From the moment you step off the plane at McCarran…sorry, Harry Reid International Airport now, it just smacks you right in the face. The electronic sounds of slot machines fill the air. One first chance to get your cash on the way in and one last chance to take it from you on the way out.

Then it is the crowd. No matter when we arrive, it always seems busy here. The throng at the airport’s rideshare pickup location left no doubt that this time would be the same.

Once upon a time, back when we were on an expense account, we would stay at the Wynn or its twin property, Encore, which seems to be the unofficial hotel of the television elite. But since we are now on our own dime, we booked a room at the Westgate. The Westgate’s main appeal is that it is immediately adjacent to the mammoth Las Vegas Convention Center, where the NAB Show is held.

The Westgate is, to put it in the best possible light, a little careworn. It is a remnant from when Vegas was a smaller oasis in the desert. Not the 50s or 60s Vegas of the Rat Pack era, but later, when Elvis arrived here. His shows started here in 1969, when the hotel was known as “The International.” The King would rule here for two extended runs each year until 1976. Much of the place feels like he never left, even if Barry Manilow is the name in lights on the marquee out front.

We arrived to find a long line to check in at 9 pm on a Friday. When we finally got to the desk about twenty minutes later, the very nice woman at the front desk asked us if we were in town for the NAB or for Wrestlemania. There was a pause as we considered which answer might be better. She recognized our hesitation and said, don’t worry—there is also a national dance team competition at the hotel this weekend.

The confluence of WWE fans, pre-teen dance team members, and NAB Show attendees was interesting enough. Then we heard that the band Phish was on night three of a four-night stand at The Sphere.

As someone once said: “Only in Vegas, man.”

The NAB Show didn’t start until Sunday, when the event officially gets underway, and the show floor opens. So we took Saturday to connect with some friends for brunch and dinner. That, and to adjust to the travel, the time change, and the lack of any ability to produce tears in our eyes for at least 24 hours.

Sunday morning, it was time to rise and shine, and “take care of business” as Elvis would say.

The good folks at TVNewsCheck.com put on a one-day conference called “Programming Everywhere,” which covers a wide range of television-specific topics. Their event kicked off with a 9 AM session featuring new research findings from Magid titled “The Omni-Media Landscape: Mapping Reach, Affinity and the Future of Media Monetization.”

For those readers who may not know, Magid has been doing media research and consulting since well before we entered the business, and they have expanded out to working in “empowering businesses” across many different disciplines. But research, both quantitative and qualitative, is at the core of what they do.

This opening session featured Magid COO Jamie Spencer presenting the company’s insights from its ongoing “EmotionalDNA” work applied to the U.S. information Media sector. Or, as the company press release states it: “tracking over 150 news brands for over 40 emotional-connection attributes predictive of brand love, against 14 proprietary points of engagement, in speaking with over 2,000 consumers in the initial wave.”

As an experienced attendee of Magid research presentations over our decades, we downed two cans of Red Bull before finding the meeting room and taking a seat.

Magid’s Spencer took to the podium right on time, and we were off. If there is research, then there is always a PowerPoint “deck.” And right on the first slide after the title, there it was:

“We are competing in an attention economy. The playing field is massive.”

Probably should have washed down a couple of Advil with those Red Bulls. Our brain momentarily flickered back to years ago and working with sportscasting legend Warner Wolf. Warner was famous for throwing to every highlight clip, saying, “Let’s go to the videotape.” When his highlights told the story of the game, either good or bad, he would often say, “Turn your sets off right there.”

(And mind you, this was three days before Perry Sook would publicly predict that only two or three companies would ultimately own all local TV stations. Talk about turning your sets off “right there.”)

But Jamie Spencer isn’t the COO of Magid without having some serious ability to be “droppin’ some knowledge.” And there were some definite “points of interest” to come.

Like how the average American’s media diet is to consume 13+ hours of media content each day. And we aren’t likely to grow that figure, so the battle is for the attention of the consumer. (What social media marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk dubbed “the attention economy” a few years ago.)

“Attention is greater than consumption.” This should be obvious to anyone who has witnessed the consumption of media in a busy family’s household anytime recently. Thus, media brands want to understand why consumers invest their attention. And according to Magid, well, it’s all about PIE.

Sorry, not the apple or cherry kind. We just abbreviated the three areas that Magid’s data highlights: Passion, Intention, and Efficiency, to being simple to remember as just PIE.

And studying the elements in PIE, it is Magid’s position that we can say farewell to the Breaking News era. And that we have now fully arrived in the Context era. And the biggest loser in the era of Context? Trust.

That’s because, in Magid’s determination, “attention-winning brands today capture passion through comfort,
confirmation, and context.” Being “trustworthy” doesn’t show up in the top 25 “emotional attributes” of news brands. (Better pull those promos with the news anchor talking sincerely about trust. We’re looking squarely at you, Tony Dokoupil.)

Actually, Tony’s boss at CBS, Bari Weiss, might find a lot to absorb in this Magid presentation. We aren’t going to try to capture all of it here for you, but if you are interested in taking a deeper dive, you can read through their entire presentation by clicking on this link

The closing slide of their presentation offered some hopeful thinking. It stated, “The Omnimedia Landscape
delivers significant opportunity.”

So we went in search of both that landscape and whatever opportunity the NAB Show floor presented as it opened at 10 am. We’ll have more for you on what we saw there, coming up in our next dispatch from Las Vegas.

And now we’ve realized just why we have had a craving for some coconut cream pie (our favorite) ever since Sunday.

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For our part, we spent yesterday as our final day at the NAB Show. Having been here over the years, we have learned that getting out of town on Tuesday afternoon makes for a less stressful travel day than fighting with most of the 60,000 or so folks who make the trip to Las Vegas for the annual intersection of broadcasters, film/TV production types, and now a large number of “creators.”

We spent much of Tuesday trying to figure out if we could “roll the dice,” at least figuratively speaking, on timing our departure for the airport late enough to be in the West hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center at 3:45 pm, while still making a 5:55 pm flight back home. (Given the vagaries of making it to the airport and then through security and out to the gate.) We were calculating and recalculating throughout the day, over and over again.

The reason for wanting to stay a little longer at the LVCC and taunt the travel gods was that at 3:45 pm, in the “Media and Entertainment Theater” in the West Hall of the convention center, there was going to be a session titled “The Evolving Paradigm of Broadcast News.” Veteran news anchor Deborah Norville would be interviewing the one person whom you would immediately think of when considering this weighty topic.

And that would be the CEO of Nexstar Media, Mr. Perry Sook.

It would be Sook’s first public remarks since a federal judge decided that Nexstar’s $6.2 billion acquisition of rival local TV group owner TEGNA was likely anti-competitive, and that both DIRECTV and a coalition of state attorneys general would probably prevail in their lawsuits to stop the merger. The larger problem, and one that was a topic of conversation for many, both on and off the NAB Show floor, was how that deal, which has already been closed, could potentially be undone.

So we definitely wanted to hear the first public comments from the man at the center of this legal battle himself. But the timing to do so and make our plane was going to be almost as tight as when Mr. Sook announced that his company had closed on TEGNA, seemingly within minutes of getting expedited approvals from both the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice.

As the clock ticked down, we ultimately made the decision to lessen our normal, elevated level of stress about air travel and left for the airport before the session began. By the time our flight back to Minneapolis landed, we were reading the excellent coverage of what Perry Sook had to say from Deadline.com’s Dade Hayes.

We were sorry that we missed it, because in the city that has hosted so many big prizefights over the years, Perry Sook came out swinging.

He pushed back on the idea that Nexstar was becoming a “broadcast behemoth” in swallowing up TEGNA. Deadline reports that he said, “The term is kind of an oxymoron, given who we compete against.” This is a continuation of Sook’s long-standing justification for the merger as necessary to compete against the tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta in the fight for viewers’ eyeballs. He added the idea that if his company is the ‘behemoth throwing our weight around in this marketplace,’ that just doesn’t really reflect the reality.

The punches kept coming. Sook tossed a right hook at DIRECTV, noting that the national satellite provider was responsible for 83% of retransmission dispute blackouts in recent years. (That means when local stations were temporarily not available to DIRECTV customers during disputes between the satellite provider and owners of local TV stations over what the former has to pay to carry the latter.)

He added a left jab, noting that six of the eight state attorneys general who have sued to block the merger are up for re-election this year. “It’s pretty easy for me to say this is all political,” says the guy who was busy lobbying both the FCC and the White House to support approving the deal.

Speaking of the FCC, a previous panel at the NAB Show that featured three officials from the commission yielded little insight into why the FCC approved the deal. All three demurred to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr for any comment on the approval. Conveniently, Carr didn’t choose to appear at this year’s NAB confab in Vegas.

But in throwing his flurry of verbal punches over why Federal Judge Troy Nunley granted an injunction that will keep Nexstar and TEGNA separate, at least for the immediate future, Sook made a statement that seemed to be, to us at least, a punch that might have landed a little “below the belt.”

In his Deadline article, Dade Hayes notes that when Deborah Norville asked him about consolidation in the broadcast industry, Sook said that it is “a break-glass moment.” Adding that things are so bad that he envisions a future where only “two or three companies” survive to control all of local TV. “It’s a matter of time,” Sook said. “Make no mistake about it. There are many companies in both television and radio that are financially struggling right now.”

Obviously, his intention is for Nexstar to definitely be one of those companies.

But to state publicly that the nation’s local television business will inevitably end up in the control of just a couple of “mega” groups? That sure doesn’t seem like it is going to be seen as “Local” no matter how many times your local ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC channels throw that word up on the screen.

Norville went on to press Sook about the timeline for Nexstar’s case to wind its way through the legal system. He acknowledged that the company has filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit appellate court, but that it has “no control of the timetable” in terms of what happens next.

“We have confidence that we will prevail on the facts and on the law, and we’ll be vigorous in our defense,” he declared.

When asked about what happens to having a diversity of voices delivering the news over local TV stations, Sook swatted away the question by saying that he thinks it is a false choice and that the status quo is going to change.

“If we maintain the status quo, newsrooms will close. And I don’t close newsrooms. I just move the address and move them into one building, so I pay to heat and cool one facility.” The imagery that comes to mind for us is of Sook, in a Scrooge-like moment, considering whether to let a station have an extra lump or two of coal to heat the building in the dead of winter.

But he is right about one thing. This isn’t going to play out over some weeks and months. Given the typical appeals court calendar, we would think August or September would be the earliest that Nexstar would get to argue that the judge’s decision in this fight was the wrong one. So who knows just how many “rounds” this fight could go on to?

And for that matter, how long will Perry Sook keep throwing punches?

From the looks of the Nexstar stock price so far this week, Wall Street isn’t ready to bet against him in this fight. Neither are we, but it is going to be something to watch.

We’ve got a lot more in our notebook from what we actually saw and heard during our time in Las Vegas, before rushing to the airport. We’ll bring you more of that in the days ahead — just as soon as we recover from the days behind us.

Because…Vegas, man.

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That story is large enough to distract from another news item involving Nexstar that caught our attention. Bloomberg reported last Friday that Nexstar had informed its NBC affiliates that it had ended its agreement with the network’s local affiliate news service, known as “NBC NewsChannel,” and that stations should instead utilize content from Nexstar’s “NewsNation” news channel. The Bloomberg piece went on to state that Nexstar will ultimately make the same move with its other affiliates, leaving ABC’s “NewsOne” and CBS’s “Newspath” when those affiliate agreements come up for renewal.

For those readers who may not have spent a lot of time in a local television station’s newsroom, some background: network-affiliated local stations have had a long-standing relationship with their network’s national news operations. Aside from carrying their traditional morning and evening news programs, the local stations also operate as contributors to those network news programs. Part of that relationship includes a “closed circuit” feed of video and audio from the network’s global newsgathering efforts along with coverage of local news stories from around the country.

Each network has a group within their news organization that acts as the conduit between the network news staff and those working in the local stations. If a major news story breaks in a location outside of the few major cities that have a bureau for the network, the local station will provide its video and audio to the network in realtime. In some cases, a local station’s reporter will appear on the network as typically the first to be on the scene of the story.

This relationship started in the early years of network news operations and grew as local stations began expanding their news programming and needing additional content, so they came to rely on the network’s feed for material to fill out those newscasts. When stations began using satellites to routinely transmit material across longer distances back to their local markets, the networks got in the business of booking and coordinating the expensive satellite time for their local stations. The networks also faced competition in this arena for the first time, as CNN offered a similar service to local affiliates called CNN Newsource, and Hubbard Broadcasting, who had pioneered using satellite news gathering on a local basis, created its CONUS operation.

