on paper a Tegna station but is run by Gray.)

If this is true, we'll likely see WCCB shutter their operations entirely and become a diginet coatrack. And Bahakel will likely liquidate their TV stations to Nexstar. There is nothing stopping Nexstar from Mission-ing WCCB so they can have a Charlotte triopoly.

Bold of anyone to assume that Carr will do anything based on FCC precedent and not use the commission as a political weapon and tool to enrich his friends. The GOP House and Senate will dutifully fall in line with whatever Carr demands, with either Susan Collins or Mitch or Murkowski clutching their pearls or some stupid stunt and it won’t matter because their votes are irrelevant to the outcome anyway. And the dems will be too feckless, useless and old to do anything. The fix is in.

And when that mercifully closes, expect Skydance to dispose of CBS and sell it all to Nexstar. Because Perry Sook will easily agree to the demands set forth by Brendan Carr against employees doing actual journalism, that deal will assuredly be greenlit in a matter of weeks. Carr might even reward Perry for his fealty and do away with the ownership caps completely.

Ol' Scotty is off here, it wasn't ABC that did this, it was Sunbeam. By far the best-designed easy-to-read, billboard I've seen in a long time. Ed would be proud.

Isn't it a moot point when Lapdog Carr is probably going to trash all the rules so Nexstar can just buy up everything along with CBS?

Ron Pereleman had already taken over Gillett Communications by the time Letterman debuted on CBS. The station simply netted more revenue from Murphy Brown reruns and delaying Dave to midnight. Of course, they never cleared Pat Sajak because of the hometown kid Arsenio Hall and WOAC 67 cleared Crimetime After Primetime. One has to remember that CBS cut payments to the affiliates in June 1992 and asked stations to repay 25 percent of what CBS had already given them. All that in the middle of a recession. There was already antipathy towards CBS among the affiliates even before they fumbled away the NFC rights. The Fox deal in that regard was a no-brainer for a station group like New World, which also benefitted from additional local revenue at the 10 p.m. hour and the News Corp. cash infusion.

Golly gee, it's almost like Colbert could take a page from Conan O'Brien 15 years ago. Would you be surprised if Colbert goes too far on purpose and forces CBS to pull The Late Show off the air? Regardless of whether or not CBS would be justified in their actions, it renders Colbert as a political martyr.