DirtyHarry

The conspiratorialist side of me says that this is all set up in advance as a way for the Saudis to get to buy into the PGA. The PGA, I believe, is a non-profit. No way to buy into a non-profit except maybe through a backdoor merger like this. Monahan and a bunch of key executives probably got payoffs and retention bonuses as well. That's what happens with all these mutual insurance companies that get gobbled up by another company, especially for profit companies. You were all played.

You know this is a dying industry when all of these companies are being scooped up by banksters and bottom fisher low rent broadcasters like Byron Allen.

It isn't dirty money for every place else they spend it. It isn't dirty for Tiffany's, it isn't dirty when some sheik has have his cancer cured at the Mayo Clinic, it isn't dirty when they buy F16's from us, but it's dirty for something as insignificant as golf? The people who allowed themselves to get sucked into the propaganda that Saudi involvement was somehow dirty were just basically puppets and used by the PGA and the networks. That's the bottom line.

I still laugh at the people who were trying to turn this into this being about Saudi involvement. Like nobody would ever dream of taking dirty money in this country. (Not saying Saudi money is dirty, but that's what they were trying to make it sound like.) All this time it was about squashing a competitor, which is what I said in the first place. I want you all to remember how you were used and now apply this lesson to everything else you hear in the media, especially when it comes from Washington.

I would think it would be pretty easy for a Lilly to fire up an LPTV in Guam. It's not like there's going to be a lot of competition for signals there.

Brad Underwood leaves WKRC. https://www.wvxu.org/media/2023-06-01/brad-underwood-leaves-wkrc-news-tvkiese

Yes, Susie Gilbert, which I believe is her real name, and Shawn Ireland, which is not her real name (I believe it's Pam Gilbert), are sisters. Which begs the question, what did they call Shawn Ireland at work? Did they call her Shawn or did they call her Pam? Calling her by her stage name in real life is kind of weird, but if they call her by her real name, they might screw up on the air. Incidentally, I've seen signed checks from the actor Eddie Albert signed Eddie Albert, even though his real name was Edward Albert Heimberger. There's a Heimberger Road in Fairfield County and it's named after his dad's side of the family. Even though Eddie Albert wasn't from here, his dad was.

Sinclair always had a fetish for leveraging content. It makes sense if they use three stations' resources to do something one station couldn't do on its own, but if you're going to take the same cheap product and just eliminate duplication by doing it once, I don't know if that benefits you much. Here's an example of something from the 1980s when they tried to do a kids show called "Take 1" for all three stations they owned.

The seedy underbelly of sports is out in the open. It didn't really occur to me that gambling was driving much of the interest in sports until the internet came around and gambling became more omnipresent.

Stadium is garbage. The only thing I ever see on there are these lesser universities nobody has ever heard of. Like who's going to watch a University of Akron basketball game?

Wouldn't it be better to just lease time on one of these sidecar stations? Or does the FCC not allow that?

Lima hasn't been shutting down stations. They just bought a few LPTVs and are running them better because they have economies of scale. The FCC also doesn't care if a full power station owns LPTVs in the same market. I don't know what Anchorage is like, but they are a larger DMA and might be able to support more than one owner in that market. Lima is a small DMA, I think 190 or something like that. However, they're over the air population is large, I think 800,000 or a million maybe.

As I understand it, the FCC's mandate is pretty broad. If it doesn't think that warehousing network affiliations is in the public interest, as long as it involves a TV signal, it can stop a sale. As we have seen in other parts of the media, warehousing properties usually results in an inferior product for the end consumer. I hate to sound like a lefty, but you can see what's going on out there. Laissez-faire and libertarianism has its limits.

Comcast announces $20 streaming service ‘NOW TV’ with Peacock included Article: https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/24/comcast-now-tv-streaming-service-with-peacock-included/ Press Release: https://corporate.comcast.com/press/releases/comcast-introduces-now-tv .

I'm interested in them too. I'll buy them. Talk is cheap. Sinclair obviously saw its stations as being more lucrative than the Tribune stations, or it would have gotten rid of them and completed the Tribune transaction.