By the late 1990s, the network and affiliate news relationship began to fray as larger station groups wanted to share material exclusively with their co-owned stations in other markets, even if those other stations weren’t affiliated with the same network. One of the largest early examples of this happened in Texas with the stations then owned by Belo. The company, based in Dallas, where it also owned the Dallas Morning News, operated the ABC affiliate, WFAA-TV. Belo also owned the ABC affiliate in the state capital of Austin (KVUE), as well as the CBS affiliates in Houston (KHOU) and San Antonio (KENS). In 1999, Belo launched a statewide cable news network, known as TXCN. The Belo stations began to hold or “embargo” local stories from being shared with the network news operations in favor of TXCN, causing headaches on both sides of the network-affiliate news “partnership.”

More recently, the network news services, “ABC Newsone", “CBS Newspath” and “NBC Newschannel” have become part of the financial terms included in the affiliation agreements that local stations have with their networks. The premise was that if there was money changing hands for this news sharing relationship, local stations would be less inclined to favor certain stations over others.

And that’s where this move from Nexstar comes into play. When Nexstar launched its “NewsNation” operation in 2020, originally on the former “WGN America” channel that Nexstar gained when it took over Tribune Broadcasting, it featured a newsroom in Chicago with regional “desks” that worked with the local Nexstar stations across the country, in much the same fashion as the major networks had been doing. Nexstar also demanded a “NewsNation” priority on local station’s coverage, going so far as to require the network news services to brand all video from any Nexstar station as being originated by “NewsNation” rather than giving credit to the individual local station, as had been previously done.

Now, poised to become the nation’s largest local TV station group by far, it appears that Nexstar wants to “go it alone” and be its own “news hub” for all of its local stations within the NewsNation operation.

Garrett Searight, writing on the industry news website Barrett Media has the idea that this move by Nexstar signals an even larger ambition. Searight supposes that the bringing of local news aggregation in-house by Nexstar may signal that the company wants to expand the “NewsNation” brand to all of its local stations. He postulates that Nexstar wants to follow the playbook that ESPN adopted when it created its radio network in 1992, and in turn, licensed the ESPN name to local radio stations who signed up. This created the plethora of outlets now branded “ESPN (Location)” or “ESPN Radio (Local Frequency)” You can find one of these in well over 400 locations across the country now. The local stations benefit from having a major brand name that instantly is identified with sports, in as much as ESPN is known as “The World Wide Leader in Sports.”

Simply put, we don’t share Mr. Searight’s enthusiasm for Nexstar slapping the NewsNation brand on all its local stations, especially if the thinking is that the local station’s brand name would be either diminished or done away with in favor of being just the local outpost of “the Nation.” By the time ESPN Radio launched, the ESPN name was over a decade old and the sports television network was heading towards being in over 100 million homes.

By comparison, NewsNation is now reportedly carried into 60-70 million homes. And much of its programming is, like most every other “cable news” network, more “talking head” centric than being a true 24-hour live news feed. As cable and satellite subscriber counts have fallen in recent years, NewsNation has had to add streaming to its distribution mix as well.

Even if the NewsNation brand were stronger, anybody who has paid any attention to Nexstar as it has built its growing empire over the years knows that one word has been at the core of the company’s television ambitions. That word is LOCAL. It even appears as the beginning of the copyright animation that plays at the end of each local newscast on every Nexstar station. Heck it even did on the TEGNA stations for a hot minute, when they were believed to be part of the “Nexstar Nation.” (Yes, that is what they called themselves internally, well before “NewsNation” was launched.)

We can’t believe that CEO Perry Sook and his trusted lieutenants are going to forego all the truly local television names in their portfolio, from “PIX 11 News” in New York City to “KELOland” (Sioux Falls, SD.) These are brands that have been built over multiple decades. It sure doesn’t seem like something a company that bills itself as having “A Commitment to Local” would do.

Listen, we read the same research studies that you probably have, the ones that detail that trust in local news is sliding in the wrong direction. But it is (as of this writing) still way ahead of any other news source for a large majority of Americans. Why would any marketing “genius” want to trade in that long established trust just to prop up some struggling, also-ran network in the battle for fewer and fewer national television news eyeballs?

That said, we have also seen our fair share of dumber TV marketing moves over the years. (Here’s looking at you HBO, “HBO Max”, “Max” — or whatever the heck you are called now.)

Let’s just say that nothing truly shocks us anymore. With that, we’re going to go see if there is a “New Coke” in the fridge.

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Actually, it’s our place in two different universes that we’re still thinking about.

The first was where four human beings traveled farther from this planet than anyone has ever gone before. They saw what few have ever seen in witnessing that side of the Moon that perpetually faces away from us. They explored that expanse that we call “the final frontier.” For those of us of a certain age, it was very reminiscent of that heady time when an American President pledged that we would go to the Moon within a decade — and we did.

Consider the moment in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy first challenged the nation to put a man on the Moon. Speaking before a joint session of Congress and having been elected just six months prior, the young president said: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

At that very moment, television itself was still in its first decade for much of the country.

Kennedy would explain why reaching the Moon was imperative. In a 1962 speech at Rice University, he delivered these words: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things — not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept; one that we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”

Of course, we did answer that challenge before the end of the decade. The Apollo missions put a total of twelve men on the Moon, beginning in 1969 and ending just three years later, in 1972.

But we hadn’t been back since.

So to see four astronauts, including a woman, blast off from Cape Canaveral aboard an SLS rocket, circle the Moon, then return to Earth and successfully splash down in the Pacific was both a nostalgic moment and a triumphant return to the idealistic goal of scientific exploration. A recapturing, if perhaps for only a moment, of some hope and pride for many of us.

No image depicts our small place in the universe quite like the one the Artemis astronauts captured of Earth from afar. It is reminiscent of the iconic “Blue Marble” photo taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. Controversy emerged on social media over the new imagery from the Artemis II mission, with some wondering why the new pictures appear less sharp than those taken over five decades ago.

(Image taken by Harrison Schmitt aboard Apollo 17 in 1972. Photo Credit: NASA)

We contrasted those images in our minds with a very different one we saw over the weekend. That image is this map of the “media universe” as created by Evan Shapiro, the self-described “official unofficial cartographer” of the media.

(Image courtesy of Evan Shapiro’s Substack: “Media War & Peace.” Please visit his publication to see this in greater detail by clicking here.)

Shapiro’s latest mapping effort reminds us of how small a space television occupies, especially at the local level, in the current state of the “universe” encompassing all media. In a “solar system” where the Jupiter-sized planets, at least as measured by their value, have names like Amazon, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia, (each being measured in Trillions of dollars) the likes of Nexstar, TEGNA, and Sinclair are more like Mercury-sized in this universe, given that their value is measured in mere Billions. Smaller players like Gray and Scripps, with their value in the millions, are but specks on the map. (If you are having a hard time finding them, locate Netflix in the center and look “due North” (straight up) from there.)

Searching through this map of the media universe, we’re reminded that even if Nexstar eventually completes its acquisition of TEGNA, it will still be considerably smaller (in value) than Hearst, which has other significant media holdings beyond its portfolio of 35 local television stations.

Frankly, if Nexstar’s lawyers wanted to convince any federal judge of the veracity of the argument they are making that the survival of local television station owners pitted against the technology giants dictates that they grow in size and scope, they should have Evan Shapiro’s map made into a giant poster and bring it to every courtroom they appear in.

Our comparison between the universe our small and fragile planet exists in and the “universe” our media exists in is undoubtedly imprecise and perhaps inelegant. But examining the two does provide, at the very least, some perspective on the changes that seem to be perpetually going on within each, and the challenge to explore what’s next in both realms.

It is also worth remembering that technology is merely a tool to help us explore the reaches of both known and unknown. No matter how sophisticated, technology cannot fully replace the human elements of inquiry and exploration that lead to understanding.

JFK’s words are still as prescient today as when he delivered them nearly 64 years ago at Rice University: “We set sail on this new sea because there is knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won — and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.”

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These are the occasions where we sincerely wish we had made our parents happier some fifty-plus years ago, when we firmly decided to study journalism rather than pursue the idea of going to law school. But we didn’t, and so here we are, trying to understand what will be the legal fate of the union to create the largest group of local television stations under one owner in the United States.

Just a quick recap here, the Nexstar-TEGNA deal was approved by both the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice back on March 19th. Within hours after receiving those approvals, Nexstar quickly moved to close on the deal to acquire TEGNA. The speed of that action surprised many until it was announced that both DirecTV and a group of state attorneys general weren’t happy and were heading to court. The California Eastern District Court received the request for a temporary restraining order and, Judge Nunley, after reviewing the details laid out by the plaintiffs, issued the initial 14-day TRO on March 27th.

In today’s new order, the judge lifted some restrictions in order to allow TEGNA to continue normal business operations, though now as an independent subsidiary of Nexstar. What that means is that TEGNA still has its own leadership making day-to-day decisions about the company’s stations (with some limitations), and it will send revenues to Nexstar. That’s important because Nexstar initially told Judge Nunley that, when the deal closed, a chain of events was set in motion that effectively could not be undone.

We’ve heard from a number of now-former TEGNA shareholders who have already received their checks for $22.00 per share of TEGNA stock they previously owned. Hopefully, those checks were immediately cashed. But that means Nexstar has already paid out significant cash for a company it doesn’t yet completely control.

Now we don’t claim to have any inside sourcing on what follows, but we have to imagine that there is some serious maneuvering going on behind the scenes to figure out what will happen whenever Judge Nunley decides what his decision will be on allowing the claims from both DirecTV and the Attorneys General from eight different states to proceed. All of which is now consolidated into a single lawsuit against Nexstar and TEGNA.

Here are our best guesses on three different scenarios potentially playing out (And of course there are likely others that we haven’t even thought of.)

1. Nexstar Sticks To Its Stated Position - Nexstar previously told Judge Nunley that, in basic terms, “the deal is done, and can’t really be undone” in terms of what has occurred in the short time since the close. The company’s lawyers said that even a temporary blocking of the deal would cause “immediate operational harm to TEGNA and Nexstar, regulatory conflicts, and a governance vacuum.” The problem with this scenario is that Judge Nunley granted the first restraining order, acknowledging that, in its presentation to the court, DirecTV had “established a likelihood of success on the merits” of its claim that the merger violated antitrust laws.

2. The Deal Collapses - Though highly unlikely, Nexstar could say to the judge that if he were to issue a permanent injunction against the deal closing, it would suffer irreparable harm and financial ruin (along the lines of a potential bankruptcy), so rather than face that possibility, it would have no choice but to send TEGNA back to being a separate company. How that might work is so far beyond our legal and financial understanding, we won’t even hazard a guess. (Again, we should have listened to you back then, Mom.)

3. A Compromise is Reached - One thing we know for sure, Nexstar CEO Perry Sook didn’t get to where he is without knowing how to “wheel and deal” like the salesman that he started in this business as. Making DirecTV happy probably would involve some offer to hold all former TEGNA stations to their existing retransmission agreements, at least in terms of fee structure, for a period of some fixed length - say, perhaps two or more years. Then, to those attorneys general from the various states, some offer to spin off some TV properties in those markets where Nexstar would own more than two stations. For instance, in Denver, where Nexstar would have ended up with four television stations after the deal, KDVR (Fox) and KWGN (CW) that it already owned, plus TEGNA’s KUSA (NBC) and KTVD (MyTV). Nexstar could offer to divest KTVD, and even KWGN if needed. Or just KUSA if Colorado’s AG thought that was needed “in the public interest.” A reminder that a court of appeals ruling last summer threw out the former rule that typically prevented one company from owning more than one local station affiliated with the so-called “Big Four” networks (being ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC.)

This third scenario could allow Nexstar to acquire a significant number of the TEGNA stations, especially in major markets such as Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Washington, and Phoenix, where Nexstar didn’t already own a “big four” network station. In other top-20 markets such as Tampa-St. Petersburg, Denver, Cleveland, and Sacramento, where Nexstar was going to end up with two (or more) stations affiliated with the “big four” networks, sacrifices might have to be made.

