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Rusty Muck

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Everything posted by Rusty Muck

  1. Rusty Muck
    Fox News is the most profitable cable network not because of ratings or ad revenue (or lack thereof on the latter) but because it is the most expensive network a cable provider can carry. Those carriage contracts are extremely lucrative and make any advertising boycott levied by MMFA, et. al, completely useless. NewsNation runs with a fraction of the budget of Fox, and is able to get some blue-chip advertising as opposed to none with Fox. And even then, the carriage contracts for NewsNation is still what makes the most money. Do you have actual proof this is the case? Show me facts and figures, or this is nothing more than a "dude, trust me" claim.
  2. Rusty Muck
    Calling it a failure with nothing to back up those claims besides ratings—which anyone would say is an outdated form of measurement and a rather arcane form of guesstimating—is particularly dishonest. Any cable network can turn a profit if they run lean and mean, and in the case of the entire Paramount Global cable portfolio, run reruns of only one show for days on end. Why? Because it's all money that's taken directly from cable bills. We pay for these networks to be in the black and they collectively do nothing to justify it. I don't really care for cable news or whatever NewsNation actually does at this point. At least they're doing SOMETHING, which is something I can't say about much of the vast wasteland of zombie cable channels that SHOULD be dead and are helping to kill off the medium altogether. She was reassigned to host special projects and documentaries.
  3. Rusty Muck
    Ratings don't matter when you're profitable. Look at the entire suite of cable networks owned by Paramount Global; they all still exist because they command profits with no budgets and no effort given into programming. Which is just as well. Nielsen clamped down on the scraping of data that Mediaite used to do to get cable TV ratings, thus you don't hear much about ratings in general nowadays.
  4. Rusty Muck
    WGN America had a near-national reach but was run as a low-rent ION with expensive, lengthy syndicated contracts of mostly copuganda shows and a second-tier Tim Allen sitcom (as their inability to rid themselves of Blue Bloods clearly shows). It was incompatible with the rest of the Nexstar portfolio and needed to be blown up. NewsNation is also turning a pretty good profit.
  5. Rusty Muck
    Except there is zero to be gained by blowing up their lone radio station. Simple as that.
  6. Rusty Muck
    A call sign change (which won't happen to begin with) won't change the fact they're stuck with a standalone AM they can't sell, with demos older than dirt.
  7. Rusty Muck
    Absolutely no sane person, no person with a shred of mental competence, would willingly allow themselves to be made a target like David Smith has. This is worse than your typical delusions of grandeur that the likes of Elon Musk have. This has a good chance of not just killing the Sun outright, but coupled with the $500M in legal fees from Diamond's bankruptcy case, could damn well be the death penalty for hundreds of television newsrooms across the country, if not a financial death penalty for David Smith and Sinclair as a whole. I'm going to say it. Something is very, very wrong with David Smith and his mental state.
  8. Rusty Muck
    I'm saying that Fox News is using a business model that is totally broken and incompatible with a newspaper's business model. If the Sun were to lose a decent amount of subscribers and/or advertising, they'd be fucked. This is entirely out of David Smith's own money and is not a part of Sinclair proper, if he were to drain money from Sinclair to keep the Sun alive... well, aide from being borderline embezzlement, that would basically be dropping a nuclear bomb on the budget for those stations.
  9. Rusty Muck
    Subscriptions in a bundled environment where you have to take all the channels regardless if you want them or not. Which is 100% not what the newspaper industry is. If you don't want to subscribe to a newspaper, you can cancel at ease.
  10. Rusty Muck
    Bad comparison. Fox News is subsidized by retransmission fees. A newspaper is wholly reliant on subscriptions and advertising revenue, and most right-wingers are distrustful of newspapers to begin with.
  11. Rusty Muck
    He's flying too close to the sun and will collapse under his own hubris. Just watch.