Certainly, this would be seen as far from ideal for Nexstar, but if it were the only path to get past a permanent injunction on the original deal to acquire TEGNA, well, as the old proverb puts it succinctly: “Half a loaf is better than none.”

Don’t even get us started on the question of who might step up to buy the stations that Nexstar would have to divest itself of? There aren’t a lot of companies with a spare billion or more lying around, waiting to either become first-time television station owners or to grow their existing portfolio of stations at a large scale.

Or is there?

One thing is for certain: no matter how this all plays out, there will be a lot of lawyers involved, and significant billable hours are already accumulating.

With all that in mind, we’re going to go have that cocktail now, and strongly reconsider many of our life choices.

Here’s hoping you have a great weekend.

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Well, that got us to thinking, “Hey wait, if the Block sale to Gray was announced last August and the Nexstar acquisition of TEGNA was announced last November…why has the latter move of sixty plus stations already gotten FCC (and DOJ) approval, while the sale of just four full powered TV stations is still languishing at the commission, awaiting final approval.

Come to think of it, there are a number of station transactions that were announced last year, well before the blockbuster Nexstar-TEGNA deal, that are still listed as “pending review” before the FCC. Even the original reporting on that mega-transaction suggested it wouldn’t be approved and close before the third quarter of this year, or perhaps “late 2026.”

And those were considered “optimistic” time frames for a deal of that size and complexity.

While it might be easy to go off on a conspiracy-laden rant here about the lightning speed that CEO Perry Sook was able to get his “big deal of the day” pushed through the typically slow corridors of Washington regulatory agencies, our focus is more about what is keeping the other ownership changes that are still “stuck in the queue” in the halls of the FCC offices on L Street in the District?

It would also be exceptionally easy to suggest some political motive for why some deals are getting approved by the Brendan Carr led FCC and others aren’t. Who knows, maybe if we poured through the database of the Federal Elections Commission, we would learn who has (or hasn’t) made the larger contributions to whichever political party one might suggest was necessary to receive preferential treatment. (To be clear, we could do this research, but our “team” is apparently out at a “team building” exercise this week.)

What’s even more perplexing is that our friend Matthew Keys at TheDesk.net is just reporting that the FCC is telling Congress that it will need less money in its annual operating budget for next year. The Commission says that it will reduce spending by almost $18 million, mostly by apparently imitating the broadcasting business, and reducing its headcount by over 100. As Keys writes: “The agency said the proposal reflects an effort to create a “lean, accountable, and efficient” organization by trimming expenses, primarily through workforce reductions.”

Excellent! The same efficiency that is on prime display with the speedy approval of transactions that create duopolies, triopolies, and probably at some point, outright monopolies of local TV station ownership.

The ever more-efficient FCC did manage to approve the transaction of ten former Byron Allen-owned Allen Media Group stations to the aforementioned Gray Media. That transaction, worth about $171 million, received FCC approval just after the Nexstar-TEGNA deal was okayed last month. It was originally announced last August too, shortly after the proposed deal between Block and Gray we previously noted.

(Editors note: To clarify, while the FCC database shows the approval for the ten AMG station licenses to be transferred to Gray, only three of those have also been signed off on by the US Department of Justice. Those are WTHI in Terre Haute and WLFI in West Lafayette, both in Indiana and WTVA in Tupelo, MS. The other seven stations appear to still be pending DOJ approval.)

And just moments ago, we learned that Byron Allen will be expanding his late-night real estate on the CBS television network. Variety.com reports that Allen has signed a deal where he will lease two hours of the late night schedule on CBS, starting at 11:35pm Eastern, beginning after the departure of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” this May.

Would you look at that? Brendan Carr gets one of those pesky late night talk show hosts exercising their First Amendment rights off of a whole network of licensed TV stations — without having to revoke a single license! Byron Allen, who couldn’t make money as a local station owner and operator, unloads most of his stations, and picks up some cash to pay some bills. And CBS turns into a “paid programmer” in the time period “after your late local news.” (At least for as long as a late local newscast is still a thing.”)

So really, everybody wins! (Well, at least everybody but the viewers, one might argue.)

We’ll wrap it up here with some free advice to the accounts receivable department at CBS, based on what we have heard from some vendors. Cash those late-night checks quickly, whenever you get them. As former GE CEO Jack Welch was fond of saying:“Cash is King.”

In more situations than you might think.

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“Why The F (word) Are We Surprised Anymore?”

(Yes, we could use the entire F-word, but we’re trying to cut down on the amount of cursing we do in public. It’s already far too much.)

So let’s take a look at the week’s industry news items that fall into the “WTFAWSA” category:

Surprise #1: The Mass Firing In Indianapolis

The Federal Communications Commission decided to approve the acquisition of Scripps-owned WRTV, the ABC affiliate in Indy, by Circle City Broadcasting, the owner of WISH-TV and WNDY, the 25th largest market’s CW and MyTV affiliates. Circle City leadership held a staff meeting at WRTV on Tuesday, and by the end of it, about 95% of WRTV’s staff had learned that their jobs were being eliminated. While we certainly join everyone in feeling sad for so many people who suddenly find themselves out of work, we have to ask: Did this really come as a surprise to anyone paying attention?

This pattern of how things go after one TV station in a market is acquired by another isn’t really new anymore. Except for the grandiose promises provided to the aforementioned FCC of “investing more in local news” in order to get such acquisitions approved, these combinations almost always result in job losses. The whole business case for combining stations is to reduce expenses in the combined operation.

Call it “streamlining”, “synergy,” or whatever business school term is in vogue at the moment. It’s always about doing more with less.

One interesting question post the WRTV acquisition is what will become of that station’s home on North Meridian Street, now that Channel 6 is moving a few doors down the street into the WISH-TV complex. The former home of WRTV also houses the Scripps master control hub, which remains operational and controls switching for nearly all of the stations owned by the Cincinnati-based group. We hear that Scripps has a deal that will give it a year to determine just where it might relocate its station hub.

Surprise #2: The Total Travesty in Tulsa

If there has been one group owner who has written the playbook on combining stations under one roof and slashing the payroll in the process, it would be Sinclair Broadcast Group. The saga in Tulsa is just another example of executing that playbook. Sinclair acquired Tulsa’s KTUL as part of its 2013 acquisition of Allbritton Communications and its eight local ABC stations. The deal made Sinclair the largest owner and operator of ABC affiliates in the nation. In an interesting twist, the FCC held up Sinclair’s acquisition of the Allbritton stations for nearly a year. At the time, the FCC expressed concerns over (wait for it) “broadcast transactions that propose new combinations of sharing arrangements and financial entanglements between a dominant licensee and a so-called sidecar entity.” In three markets, Harrisburg, PA, Birmingham, AL, and Charleston, SC, Sinclair already owned a station and was adding a second; the FCC required either the sale of a station or the termination of a local marketing agreement (LMA) or shared services agreement (SSA) to approve the transaction.

Back to the present day in market #61, where Sinclair has just acquired Tulsa’s Fox affiliate, KOKI, from the very-short-lived Rincon Broadcasting Group, marking the sixth different owner for “Fox 23” in the last two decades. (Extra points if you can name them all.) A short time back, Sinclair had hollowed out the local news operation at the once-dominant KTUL, known as “Total 8 Tulsa” in its heyday, shifting much of it to co-owned KOKH, the Fox affiliate in Oklahoma City. Now, with the full acquisition of KOKI in Tulsa, Sinclair has announced it is moving the few remaining folks in the KTUL studio on Lookout Mountain to the newly acquired KOKI building. Also, during the consolidation, as it has in other markets, Sinclair moved the Fox programming from KOKI’s channel 23.1 signal to the 8.2 subchannel of KTUL's signal.

(If you’re still wondering, those six owners would be Clear Channel, Newport Television, Cox Media, Imagicomm, Rincon, and now Sinclair.)

Meanwhile, in the Pacific Northwest, the ever intrepid Scott Jones of FTVLive fame reports that Sinclair is following up on its latest moves in Tulsa with a similar situation in Washington, where it has acquired Rincon’s KIMA, the CBS affiliate in Yakima. That station’s local newsroom has been decimated, with most of the staff cut, as Sinclair is now having KEPR, their CBS station in Pasco, Washington, provide local news programming for KIMA. While both Yakima and Pasco are technically both in market #114, about 85 miles separate the two cities. No immediate word on how many folks will be losing their jobs as a result of this latest stop on the ever-shrinking local news express.

One thing is for sure, it certainly won’t be the last one.

Surprise #3 (and the biggest one): The Novel Legal Theory from Nexstar

After a federal judge slapped a 14-day temporary restraining order on Nexstar for its lightning quick close on acquiring rival TEGNA, especially because that happened just one day after legal challenges were announced to the $6.2 billion deal being approved by both the FCC and the Department of Justice, Nexstar’s legal eagles have filed a response to the judge, which states, in so many words, a sentiment echoed in the 1972 R&B hit song by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose, “It’s too late to turn back now.”

Nexstar contends that it and TEGNA have taken “...many typical steps that may not have been apparent to the Court when it issued its TRO. It is particularly difficult to freeze integration that was already taking place, unlike a conventional hold-separate order. Complying with certain aspects of the TRO is impossible and could jeopardize Nexstar and the Tegna assets the Court seeks to preserve.” So they told the judge, We can’t comply with your order because…well, Your Honor, that horse is out of the barn.

In a document that looks more heavily redacted than one from the “Epstein files,” Nexstar’s argument is, that because the retransmission agreements that were in place for the TEGNA stations were immediately changed (with a few short-term exceptions) to now be governed by the agreements in place between Nexstar stations and the various multichannel video programning distributors (aka “MVPDs.”) The MVPDs include cable systems, both big and small, along with the direct-to-home satellite providers, DISH and DIRECTV, the latter being the party suing Nexstar over the merger, which in turn led to the judge’s temporary restraining order in the first place.

The Nexstar response includes many other examples of how the TRO is definitely making life impossible for both Nexstar and its newly formed TEGNA subsidiary. In fact, complying with the judge’s order could imperil TEGNA’s previously announced plans to implement a cost-savings plan, valued at $90 to $100 million, which is already underway and will “eliminate newsroom positions and support positions, consolidate station operations and management, and develop technologies like AI automation.” We certainly can’t slow that down now, Judge.

Apparently, the one thing that could be reversed was the addition of the animated Nexstar logo to the copyright tag that was quickly added to all of the TEGNA stations’ newscasts last week.

The legal challenges so far appear to be mostly just speed bumps that Nexstar CEO Perry Sook will have to navigate on the road to getting all the corporate synergies in place that will make the $90-$100 million in costs TEGNA was going to reduce look like the proverbial “chicken feed.” And yes, more people are likely to lose their jobs on the way down that road. Among them are those in the TEGNA executive suite who we’re told have been missing in action as all of these “unstoppable” changes have been playing out.

As we asked off the top: Why The F Are We Surprised Anymore? By Anything?

Maybe President Harry Truman put it best when he said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”

Remember, he was the guy who had the sign on his Oval Office desk that read “The buck stops here.”

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What we are shaking our heads about on this Monday is the hypocritical behavior from the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, one Brendan Carr.

Last Friday, Mr. Carr appeared before the annual CPAC convention in Grapevine, Texas, where he proudly proclaimed, “President Trump is taking on the fake media and President Trump is winning.” Carr acknowledged that the administration is “not at the point of raising the mission accomplished flag” in its apparent quest to vanquish any media outlet that might disagree with the approved narrative coming out of Washington.

Thank heavens for that bit of cognition from the FCC chairman, because we all know how well the last raising of a “mission accomplished” banner was remembered by history.

But Carr wasn’t appearing before the CPAC faithful for just a quick victory lap. In his remarks, he would go on to recite the various “accomplishments” that had been achieved in the last 15 months: “Look at the results so far. PBS defunded. NPR defunded. Joy Reid, gone from MSNBC. Sleepy-Eyed Chuck Todd, gone. Jim Acosta, gone. John Dickerson, gone. [Stephen] Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough, CNN is going to have new ownership as well.”

It is worth noting that none of the “results” he cited were due to any direct action by the FCC. Rather, it’s the climate of fear and uncertainty that Carr’s FCC has brought to the electronic media that it regulates. An FCC with only three sitting commissioners, when it normally has five, and a two-Republican-to-one-democrat majority.

It isn’t just that the FCC Chair was speaking as a loyal member of the Trump administration. That’s pretty much par for the course. (Watch any congressional hearing on C-Span that features current or would-be appointees for a masterclass in not answering a direct question.) What is almost shocking to us (mostly because nothing is really too shocking at this point) is that Carr was cheerleading for allowing caps on the First Amendment.

Good to note that he approves of some caps, since he found a way to dispense with them in his review of the $6.2 billion merger of Nexstar and TEGNA.

Speaking of that deal, not long after Mr. Carr received his last round of applause from the conservative faithful in Texas, a Federal Judge in California issued a temporary restraining order against Nexstar's acquisition of the TEGNA stations. The deal that the FCC (along with the DOJ) approved just back on March 19th, which Nexstar moved to close on with lightning speed.

Judge Troy Nunley of the U.S. District Court for Eastern California wrote in his ruling: “Tegna and Nexstar for the time being must operate separately and may not share any 'competitively sensitive' information, including any information related to retransmission fee negotiations, among other restrictions.” His decision came in support of a lawsuit brought by DIRECTV which asserts that the proposed merger represents a concentration of broadcast TV “without precedent” and would “irreparably drive up consumer costs, reduce local competition, shutter local newsrooms, and increase both the frequency and duration of blackouts of key local teams and network programming,”

The judge made it clear in issuing his TRO that the court believes the merger “is presumed likely to ‌violate ⁠antitrust laws based on the combined firm market share alone.”

So much for ignoring those ownership caps, Mr. Chairman.

Carr isn’t just pleased that PBS and NPR have been defunded and that Stephen Colbert will soon be deplatformed; he is also turning his regulatory threats towards another entity — one that might have far more willingness to fight back — namely, the National Football League.

It seems that Carr believes that the NFL may be moving too many games from airing on broadcast television outlets, such as ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC, and placing them on subscription-based streaming services such as Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Peacock. So the FCC’s Media Bureau has issued a call for public comments on “Sports broadcasting practices and marketplace developments.”

Carr told the online publication Semafor last week that he is asking: “Does the NFL still benefit from the antitrust exemption when they’re negotiating for carriage of games not on a sponsored telecast, but on a streaming service?”

The league has benefitted from an antitrust exemption since 1961, which is part of a sports broadcasting law passed by Congress. The exemption allows the league to negotiate television deals on behalf of all its teams, but only if it adheres to certain criteria that ensure local fans can watch their hometown teams. That’s why games carried on ESPN, the NFL Network (now part of ESPN), and streaming services are also typically seen on local TV stations in the home markets of the two teams playing.

Which the league happens to make a nice bit of money on, on top of the rights fees paid by whatever national outlet is airing the game.

We would point out here that the FCC Chairman can probably get away with blatantly ignoring the law passed by Congress establishing a national cap on the number of local television stations that any one company can own. But when it comes to questioning the Congressional power on where people can watch professional football games…well, that might be “a bridge too far.”

When it comes to angering the National Football League, we’d tell Mr. Carr that we know from personal experience that, as the late Jim Croce sang, “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape.”

The song’s title, “You don’t mess around with Jim,” would be changed here to “You don’t mess around with Roger.” As in Roger Goodell, the Commissioner of the NFL.

Brendan Carr previously told Semafor that moving sports behind paywalls undermines a mission to keep local news afloat. Interestingly enough, he used that same “mission” as a primary justification for granting the waiver that allowed the Nexstar-TEGNA transaction to proceed.

For its part, Nexstar placed TEGNA into a subsidiary, perhaps just in case a speed bump like a federal judge might come along and slow things down in creating all the cost savings in those projected “corporate synergy” numbers. Viewers of local TV stations previously owned by TEGNA are already seeing the Nexstar name and logo at the end of every local newscast.

Much like every NFL game on TV ends with the animated message that “thanks you for watching this presentation of the National Football League.”

And so we wonder if Mr. Carr is about to find out, as Mr. Croce’s 1972 song also warned: “You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger”?

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Here Are “The Headlines from The Topline.” (Yes, we’re still going with that title, at least until we think of something better.)

Her Redemption Tour Is Now Fully Underway

When last we heard much about Wendy McMahon, it was last May, during her defenstration from the CBS Broadcast Center in New York City. She announced she was leaving her position as President and CEO of CBS News and Stations amid tectonic shifts ahead for the organization. Her resignation came as corporate owner Paramount was itching to settle a lawsuit from President Donald Trump against CBS and “60 Minutes.” The pesky lawsuit seemed the last major hurdle to clear before Paramount boss Shari Redstone could sell the whole company to Skydance’s David Ellison, backed by his father Larry’s vast fortune. The internal fight over whether the network should pay out millions to Mr. Trump had already cost long-time “60 Minutes” Executive Producer Bill Owens his gig. McMahon resigned with the announcement that “the company and I could not agree on the path forward.”

Wendy’s path has now led her to an advisory role with the online newsletter-publishing platform beehiv. Now, in her first public “exit interview” since resigning from CBS, she is having a candid conversation about her decision to leave and the future of the network news operation she once led. Is she having that interview with a major news magazine or perhaps an industry publication? Actually no. She is talking to the magazine Marie Claire in their “Exit Interview” feature. We won’t spoil it for you here; you should definitely read how McMahon struggled with feelings of “imposter syndrome” and what she thinks about the currently in-progress remake of CBS News, under the new leadership of one Bari Weiss.

Here is her “money quote” from the article: “I do believe that our democracy does not exist without freedom of the press.”

Speaking of the Revamping of CBS News

We’ve been wondering about the whole future of the combined “CBS News and Stations” structure under Bari Weiss and Tom Cibrowski. The work that Wendy McMahon and Adrienne Roark put in place to unify the operations of CBS’s network news division and its owned-and-operated local television stations. Those had traditionally been operated independently for a variety of reasons. Still, in the brave new world of “digital synergy,” the two would be unified primarily to create a 24-hour streaming news service and to extend CBS News's branding to local markets where the O&Os operate. Call letters and channel numbers were replaced with “CBS News (location)” in places ranging from CBS News Los Angeles to the less impressive “CBS News Sacramento.” We’re hearing the latter may be replaced with the regional brand of “CBS News Northern California,” which would marry the “CBS News Bay Area” moniker in San Francisco to Sacramento under a single name, much as both the SF and Sacto stations now report to one General Manager.

But with the “catastrophic” ratings situation in progress at the network level (at least according to “Status” newsletter founder Oliver Darcy), we wonder if any of the owned and operated stations have the cajones to suggest that they might fare a whole hell of a lot better with their own legacy branding? Would KDKA-TV draw better ratings in Pittsburgh, or would WCCO-TV in the Twin Cities, where we would bet a few dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts that many viewers still know those stations as Channel 2 or 4, where they have known them since they went on the air seven-plus decades ago?

We suppose there could be alternative paths to pursue at the local level. But certainly no one wants to be part of the place once known as “The Tiffany Network,” but now looks more like the “Titanic News Network.”

And Then There’s The Rewind at Rincon

The folks at the excellent daily “Radio and Television Business Report “ broke the details about the future of Todd Parkin’s Rincon Broadcasting Group. Parkin, who was previously the head of sales for the Bally Sports Networks regional sports operation (that had its own “Titanic” like ending), had since formed The Rincon Broadcasting Group with an initial five stations from his previous employer, Sinclair Broadcast Group. Then he added a half-dozen stations that Imagicomm had previously owned for a hot minute. More recently, three stations from investor Soo Kim’s Standard Media were set to join the quickly growing Rincon portfolio.

But “RTVBR” reports that FCC filings suggest Rincon will be retreating from its entire business plan, with Soo Kim writing a $116.5 million check to Todd Parkin for his interest in Rincon. Kim will then take the Imagicomm, Standard Media, and Sinclair stations back under his “MediaCo” holding company. But they may not stay there for long, as RTVBR quotes sources saying that Kim, who once made a bid for all of the TEGNA station group—before Perry Sook’s Nexstar Media landed that prize—won’t hold on to all these stations for long.

A deal to sell the whole lot of 15 full-power outlets to Sinclair is the probable endgame now. That’s likely because Soo Kim is now the Chairman of Bally’s Corporation, which his Standard General investment fund owns 74% of. Bally’s operates Casinos and Sports Betting operations around the world, and recently received one of the first casino gaming licenses issued for New York City. Bally’s plans to build a casino at the site of the Ferry Point golf course in the Bronx.

Funny how it all seems to be working out for everyone involved. Why take a gamble on owning television stations when you can have a sure bet on people actually gambling?

And there you go, three stories in the space we normally take for one. Who says we can’t do shorter updates? Don’t worry, we’ll be “going long” again soon.

-30-

Think of it as “The Headlines from The Topline.”

Dateline: Washington! (Urgent sound effect goes here. Use your imagination.)

The FCC appears to have entered its spring-cleaning mode now. After suddenly sweeping out the approval of the Nexstar-TEGNA deal last week, it moved this week to approve the transfer of three TV station licenses from Allen Media to Gray. The Atlanta-based Gray now adds two Indiana properties (WTHI in Terre Haute and WLFI in Lafayette) and one in Mississippi (WTVA in Tupelo) to its existing roster of 180 stations. Seven other Allen Media stations were part of the original deal with Gray announced last August—no word from the commission on why they weren’t approved alongside the initial trio.

Also, Dateline: Washington! (Another hit of the SFX)

Punchbowl News reports that U.S. Senator Ted Cruz isn’t happy about the fact that the FCC approved the Nexstar acquisition of TEGNA without a formal vote of the commissioners. We found that a bit funny too. Speaking of funny, we found some humor buried in the FCC’s approvals of the “transfer of control” actions for all TEGNA stations. There, we could see the actual licensees named for each television station. Most were just the station’s name as an LLC, such as “WFAA-TV, LLC,” but a few names were interesting holdovers from long-gone group owners. For instance, “Multimedia Holdings Corporation” is a throwback to Multimedia, the Greenville, SC-based company that owned newspaper, radio, and television stations, as well as syndicated programming (including “The Phil Donahue Show”) until 1995. After a deal for General Electric to acquire Multimedia didn’t materialize, Gannett acquired the company in 1995 for $1.7 billion. Another name from broadcasting history was Pacific & Southern, a radio group that operated until the late 1970s. Finally, the Belo name appears on the list of TEGNA licensees. Just before TEGNA was created in 2015, when Gannett spun off its television stations from the core newspaper business (now known as USA Today), Gannett acquired Belo’s 20 television stations from the Texas media company, which was known for owning the Dallas Morning News. None of these names from the past really mean much of anything; they were just legal entities that were listed on the station license documents. Ultimately, all were owned by TEGNA, which is—for now at least—operating as a subsidiary of Nexstar.

Dateline: New York City! (SFX again)

As the initial shock and mourning for the announced end of CBS Radio News begins to subside a bit, are we the only folks wondering why Paramount-Skydance didn’t try to sell the radio news network rather than just shutting it down? After all, the network had some 700 radio stations as clients, and though it was reportedly not making a lot of money, surely it was a business that someone might have taken off of David Ellison’s hands for, say, “a fistful of dollars”? Is it possible that Bari Weiss never explored the possibility of selling rather than slashing the place where, as Keith Olbermann correctly noted on his “Countdown” podcast, “broadcast journalism was born.” Olbermann also opines that Ms. Weiss’s mission is not to save CBS News, but rather to destroy it. With the network’s ratings sinking faster than our war-impacted retirement investments balance, we can’t argue with that conclusion. Meanwhile, Oliver Darcy in last night’s edition of his Status newsletter labelled the ratings situation at CBS News as “catastrophic.”

Dateline: Philadelphia! (Maybe the “Move Closer To Your World” theme music here)

Speaking of bad situations, one has to wonder just what is going on at ABC O&O and long-time market leader WPVI in the “City of Brotherly Love? Rick Gevers and his eponymous newsletter sent out the news at the beginning of this week that “veteran” news director Tom Davis, who had led “Action News” for some 15 years, went out for a meeting and never came back to work. ABC O&O chief Chad Matthews then put out an email announcing Davis “had made the decision to leave 6ABC.” (Sounds to us like maybe the decision was made for him.) The departure now leaves the station with no news director or general manager. WPVI’s previous long-time GM, Bernie Prazenica, retired from the station after 17 years, back in January. One might assume that the O&O chief (Matthews) decided to hand now-former ND Davis his walking papers, rather than stick a new GM with that unpleasant chore. But what’s wrong inside 4100 City Avenue is what many are now wondering about.