  12. Rusty Muck
  13. Rusty Muck
    Here's the thing: David Smith's inability to understand how a newspaper works will make this a disaster from the start. A newspaper is not insulated by retransmission revenue like his Sinclair stations and cannot withstand any loss of subscribers or advertising. The Sun also has competition from the Banner, which has clearly found footing as a digital enterprise and would benefit if there was an actual "cancel the Sun" campaign. If David Smith wants to literally blow hundreds of millions of dollars with a good chance of no return on investment, that's bad for him, bad for his other commercial enterprises, and ultimately good for the rest of us.
  14. Rusty Muck
    David Smith wasting over nine figures to buy a newspaper easily, easily trumps the Diamond Sports disaster he committed in 2019. The three words that will make this vanity project a personal hell for him: "Cancel my subscription".
  15. Rusty Muck
    Nexstar may have been willing to sacrifice their existing CW affiliations in Phoenix and Tucson if it meant signing with WMYD (and re-signing with WSFL?). Scripps controlled each and every aspect of these talks.
  16. Rusty Muck
    This indeed is the case, WKBD will simulcast CBS News Detroit at 7am starting Labor Day. I could see more simulcasts in the weeks to come as the fall season gets underway.
  17. Rusty Muck
    Not to be pedantic, but 11pm (after SportsCentral) or 7pm (before the news block) could be considered “prime time”.
  18. Rusty Muck
    Or reair the 8pm hour at 10pm.
  19. Rusty Muck
    They have a dynamic open with the date, time and temp inserted in? Can't say I've seen that before!
  20. Rusty Muck
    The KGBT-KVEO swap and sale happened as a settlement from Tribune’s breach of contract lawsuit against Sinclair after their failed merger, Nexstar was the beneficiary.
  21. Rusty Muck
    There’s a very good chance that Tegna stands pat. Standard General was the only party really driving a sale (yes, Byron tried to crash the party but the odds were stacked up against him). The L taken by Standard General is such that they may have to sell off their measly four stations to Tegna.
  22. Rusty Muck
    I’ll believe THAT when I see it. The story is largely sourced from a staffer present at a meeting in which the McKimmons didn’t even say a word. This feels like spin to hide a massive bloodletting at KUSI and merger at the KSWB building. Nexstar’s purely a bottom line company and there’s no reason for them to maintain two distinct news departments like this. At the same time, they can’t have everyone at KUSI quit in protest over the actual plans.
  23. Rusty Muck
    KSWB is already a U so the “Discount” sham is equally applied to KUSI, so Nexstar is not really affected cap-wise here. It IS very possible that Nexstar paid the McKinnons $35 million to take out a competitor to KSWB.
  24. Rusty Muck
    As @Samanthapointed out to me, this outright eliminates KSWB's main competitor, there are no newscasts on KUSI that don't overlap with KSWB. Because of that, the chances KUSI maintains any sort of separate operations is very, very small; in the case of Indianapolis, WTTV and WXIN have to have separate news ops because of the nature of their affiliations. Of note, KFMB-DT2's contract with the CW (reupped in 2021) runs through September 2026. So either Nexstar said what they said under the impression Tegna is planning to opt-out of their CW contracts, or they are forcing the issue for Tegna. Otherwise I cannot understand why Nexstar just turned KFMB-DT2 into a lame-duck CW affiliate for three years.
  25. Rusty Muck
    CBS and Gray (WPCH) will no doubt be bidding aggressively for all of those teams. Plus there’s nothing stopping CBS from moving an indie WUPA to a .2 (and buy WTBS-LD to put it on a ceremonial 6.1) if they do choose to take the network affiliation in-house. The possibilities of in-market realignments are endless tbh. If Gray winds up securing one or two teams, then they become a sports heavyweight and may want to make WANF (for lack of a better description) the WHDH for the South. CBS gets an O&O and possibly a sports-leaning indie that’ll be having Paramount’s content library opened up. This could be really fun to watch unfold.
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