Dateline: Indianapolis! (The NCAA Tournament theme from CBS would go here)

And from the place the aforementioned Rick Gevers calls home, we suspect there have to be a lot of smiles here in the NCAA’s offices this week. The Hollywood Reporter says the Nielsen ratings show that the numbers for both the Men’s basketball tournament on CBS/TBS et al., and the Women’s tournament on ESPN/ABC are up year over year. The first two rounds of the Men’s tournament averaged just over 10 million viewers, while the Women’s tournament had games peaking at just under 1 million viewers.

Proud to say we were among both numbers for a good portion of Thursday through Monday. Even if our brackets were a total bust by the end of Friday.

Those are our headlines for now. We’ll be back here with our next big story on The Topline by week’s end.

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When the drumbeat grew loudest that significant layoffs were coming to CBS News by last week’s end, we didn’t stop to think about the small group of people who still were churning out hourly newscasts to about 700 radio stations from coast to coast. The five notes of the network’s opening stinger are almost as famous as the three notes heard on rival NBC since the golden age of radio.

The same NBC that saw the light decades before, and pulled the plug on its own radio news network by selling it off in 1987, recognizing that the economics of the radio business didn’t make sense even back then.

The economics of radio news didn’t get better in the subsequent fifty years, and that was one of the reasons that CBS News leadership, in the form of Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss and President Tom Cibrowski, cited for announcing the end of the longest-running broadcast news operation this May 22nd.

It will come just shy of what would have been the network’s 100th anniversary next year.

CBS Radio started its existence back in 1927, originally as “United Independent Broadcasters.” A 26-year-old William Paley would push his family’s cigar business, a major advertiser on radio at the time, to buy the nascent chain of stations. Paley would rename the business to the “Columbia Broadcasting System” and take over as its president the following year. Paley would build CBS into a serious competitor to RCA’s “National Broadcasting Company”, which had just launched the year before CBS in 1926. NBC actually came into being as two different radio chains, known as the “Red” and “Blue” networks. (Broadcast history junkies like ourselves know that the smaller “Blue” network was eventually sold under threat of government antitrust action, and became the basis for the “American Broadcasting Company,” also known as ABC.)

All three would eventually move into television, which, of course, became the much larger business after the Second World War ended and, by the 1950s, was pushing radio aside in both audience and advertising. But contrary to some popular belief, radio isn’t dead. It still reaches a large majority of the population, primarily through “out-of-home” listening — meaning those people who listen in their vehicles on the road.

But before television captured the nation’s attention, it was radio that introduced the notion of receiving the news in real time, live from wherever it happened. Edward R. Murrow’s dispatches from the rooftops in London during the German air raids on that city during the war brought him name and voice to the attention of millions, leading him to become the patron saint of broadcast journalism. His name is now on the major national awards for the best practice of the craft.

He wasn’t alone. The roll call of voices heard on CBS News Radio is an incredible one, ranging from Lowell Thomas, whose voice had been heard on Movietone newsreels in theaters, to Charles Collingwood, Eric Sevareid, Howard K. Smith, Richard C. Hottelet, and William Shirer—a group who would become known as “the Murrow Boys.” They would be joined in the years to come by Robert Trout, Douglas Edwards, and a young man named Walter Cronkite, who would go on to find some success in that “new fad” called television. Plus, our two personal favorites to ever sit at the CBS Radio microphones, Christopher Glenn and Charles Osgood.

Yet all this rich history behind the name CBS News is probably in large part why the last vestige of its storied roots in radio had to be ended by the current caretakers of “The House that Murrow built.” Radio is the medium of what some might dismissively label as “old people.” It doesn’t really seem to fit with the digital media darlings of streaming video, podcasting, and social media platforms aplenty.

We’ve spent the weekend since the announcement that CBS News Radio is ending, reading the various takes on the decision. Predictably, they have ranged from sincere eulogies bemoaning the end of the institution, or at least what was left of it, to the clinical dissections that radio has been dead or dying since the internet killed off what television had mortally wounded in previous decades.

The figure most often cited was that CBS News Radio made only $67,000 in January 2026 and was unprofitable. While we can believe this, we do wonder whether the economics of unloading an entire unit of people in a single cut made it an easy target for CBS News leadership. They are under pressure from their parent company, Paramount-Skydance, to find significant operating savings wherever possible. (And that’s before the company takes on a massive pile of $110 Billion or so to acquire rival Warner Bros. Discovery.)

Economic realities aside, the truth is that CBS News Radio wasn’t that much of a drain on a company that shelled out $150 Million to acquire “The Free Press” and its wunderkind CEO and Editor-In-Chief, the aforementioned Ms. Weiss. To bring her talents to be Editor-In-Chief for all of CBS News, Paramount CEO and “Would-be owner of Hollywood” David Ellison had no problem spending the nine-figure sum needed to bring on Weiss so she can deliver a vision for CBS News that she defines with this quote: “It’s no secret that the news business is changing radically, and that we need to change along with it.”

We’d point out that just having the name CBS News on 700 radio stations every hour or so was, at the very least, a pretty major promotional platform that wasn’t costing more money than another campaign for the struggling morning or evening programs that CBS News is putting on television each weekday. Remember the claim in recent years: “More people get their news from ABC News than any other source”? It was ABC’s radio news division that was a key part of the calculation supporting the claim. (By the way, ABC is still in the radio news business, with over 1,400 affiliated stations and probably more to come, as many of those stations that were carrying CBS News Radio scramble for a new provider.)

But we’d venture to guess that perhaps the bigger motivation in signing off the CBS News brand from radio is that it was too visible a sign of the organization’s “Old media” roots. The ghosts of Murrow, Cronkite, and their compatriots were just a little too embedded in the hallways of the CBS Broadcast Center on New York City’s West 57th Street. For someone with no real experience in broadcast journalism, let alone broadcasting itself, there was little nostalgia for something nearly a century old.

The previous owners of CBS had shown how little radio mattered when it sold off its flagship radio station that bore the CBS letters in its name. WCBS radio was spun off, along with all of the major radio stations CBS then owned, to Entercom (now known as Audacy) in 2017. Then, in late 2024, WCBS radio and its 57-year-old all-news format were silenced by Audacy, replaced by “ESPN Radio New York” on 880 AM.

It is absolutely fair to say that CBS News Radio could have done more to prevent its ultimate fate. There was not much of a digital footprint for the audio-only news content produced each day. Even Fox News has figured out how to make radio a complementary part of its ever-growing empire. Given the much-speculated belief that Ms. Weiss, her only boss, Mr. Ellison, and their interested patron in the Oval Office, want to take CBS News on more of a turn to the right on the editorial spectrum, one would think that Fox’s complementary success with radio would have been of note.

Apparently not.

Count us among those who will miss the radio version of CBS News when it signs off for the last time, probably because we grew up with it as a trusted, reliable, and authoritative voice for all of the major news events, ranging from November 22nd, 1963, to September 11th, 2001, and beyond, right up until May 22nd, 2026.

It’s a sad farewell to the foundation of that house that Murrow built, which is now being remodeled into something far more modern.

And unlike Kenny in “South Park,” Weiss and Ellison aren’t likely to un-kill it in the next episode. Which will, of course, be available for streaming on “Paramount Plus.”

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Seemingly faster than the final score of a game could be put on the screen, the TEGNA website was replaced by a single webpage stating “TEGNA, Inc. is now part of Nexstar Media Group,” with a “click to learn more” link that would take you to the Nexstar press release on the deal’s closing.

The speed of this was more startling than VCU’s comeback to stun North Carolina — as the Rams erased a 19-point second-half deficit to win 82-78 in overtime, the largest first-round comeback in tournament history — blowing a gigantic hole in our brackets.

Just the night before, a coalition of eight state attorneys general — led by California AG Rob Bonta and joined by New York, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, North Carolina, Connecticut, and Virginia — had filed a federal antitrust lawsuit seeking to block the merger, alleging it violated Section 7 of the Clayton Act by substantially lessening competition. DIRECTV piled on Thursday with its own separate federal suit, arguing that the combined company’s enormous leverage in retransmission consent negotiations would ultimately hit satellite subscribers in the wallet.

Neither lawsuit apparently stopped the clock before the horn sounded. When it did, Perry Sook and company had won their fight to create the nation’s largest owner of local television stations — 265 of them, across 44 states and Washington, D.C.

As The Desk’s Matthew Keys first reported, the FCC’s Media Bureau released its 40-page order, numbered DA-26-267A1, granting Nexstar a waiver of the existing rules that limit any one company from owning TV stations reaching more than 39 percent of the nation’s television households. The order devotes many pages to explaining the deal’s cap conflict. Still, it justifies the waivers on public-interest grounds, citing an increasingly competitive media landscape dominated by streaming giants and the Big Four network owners. “Grant of the relevant waiver,” the Commission wrote in DA-26-267A1, “will most effectively further FCC media policy goals, help promote better service in local markets, and benefit consumers.”

In paragraph 35 of the order, the FCC makes the remarkable argument — at least to us — that it has the legal authority to waive that pesky cap embedded in Congressional statute (that is, “law”) because “Congress ‘knew exactly’ how to remove the Commission’s authority to waive or modify the National Cap if it so intended, but chose not to do so.”

In other words, the FCC told Congress: “Hey, you didn’t specifically tell us we didn’t have the authority to ignore the ownership cap, so we assume we do — and we’re using it.”

Depending on the calculation being used, the newly combined Nexstar-TEGNA stations will reach somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of the nation’s television households. To quote the late, great baseball announcer Bob Uecker, that would be “Just a bit outside.”

The Commission went so far as to note that by adding the TEGNA stations to its portfolio and then divesting a few, Nexstar will own 259 stations — less than 15 percent of the currently licensed 1,777 full-power television stations. And while that is technically correct, it fails to account for the roughly 30 stations owned by so-called “sidecar” companies Mission Broadcasting and White Knight Broadcasting. While these companies hold those stations’ licenses, they are operated by Nexstar as if they were stations it controlled outright. Mission’s ownership of WPIX in New York City, for example, takes that station’s reach in the nation’s single largest TV market off Nexstar’s books in any calculation of the ownership cap.

As part of securing FCC approval, Nexstar agreed to divest six stations from the 265 it will now own outright — within two years of the closing date: KTVD Denver, CO; WTHR Indianapolis, IN; WCTX New Haven (Hartford), CT; WAVY Portsmouth (Norfolk), VA; WUPL Slidell (New Orleans), LA; and KNWA Rogers, AR. That is, if the FCC’s rules still require it to do so at that time. (We were puzzled by this particular selection of stations until concluding that these stations likely prevent Nexstar from claiming too large a share of a given market’s advertising dollars or from owning more than two stations affiliated with the Big Four networks of ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC.)

The company also committed to extending current retransmission consent rates to existing pay-TV partners through November 30, 2026, and pledged to expand local news investment in acquired markets. The order includes considerable detail on Nexstar’s representations that it has historically increased such investment in each market it has acquired — with no detail, however, on the number of positions that may have been eliminated in those same acquisitions.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who signaled as far back as last month that he was prepared to sign off on this mega-merger, framed the approval as a rescue mission for local journalism. “For too long,” he said in a statement, “the FCC stood by while newspapers closed by the dozen in communities all across the country.” (Not that the FCC has anything to do with the printed press, but why let that relevant fact get in the way?) The lone Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, took sharp exception, calling the approval rushed and opaque — decided behind closed doors, without a full Commission vote or public process. “The American public,” she wrote, “deserves to know how and why this decision was made.”

One person not asking those questions: Nexstar founder, chairman, and CEO Perry Sook. In his own statement, he thanked President Trump, Chairman Carr, and the DOJ by name, calling the deal “essential to sustaining strong local journalism in the communities we serve.” It was a grateful exit from a regulatory gauntlet that, as recently as a month ago, appeared to have no clear finish line — particularly at the DOJ, where staff turnover in the antitrust division had forced Nexstar to repeatedly re-brief incoming reviewers. Some reporting points to last month’s forced departure of Gail Slater from that division following disagreements with senior DOJ officials, and reports of interference in antitrust cases then in process. It’s important to note that the review of the Nexstar-TEGNA merger was never specifically mentioned as one of those cases.

The attorneys general are not ready to concede the floor. California’s AG Bonta declared Thursday evening that “Nexstar/TEGNA is not a done deal,” and his office confirmed the antitrust lawsuit would proceed in federal court. DIRECTV echoed the message. A source familiar with the satellite carrier’s case told The Desk there were still “lots of twists to come.”

There may well be. A merger that closes while federal injunctive actions remain live is an unusual posture — legally complex, and potentially reversible depending on how the courts ultimately rule. The ownership waiver itself has drawn scrutiny over whether the FCC had the statutory authority to grant it at all, or whether that power belongs exclusively to Congress. That question, unresolved Thursday, is likely headed for the D.C. Circuit.

For now, though, Nexstar owns the floor. The company that was already the largest local television news provider in the United States went through seven months, one DOJ review, one FCC waiver process — and, in the face of two federal lawsuits, took its proverbial three-point shot to win.

Whether the score at the final horn holds — or whether “the refs,” in the form of the courts, are still reviewing the play — is the outcome many will be watching long after the madness of March has concluded with its traditional “One Shining Moment” song.

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Which raises a question that the suits running those organizations are almost certainly not discussing as they watch Duke and Michigan play their way through the bracket: What happens to March Madness if the Paramount-Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery actually closes?

The current arrangement is already a study in corporate awkwardness. CBS — a broadcast network owned by Paramount Global — and the Turner cable networks — owned by Warner Bros. Discovery — have shared rights to the tournament since 2011 under an escalating deal worth roughly $10.8 billion that runs through 2032. In fact, this year’s rights alone will exceed the $1 billion mark for the first time.

The partnership works largely because both sides have strong institutional incentives to make it succeed. The games stream on Paramount+ if they’re on CBS, and on HBO Max if they’re on TBS, TNT, or truTV. To watch every game, a viewer needs subscriptions to two separate streaming services from two separate companies. It is not exactly a seamless consumer experience.

Now fold in what’s on the table with the proposed merger. If Paramount-Skydance absorbs Warner Bros. Discovery, CBS, TBS, TNT, and truTV would all sit under one roof — along with Paramount+, HBO Max, CNN, and whatever remains of the Turner sports portfolio. The NCAA Tournament’s broadcast arrangement, which currently requires coordination between two rival media giants, would suddenly be an in-house scheduling exercise.

That is either a tremendous opportunity or an antitrust regulator’s field day, depending on your vantage point.

For viewers — particularly the tens of millions who fill out brackets every March — consolidation could theoretically mean a single streaming destination for all 67 games. No more toggling between apps to catch the Duke upset you missed on CBS while your truTV window was showing a mid-major miracle in Dayton.

On paper, it sounds like progress.

But consolidation of that scale also means fewer bidders when the current rights deal expires in 2032. ESPN and Fox would presumably still be interested parties, but the negotiating dynamic shifts considerably when one entity controls the existing relationship, the infrastructure, and four of the television networks that currently carry the tournament.

ESPN is hardly a passive bystander here. “The Worldwide Leader” controls the TV rights of NCAA Championships for some 40 different sports until 2032 — including the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament. That deal, just done in 2024, also includes the international rights to the Men’s Tournament as well. So, outside the current CBS/Turner Sports distribution footprint, ESPN already handles the games in the Men’s bracket.

Speaking of brackets: the American Gaming Association has estimated that over 68 million Americans fill one out each year, generating somewhere north of $3 billion in legal wagers. Most of those brackets cost little or nothing to enter. They exist primarily to give casual fans a rooting interest across three weeks of television, which is precisely what the networks — all four of them — are counting on to drive ratings from the first round through “One Shining Moment.”

If a merged super-company ultimately controls the entire viewing experience, from the Selection Show through the Final Four, it will also control the single largest annual on-ramp to sports-betting engagement in the country.

That is not nothing.

And it will probably spark some interest from the TV arms of FanDuel, DraftKings, and the like by 2032. (Assuming the ever-pristine NCAA would even consider an offer from them.)

The bracket you filled out this week — assuming you filled one out — may look very different in six years. Both in terms of who’s playing and who’s paying to show it to you.

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We wanted to thank you for your weekend message on social media that not-so-subtly warned those U.S. broadcasters who aren’t playing ball in covering all the great accomplishments of the current War in Iran. It is about time that someone leading the Federal Communications Commission had the fortitude to clarify that if a federal administration in power can’t keep the people who own and operate the nation’s TV and radio stations from questioning the party line, then those stations need to be taken off the airwaves as soon as possible.

You put it best when you said: “The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves.” Don’t pay attention to those bozos who will point out that the owners of radio and TV outlets have had to pay for their licenses each year with fees to the FCC. And don’t give one thought to their claims of having done all that work to keep the public informed in the event of an emergency.

That’s all just noise designed to distract you, especially after you went down to Mar-A-Lago this weekend to apparently consult firsthand with the Commander-In-Chief about this growing problem.

(Lucky for us that CNN’s Brian Stelter happened to be on the same flight with you out of Fort Lauderdale to ask you firsthand about what you were doing in Florida. Aside from sending out something on your X account on Saturday afternoon.)

You go right ahead and let them know that these “hoaxes and news distortions” will not be tolerated. And certainly, your not-too-veiled threat about broadcasters covering the next elections will lead them to pay more attention to all the absolutely proven rigging and ineligible votes being counted. That 9% trust in “legacy media” can be a lot better if things change right quick. Thank goodness Secretary of War Hegseth knows this too, as he openly roots for David Ellison’s Paramount-Skydance to get its mitts on Warner Bros. Discovery - just as soon as his Dad gets those billions in foreign capital deposited in the bank.

(Then Brian Stelter and all those other “lefty” journos over at CNN will come under the purview of Bari Weiss and her team, who are reshaping CBS News to be a much better news organization! One that is reporting the facts about how America is #winning more than Charlie Sheen in rehab.)

But you know who thought of this long before you were born, don’t you? The 37th President of these United States, Richard Milhous Nixon. Back in 1972, “Dick” Nixon was talking about yanking the TV and radio licenses of The Washington Post Company. (No, not the one that Jeff Bezos is doing a bang-up job with these days, but under the previous owner, Katharine Graham, whose paper was printing all that fake news about that “third-rate burglary” over at the Democratic National Committee’s office at the Watergate.)

Nixon basically had your idea, but he still had the legal tool of “The Fairness Doctrine” that would have made it a lot easier for the FCC to revoke broadcast licenses for not “playing ball”, whoops… we meant “putting out all that fake news.” The doctrine would have been great to have in your fight for making sure everything is right on radio and television. Unfortunately, that liberal snowflake Ronald Reagan had the doctrine abolished in 1987, under your then predecessor at the FCC, Dennis Patrick. They didn’t teach you that in the third grade, did they? Still too much wokeness in the public schools back then.

Of course, Congress tried to fix the matter by codifying the doctrine into law with “The Fairness in Broadcasting Act of 1987.” But again, President Reagan thwarted that brilliant plan with a pesky veto, which Congress didn’t have the votes to override. Hey, maybe you can get your pal Speaker Mike Johnson to bring back that kind of common-sense legislation in the House. Better make it soon, though; those midterms in November are coming up quickly, and who knows what the landscape will be like after the next few months?

Plus, if this whole situation in Iran leads to gas prices looking like egg prices from early last year, then the whole affordability thing might force even more people to give up all their streaming subscriptions and start watching more “free TV.”

One more thing, Chairman Carr. Don’t worry about anyone telling you that you are setting a bad precedent with your weekend message on social media. There’s nothing to worry about from a change in control of Congress this November or the election of a President from a different party in 2028. They wouldn’t possibly follow your lead and decide that all those conservative voices on talk radio need to be silenced by a future FCC. Who could possibly think that anyone would find the likes of Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Dana Loesch, Mark Levin, Dan Bongino, (and all their countless imitators), to be anything less than what real Americans need to hear 24/7 coming out of their radios.

That’s assuming we’ll even have elections later this year or in the future.

Remember, the American people believe that the folks in Washington always know what’s best for them. Plus, all those recently hired ICE agents are going to make solid “poll watchers,” so the situation supports your correct vision of what’s really “in the public interest.”

But Chairman Carr, you know what would really help things out? If you would expedite all those pending media deals that the FCC still has to approve. It will be far easier to get all these broadcasters in line if you finally set up just a few wealthy Republican Party donors to own all the radio and television stations across the country, with none of that crap about having some meaningless ownership cap. More consolidation means fewer people to get behind the message of the day, so perhaps you can get on that right away.

Whew. Seriously, folks—writing the previous nine paragraphs became less of an exercise in sarcasm and more of one to keep from vomiting all over the keyboard before us.

It’s hard to imagine a bigger toady in charge of the FCC. It really is. Carr’s weekend threat to the nation’s broadcasters is so overtly authoritarian that it defies belief, in an already unbelievable time we are living in. Even if there is a fairly low chance that the Commission could actually do anything the Chairman might fantasize about.

We’ve been thinking non-stop about what to label Brendan Carr that would be suitable for our audience's wide range of sensibilities. We were just about ready to give up when the Instagram account at @thealphawomenclub provided the answer with one of their “word of the day” entries.

Pronounced phonetically, the word is “kok-wom-buh-l.”

Defined as (n.) “A walking, talking waste of oxygen who speaks with full confidence and zero brain activity. A completely useless person that spots constant bullshit, repeats it louder, and acts shocked when everyone rolls their eyes.”

That seems about right.

Mr. Carr, you sir, are the very model of a Cockwomble.

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Anastos died earlier this week after being hospitalized with pneumonia. He was 82 years old. He was, as The New York Times once put it with characteristic economy, “the ubiquitous anchorman.”

But what Ernie Anastos really was, in a way that is becoming increasingly rare in local television news, was a star.

Not a celebrity in the tabloid sense, though New York certainly claimed him as one of its own. A star in the older, more specific sense: someone whose presence on screen created an immediate and visceral sense of trust in the viewer. Someone you wanted to watch not just because they were delivering information, but because of who they appeared to be while delivering it. The charismatic anchor — the kind of figure who could hold a market’s attention across multiple decades and multiple stations — is a vanishing archetype in American local television. The economics of the business have made that kind of long-term investment in a single personality increasingly difficult to justify.

Ernie Anastos was perhaps one of the last great examples in the role.

His initial tenure at the anchor desk in NYC was at WABC-TV, beginning in 1978, at the height of that station’s dominance as “Eyewitness News.” Over the next eleven years, he would be one of the key figures in what was perhaps the most talent-laden station ever assembled in the nation’s biggest market.

He would go on to anchor at WCBS beginning in 1989, remaining there until the mid-1990s before eventually landing at WNYW, the Fox O&O, in 2005 — where he would spend the next fourteen years, his longest tenure at any station in the market. Along the way, he became the owner of a group of radio stations in Upstate New York and New England, under the banner of the Anastos Media Group. Up until becoming ill a few months ago, he was still on the air, producing and hosting positive news features for WABC Radio.

Ernie even found time to write a few children’s books, including the story of a young boy who realizes his dream of becoming a TV reporter. His first big scoop is covering the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The book’s title? “Ernie and The Big Newz.”

What strikes us, looking back at his career, is how much the skills that made Anastos exceptional on television overlap with those that make for a successful politician. This is not a coincidence. Both the charismatic anchor and the effective political figure are, at their core, practitioners of the same art: projecting warmth, authority, and approachability to strangers at scale.

Consider what his colleagues said about Anastos in the hours after his death was announced. That he “paired well with every co-anchor they ever put him with.” That he was “always positive” and “never cynical.” That he “knew everybody, and everybody loved him.” That you couldn’t walk into a Greek diner anywhere in New York for a generation without seeing his photograph on the wall.

Having worked with him for a few years in the early 1990s, we found out firsthand that Anastos understood, in a way that precious few broadcasters of any era have, that the relationship between an anchor and an audience is fundamentally a relationship between a person and a constituency. It must be tended to, maintained, and renewed. It requires showing up at community events. It requires remembering names. It requires — and this is where many talented journalists fall short — a genuine pleasure in the company of others that reads as authentic across the distance of an electronic screen.

You cannot fake that quality for forty-plus years, especially in the mega-media metropolis that is New York City. Anastos had it, and New Yorkers knew it.

Local television news is no longer producing many anchors in the mold of Ernie Anastos. The current economic pressures of the business have pushed stations toward shorter (and cheaper) contracts, more rotating in the anchor chairs, and a de-emphasis on the kind of community embeddedness that defined his career. That loss extends beyond simple nostalgia. The charismatic local anchor would at some point be referred to with the shorthand of “the command anchor.” That term identified the style of what an anchor could be in those critical moments of live, breaking news coverage, helping guide the viewer through the most shocking and unsettling of events. Ernie Anastos did just that, time and time again over the years. But just as deftly, he also presented those smaller, more human moments which truly endeared him to the audience.

That is the genuine “X factor” for a TV anchor that so many have never fully grasped.

Anastos’s final public post, published on March 3rd on his social media page, showed him standing in front of the iconic “Superman” Globe at the old Daily News Building in Manhattan. His caption read simply: “Now more than ever we need to promote and protect the truth.” It was, as it turned out, fitting last words from a man who spent his life making people believe that someone on the other side of the screen was looking out for them.

In that, he was among the best we’ve ever seen.

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And what a year it has been.

When we walked out of a working local TV newsroom for the last time early last year, it was the first time we were not employed full-time in five decades. We believed that we needed and deserved the break. But like far too many of our generational peers in this crazy business, we couldn’t go full-on cold turkey.

After all, it is the news business. It is, to some varying degree, like cheap heroin. Once it’s inside your veins, you find that you really can’t live without it. Even if you aren’t working in a newsroom, you are still somewhat obsessed with what happens in one. Perhaps all of them.

What the year has taught us, if nothing else, is that despite our very best efforts, we are not a columnist on the level of the Defector’s Drew Magary. And that is despite our mutual fandom of the ever-frustrating Minnesota Vikings. We keep working on having Drew’s gift of authoring shade that is at the solar eclipse level of being both devastatingly accurate and hysterically funny.

And that man does this after having a catastrophic brain hemorrhage back in 2018.

God bless him--and respectfully, screw him at the same time.

Aside from all that authoring envy, we have managed to pump out nearly 150 items in the past twelve months, averaging about three a week, so we consider that a pretty strong output, given that we aren’t getting paid to deliver all this goodness to you, dear reader. Don’t worry, like you, we find we are paying for way too many subscriptions each month, so we still aren’t planning to charge for “The Topline” anytime soon.

But if you’ll allow us a moment of local PBS station fundraising-like begging here, it would be great if we could grow our subscriber count just a little bit. If you are already a subscriber here, we honestly can’t thank you enough. (Sorry, we don’t have any tote bags available to send you!) Your support means a great deal to us, and we hope you have found value in our dispatches. And maybe at least a chuckle or two.

If you’d like to support our efforts without having to spend a nickel, please consider forwarding this column to anyone you think might enjoy it. Even someone you really dislike and want to clog up their email inbox.

And if you aren’t a subscriber yet, what exactly is keeping you from signing up? Your phony email address is flooded with countless offers from companies for the online discounts you signed up for. Your inbox has too many messages from OnlyFans creators that you just happened to stumble across, and can’t handle one more thing coming in?

Unlike all those heathens, we promise we won’t ever spam you with anything other than what we publish a few times each week. Plus, you can definitely find a few other things worth your time on Substack, where we now publish “The Topline.” Just like every other suddenly out-of-work journalist, it appears. “Going independent” is the new mantra replacing “I’m taking some time between jobs to work on myself.”

Anyway, we wanted to mark the occasion of making it through our freshman year as an independent publisher and to thank you for being part of the journey. We have some fun things planned for our sophomore season, and we hope to continue to be worthy of your time and interest. Certainly, the industry news for the television business shows no signs of being any less insane, any time soon. Same for pretty much all the news we are seeing each day.

Including whatever the hell the Vikings are up to in this off-season.

We’ll be back on Monday with the latest on some matter far more serious than this. Do enjoy your weekend.

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We think every local television station in the nation should take notice of what they are doing.

The event is titled “KXAN Investigates LIVE: The Stories Behind Our Stories.” Scheduled for two hours, the first-of-its-kind event will feature members of KXAN’s Investigative team presenting some of their multi-platform investigative projects and interacting with the audience to give them a look inside how these stories were selected for coverage and then how they came together in the editorial process. The intention, as told to us by Josh Hinkle, KXAN’s Director of Investigations and Innovation, is that the station is “taking the newsroom out into the public and allowing the public to interact with us.”

We were intrigued by the idea as soon as we saw a graphic for it posted on Hinkle’s LinkedIn page. KXAN may have the perfect foundation for holding such an event. The station has one of the most productive investigative teams in the country, and its work has garnered multiple national awards over recent years, including seven national Murrow awards. Not to mention that Austin is a place that can turn out a crowd for this.

Hinkle told us that the station has several UT graduates on staff, and it has worked to develop a partnership with the University’s Moody College of Communication. The “KXAN Investigates LIVE” event has been in the works for several months and will be aimed at both students from the school and the general public. The station has aggressively promoted the event, which will, coincidentally, come just before the start of Austin’s annual South by Southwest festival.

The scheduled program will focus on three examples of KXAN’s recent investigative reporting as part of its “Catalyst Projects.” All of the stories have “true crime” themes at their core. From an examination of serial drownings titled “Beneath the Surface” to an in-depth look at how the state handles death inquests in “A Hanging on Backbone Creek,” the live event is smartly centered on the same kind of true crime storytelling that has fueled TV shows like “Dateline” and “20/20” as well as the most popular genre of podcast serials. (Click on those titles to watch the projects.)

Hinkle confirms that presenting these stories was an intentional choice, not only to help attract a larger audience, but also “to showcase the innovative and immersive reporting that KXAN has been working on.” He stated that the hope is “to get students really excited about journalism in today’s industry.” Adding that “these are not just TV news stories that you have seen for many years. They are projects that have digital docuseries including podcasts, immersive articles, and data interactives.”

KXAN isn’t alone in producing this kind of multi-platform, long-form storytelling. Recently, we’ve been impressed by the investigative and documentary work we have seen from other local stations. Two standouts in the space are Fox O&O KMSP in the Twin Cities, with its “Doc 9” series of documentaries, and Capitol Broadcasting’s WRAL in Raleigh, with its “WRAL Documentaries” series. (Again, those titles link to their online collections.)

As far as we are aware, the extension of the long-form franchise into a live “on stage” presentation is unique to KXAN.

But a television outlet producing a live audience event isn’t without precedent. MSNBC leaned into the space beginning in 2024 with a live event featuring its primetime hosts, including Rachel Maddow, Laurence O’Donnell, and others. Even as the network evolved into its present MS NOW branding last year, it produced another “This Is Who We Are” event that was successful enough that the newly spun-off Versant network says it will be tripling the number of these events going forward, under the banner of MS NOW Live, including a series from Host and Creative Director, Luke Russert.

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to suggest that MS NOW may have been inspired to try its hand in the live event space by the success of its sister Versant network, Bravo. In 2019, the television home of the countless “Housewives of…”, “Vanderpump Rules” and Andy Cohen-hosted franchises held its first “BravoCon.” A three-day event modeled heavily on the iconic annual “Comic-Con” in San Diego (along with countless local and regional clones) that sells out to fans of comics, sci-fi, and Fantasy. “BravoCon” serves as both a money-making event with paid attendees and a content engine that generates programming for the network.

Tonight, in Austin, KXAN won’t charge anyone to attend, but it has used the online service Eventbrite to handle ticketing for the audience at the Hogg Memorial Auditorium. Early indications are that it won’t be an empty room. Josh Hinkle confirms that the event will be recorded on video and, hopefully, result in programming to air on the station’s KXAN+ streaming channel in the future.

Even if KXAN doesn’t make a dime from the production of “KXAN Investigates LIVE,” it will likely see a solid return on its investment in the on-stage event. Both connecting with an audience willing to attend in person and hosting journalism students who can interact with working professionals. It’s the kind of trust-building community outreach that every local television station should consider for the future, in some form or another.

If only because, as the fiction writer P.S. Baber put it, “The stage is a magic circle, where only the most real things happen.”

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That assumption has gone the way of the traveling circus under the big top.

Broadcast television’s audience erosion is no longer news — it has become background noise, the kind of slow bleed that industry veterans cite with the weary detachment of men reading their own obituaries. Morning television, once the medium’s most reliable franchise, now draws roughly half the viewers it commanded fifteen years ago. Prime-time numbers tell a similar story. Ad revenues have followed the audience south, and the broadcast networks — those cathedral institutions of mid-twentieth-century American life — are left standing in a sanctuary that keeps getting emptier.

The industry’s response, for most of that period, has been to try to “out-broad” the broadest. To program louder, bigger, and more aggressively to the middle-of-the-road. In other words, to build a still bigger tent over a still shrinking crowd. It has not worked.

Last week, a must-read article from The Hollywood Reporter’s Andrew Zucker got our attention about what is called “niche-casting."

Zucker’s piece traces the rise of a new class of livestreamed talk programs that have dispensed entirely with the mass-audience fantasy. These are not shows that want to be CNBC or CNN. They are shows that want to be the only thing a freight executive, or a car dealership owner, or a tech industry insider, watches over morning coffee. TBPN — the Technology Business Programming Network, pitched more or less explicitly as Silicon Valley’s answer to Squawk Box — runs three hours a day and monetizes through advertising that, as the show’s president Dylan Abruscato put it, constitutes a “truly unskippable ad read.” When your audience is four thousand passionate obsessives rather than four million indifferent scrollers, the advertiser’s calculus changes entirely.

The quantity of viewers for these hyper-focused programs is not the measure of success. The quality of the viewers is the whole point.

This is not, if we are being honest, a new idea. Trade journalism figured it out long ago. The narrower the vertical, the more captive the reader, the more a quarter-page ad in that vertical was worth to the company selling to that reader. Broadcasting convinced itself it was exempt from this logic. It wasn’t. It was merely insulated from the consequences — for a while.

What the niche-casters have understood is that the internet did not kill appointment viewing. Appointment viewing for someone — for a specific, identifiable, reachable someone — is not only alive but thriving, on YouTube, on X, on LinkedIn, on all the platforms that the broadcast establishment spent years dismissing as vanity exercises. Warner Bailey, whose forthcoming Hollywood-focused morning show grows out of his Assistants vs. Agents social media franchise, told Zucker that audiences are now chasing authenticity.

And live programming, no matter how unpolished it can appear to be, is definitely authentic — and that is the feature, not the bug.

We would gently suggest that broadcast television’s problem is not just that it became too polished. But rather, it became too polished for no one in particular.

Local TV broadcasters sit in an interesting position. A local TV news operation already possesses what the niche-casters are laboriously constructing from scratch: community, specificity, a defined audience with knowable interests. The question is whether those newsroom assets get deployed in the direction of narrower, more targeted, and more genuinely useful content — or whether the answer remains, as it has been for a generation, adding yet another hour of local news with the same ingredients: Some local headlines, interspersed with a story or two from overworked and underpaid journalists, chasing multiple stories each shift, while doing double duty as both reporter and photographer.

At the top of each news hour, follow the directions printed on every shampoo bottle: Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Some local stations have pursued strategies to remix the formula. They range from promising to cover the “news where you live” to “holding the powerful accountable.” Others have pushed all their chips on “super-serving” the weather audience with a forecast of some kind every ten minutes. Sports has become a fifty-fifty bet, with some stations going all in on sports coverage, while others have stopped covering sports altogether. The industry’s consultants, who declared that any sports coverage was likely a waste of time, instead pushed stations to adopt “franchise positions” like investigative or advocacy journalism to differentiate one station from another in each of the nation’s 210 local markets.

And while this has been playing out, someone figured out that there was an audience for shows “micro-targeted” to the groups of people who might really be interested in watching. Maybe what their careers or pastimes were about. Or perhaps what their lives were focused on. And so, the freight executives found their show. The tech founders found theirs. Apparently, the car dealers have found one too.

Then the algorithm on whatever platform they are watching serves up even more of the same topic. The so-called “flywheel effect” takes over, keeping these “niche-casters” powering what, for many, is today’s version of “Must See TV.”

At some point, broadcasting has to ask itself whether it should keep trying to be something to everyone — or focus on getting a smaller, more loyal audience into the tent.

That act might be what saves this circus.

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One night. One hour.

And the media industry, which has a congenital weakness for a good comeback narrative, is treating this like the second coming of Must See TV.

We are not here to be cynical about Bill O’Reilly. Once upon a time, he mattered enormously in both the political and television landscape. From 2001 until 2017, The O’Reilly Factor was the highest-rated program in cable news for 16 consecutive years — a streak with no parallel in the history of cable TV news and likely will never be matched, given what has happened to television since.

He left Fox News in April 2017 under circumstances that remain, depending on your ideological priors, either a cautionary tale about unchecked power or a politically motivated hit job. O’Reilly has consistently denied wrongdoing. Fox News paid out some big settlements and showed him the door. The ratings-dominant era of “The Factor” ended not with a farewell broadcast but with a press release on a Friday afternoon.

That’s just show business. Occasionally, it’s show business—but with a legal rider attached.

It isn’t like O’Reilly has been invisible in the years since. He hosts “No Spin News”, his YouTube and podcast operation that keeps him in front of the audience that has followed him since the Nineties. His books have sold well; a dozen of them have been bestsellers. He is a regular guest on — and this brings us to the heart of tonight’s matter — NewsNation. This Nexstar-owned cable outlet launched in 2020 from the bones of WGN America and has spent the better part of five years trying to figure out exactly what it wants to be when it grows up.

Here’s where NewsNation is right now, and we say this with the dispassion of people who have looked at Nielsen data for a living for far too many years: Status.news reported back in mid-February that the network’s total-day audience averages about 68,000 total viewers, with its advertiser-coveted demographic of adults 25-54 down eighteen percent year over year to a paltry 9,000 viewers.

For context, Fox News averaged just over 2 million viewers in primetime in January. Newsmax, the low-budget ideological disruptor that NewsNation is now openly chasing, routinely clears 300,000 on its top shows. Katie Pavlich, hired as a marquee primetime talent to attract the Fox News-adjacent audience that Nexstar clearly covets, averaged 107,000 total viewers in her first weeks — performing roughly 24 percent below NewsNation’s own overall primetime average.

When your big swing of a new hire underperforms even your typical mediocre numbers, you are in a particular kind of trouble that a one-night Factor revival won’t fix, but it might show you a way out.

Despite its initial branding as “News for All America,” NewsNation has visibly tilted right, staffing up on former Fox News personalities in what everyone working inside the network understands to be an attempt to carve out a lane between Fox and Newsmax in the right-leaning cable news space. The strategy has a certain logic to it. It also has a certain problem: that side of the highway is extremely crowded, and the people who used to live in it have largely moved to streaming, podcasting, YouTube, Truth Social, and whatever Rumble is doing this week. The MAGA media ecosystem in 2026 does not need another linear cable channel telling it what it wants to hear. It has approximately four hundred options for that, most of them free, and unburdened by the overhead of running a cable news operation.

Which brings us back to “Bill O” (as Keith Olbermann, who used to compete in the same hour of primetime on MSNBC, still loves to call him) O’Reilly pointed directly into the camera on Cuomo’s set last Wednesday and saying, with the particular energy of a man who has not forgotten that he once owned this town: “I’m bringing it back. You can’t miss this. Wait until you see the cast that we’ve assembled.” Cuomo joked that it would be “the highest rated ever” and called it “the Everybody Hates Chris show.”

You do have to appreciate Cuomo’s ability to get out of the way of a better story. It is an underrated skill in the circular firing squad, typically seen in primetime on all cable tv news.

Is this a tryout? We would be naive to suggest otherwise, and we did not get to this point in life by being naive. NewsNation needs something. Some might suggest anything, really. O’Reilly still has an audience, scattered across platforms, nostalgic for the era when cable news had a center of gravity. The question is whether that audience — older, habituated to consuming O’Reilly on their own terms via podcast or YouTube, and largely indifferent to what is or isn’t on cable at 8 p.m. on a Wednesday — will make the effort to find NewsNation on their dial.

And yes, we use the word “dial” generationally and without apology.

One strong night from a legacy brand does not a strategy make. The history of cable news is littered with the remnants of channels that believed nostalgia was a business model: CNN’s various pivot attempts, the short-lived revivals, the “reimagined” formats that reimagined nothing except the letterhead. The O’Reilly Factor worked because it was of its specific moment — the post-9/11 media landscape, the Bush years, and the Obama years — and an audience that wanted a combative patriarchal voice to curate the day’s outrages and tell them what to think about them.

That audience has not disappeared. It has just atomized into a thousand smaller streams, each one flowing toward whoever is yelling most effectively on whatever platform their grandson showed them last Thanksgiving.

There is also the not-insignificant matter of the situation for NewsNation’s corporate owner, Nexstar Media, which provides useful background music to all of this. Nexstar is seeking to absorb Tegna in a $6.2 billion acquisition that would reach 80% of U.S. TV households — in a deal that still requires FCC and, perhaps, congressional approval. Not to mention, as all mega media deals seem to require these days, the blessing of the occupant of the White House. (See Paramount, the apparent winner in the crazy chase for Warner Bros. Discovery, for why that last part matters.)

In that context, having a higher-profile cable news operation that demonstrates reach and relevance is not merely a ratings play. It is a key argument to regulators at this critical point, before Nexstar Chairman Perry Sook gets his deal done to own the country's largest group of local television stations, by a wide margin.

Which may explain why NewsNation keeps making moves — Pavlich, O’Reilly, etc., leaning more into the conservative audience — that look less like a coherent programming strategy and more like a channel trying to look bigger than it is, before someone official starts counting too carefully.

None of which diminishes what happens tonight. O’Reilly is a genuine talent, whatever else one thinks of him, and a genuine talent with something to prove and a just-launched war on Iran to discuss, will probably not be the worst hour of television you will watch this week. The Factor format — the no-spin zone, the Talking Points Memo, the pointed interview — was efficient and effective television, and there is no particular reason it cannot work in 2026 if executed by the man who invented it.

Whether he is physically up to doing it five nights a week is a point worth noting. He is fresh off a January hospitalization for what he described on his website as “a hereditary condition involving internal bleeding,”

The question is not whether one night will be good. The question is whether one good night means anything at all in a media landscape where the morning’s most-watched “broadcast” might be a sixteen-second clip on X, and where the person with the most influence over conservative voters announced an entire war on a social media platform he owns.

Bill O’Reilly himself was, in some ways, the original disruptor — the man who dragged cable news out of its anodyne neutrality and turned it into appointment television with a point of view. Unlike his successors at Fox, he also could engage his critics head-on. When “The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart appeared on The Factor, it was some of the sharpest (and humorous) debate ever seen on television. Even O’Reilly would occasionally laugh at the verbal volleying that played out like a U.S. Open center court match.

O’Reilly knows better than most what it takes to hold an audience. He just has to find one that still shows up to watch a show on cable at 8 p.m. to watch.

And of course, he will have to “do it live.”

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Fast forward to this past weekend: the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury (the American branding) and Operation Roaring Lion (the Israeli branding — and yes, they named them separately, because apparently even in wartime there are committee meetings). In the first wave, dozens of sites were struck across Iran’s 31 provinces, setting off a regional conflict that is still very much unfolding across the Middle East as we write this.

The first explosions in Tehran on February 28, 2026, were every bit as consequential as those in Baghdad some 35 years prior. Maybe more so. With one notable difference.

There was no Bernard Shaw in the window.

There was no window, really. What there was, instead, was the fire hose of social media.

President Donald Trump announced the commencement of “major combat operations” not from the Oval Office, not via a White House briefing room, but on Truth Social. Let that marinate for a moment. The President of the United States informed the American public — and the world — that we had entered an active war with a nation of 89 million people via a recorded message on social media. The video clip, posted to his own social network, later amplified across every other platform by the sheer gravity of its content.

X — the platform formerly known as Twitter and currently known as whatever Elon Musk needs it to be on any given afternoon — was flooded within minutes of the first strikes with video clips of unknown provenance, missile-trail footage shot from apartment rooftops, and, because it would not be the modern internet without this, AI-generated imagery of buildings that were never actually hit. TikTok, running its own parallel information ecosystem aimed at younger audiences who could not pick Khamenei out of a lineup twenty-four hours ago, lit up with a hashtag war. Iranian diaspora accounts posted footage of Iranians cheering in the streets. Pro-regime accounts posted footage of mourners. Both were real. Neither told the whole story.

Welcome to our new “war room.”

The contrast with the Gulf War is not merely nostalgic hand-wringing, though we’ll admit a certain amount of that is baked in around here. It speaks to the structural shift in our media consumption — something that has fundamentally changed about how we process catastrophic events in real time.

In January 1991, there was a hierarchy. CNN had the satellite uplink. CBS, NBC, and ABC had their anchors and their graphics packages. The pictures were curated, contextualized, and — for better or worse — filtered through the editorial judgment of professional journalists who had at least some obligation, institutional — if not always moral —to tell you what they knew rather than what they were guessing. Peter Arnett was reporting from inside a country being bombed by his own government, and he was still filing dispatched copy with verifiable sourcing. That was the standard.

The news media may not have always met it, but it existed.

This weekend, the standard was: post first, verify never, pin if it trends. NPR noted that social media platforms were flooded with videos and images of the strikes on Iran, pausing helpfully to note what they did and didn’t actually show. That’s the job now, apparently: a forensic post-hoc assessment of the flood, conducted after everyone has already drowned in it. The Institute for Counter-Terrorism had flagged, back during the June 2025 Israel-Iran confrontation, that TikTok had become a primary vehicle for AI-generated Iranian disinformation — fabricated footage of Israeli cities in flames, deepfaked air strikes on Ben Gurion Airport, imagery portraying Iran as a powerful lion dominating a weakened Israel. That campaign ran for days before platform moderators meaningfully intervened.

There is no reason to believe this weekend was any different, and ample evidence to suggest it was considerably worse in scale.

What’s missing — and this is the part that should unsettle anyone who covers this industry for a living — is the authoritative, on-the-ground eyewitness reporter. The person in the hotel room, with a view out the window. Shaw and Arnett were in Baghdad because CNN got there first and stayed. They were credentialed, embedded in the geography, and, crucially, physically present in the place where the history was occurring. Iran in 2026 is not a country where foreign correspondents are embedded and welcome. The Islamic Republic had been restricting press access for decades; whatever Western journalists remained in-country before the strikes were evacuated or simply went dark almost immediately. The result is that the most consequential military operation since 2003 — described by U.S. military observers as the largest Middle East buildup since the Iraq invasion — is being documented almost entirely by people with smartphones who may or may not be telling us the truth, filtered through algorithms optimized not for accuracy but for engagement.

In 1991, the misinformation problem was that governments controlled too much of the narrative. In 2026, the problem is the opposite. There is no narrative. There are ten thousand of them, simultaneously, and the loudest one wins the algorithm.

Al Jazeera called it “The Truth Social War,” and they weren’t wrong. The information architecture of this conflict has been shaped from the first moment by the platforms and the personalities who dominate them, not by the reporters on the ground who used to do that shaping. The White House shared images of Trump and his national security team monitoring the attack from Mar-a-Lago — because they understand, perhaps better than anyone, that in 2026 the image is the briefing. The optics of command matter as much as command itself.

None of this means good journalism isn’t happening. It is. The wire services are working. BBC, Reuters, and AP correspondents on the edges of this conflict — in Israel, in the Gulf states, in Washington — are filing around the clock. CNN, whatever its recent institutional convulsions, still has infrastructure and credibility in this space. But they are all working around a void at the center. Nobody is in Tehran with a camera, a satellite uplink, and most importantly, the decades of experience in journalism to allow them to look out the window and say: “Something is happening outside.”

Until that happens, the void is being filled by noise. And we should be honest about what we lose when noise is all we have — not just accuracy, though that matters enormously, but the shared experience of witness. In 1991, America watched a war start together, in something close to real time, mediated by people whose job it was to tell us what we were seeing. This past weekend, America watched a war start in a thousand fragmented feeds, each one curated to confirm whatever the viewer already believed, the algorithm making sure everyone got the war they wanted.

Bernard Shaw passed away at the age of 82 in 2022. He had retired from CNN two decades earlier. By then, he’d covered everything from Washington to Beijing to Baghdad. He left CNN after Ted Turner sold the network to Time Warner. You can watch his coverage of the start of the Gulf War on YouTube. Go watch it sometime. Listen to the way he pauses when he doesn’t know something. Or the way he says “we don’t have confirmation of that,” like it actually costs him something to admit it.

Shaw’s retirement came, ironically enough, on February 28, 2001. On the same date, 25 years later, we sure could use someone like him in a hotel room in Tehran. Looking out the window and telling us what is actually happening there right now.

Whatever you might find about it on social media at this moment will be far less illuminating.

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