A brief bit of history: Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher who became a key advisor to the Emperor Nero during the Roman Empire’s “go-go” years around 50 AD. He delivered the famous quote above with irony, because even though he was a Stoic who was supposed to be detached from the trappings of wealth, he was one of the richest men in ancient Rome.

We think today that in our more modern current times, Perry Sook, Chairman and CEO of Nexstar Media, could have used an advisor like Seneca to remind him of the key weakness of loyalty that is purchased. That being in simpler terms, somebody can always come along and pay more for it.

Because that sure seems like what went down this past week when it was announced that Nexstar had renewed its affiliation agreement with CBS for its local stations that carry the Paramount-owned broadcast network. That would be for most of those stations, at least.

Because as FTVLive.com began reporting earlier this week that the famous CBS “Eye” logo was being quietly scrubbed off of Nexstar’s KRQE in Albuquerque, our friends over at TheDesk.Net broke the larger story yesterday that as of this August 1st, the CBS trademark will be coming off of no less than six different Nexstar-owned stations in the following markets:

WSPA-TV 7 in Greenville/Spartanburg, SC (Market #36)

WIAT 42 in Birmingham, AL (Market #45)

KRQE 13 in Albuquerque-Santa Fe, NM (Market #48)

WJTV 12 in Jackson, MS (Market #99)

KXMA 2 in Minot, ND and KXMB 12 in Bismarck, ND (plus satellite stations KXMA & KXMC, all located in Market #147)

Where is CBS headed in these five markets? More on that in a moment.

First, let’s consider the impact of this announcement. The largest owner of local television stations in the nation just lost six of its affiliations with one of the biggest broadcast television networks. How could this happen? Well, as that rich Roman Seneca would have said, had he ever heard the music stylings of Puff Daddy:

“It’s all about the benjamins.”

Rumblings in the industry suggest that Nexstar’s Sook has told the networks his group has been negotiating with that Nexstar will hold the line on “reverse compensation.” That’s the money that local stations pay to the network for the privilege of carrying that network’s programming. It is called “reverse compensation” because for the first four decades of the network-affiliate business model, the networks paid the affiliates to carry their programming and the national advertising contained within those programs.

But when local stations began collecting income from cable and satellite television providers for carrying their signals (alongside other cable networks to which they paid a “per subscriber” rate to carry), the networks wanted a piece of that action and “reversed” the affiliation model. As you might imagine, the amounts involved have increased over the years, and each time an affiliated station renews its agreement with the network, negotiations become increasingly difficult.

For Sook and Nexstar, the whole network relationship issue has become more complicated because of Nexstar’s acquisition of rival group owner TEGNA and its local stations. Industry sources suggest that TEGNA had network agreements that were sending more money back to the networks than Nexstar has been doing. Thus Nexstar has been letting the networks know that it will seek to have all renewal agreements set at the current, lower amounts of “reverse compensation” that Nexstar enjoys.

That might have been fine before the situation in Miami unfolded last year.

When longtime ABC affiliate WPLG-TV, the sole television station owned by Berkshire-Hathaway, tried to play hardball with that network during its affiliation renewal, ABC basically said: “Fine, we’ll take our network programming somewhere else.” Now, this threat didn’t mean much at the time because there were only a few full-power television channels available in each local market across the country. For networks to have coverage across an entire market, they had to be on one of these channels. While there have been a few moves over the years (Indianapolis comes to mind, when CBS left its home of 58 years on WISH-TV 8 in 2015 to move to crosstown rival WTTV 4), most networks have stayed put because there just weren’t any real alternatives to move to.

But the situation in Miami changed all that. ABC moved from its home on WPLG’s Channel 10 to a new location, the digital 7.2 “subchannel” of Miami’s WSVN, the Sunbeam Television-owned station that carries the FOX network on its 7.1 signal. The surprise move put two networks on a single full-power digital television station and left WPLG to forge a future as what Greek lifers in College would know as a “GDI.” (The last initial standing for “independent”; the first two can represent varying emphatic adjectives.)

Apparently, while Nexstar was negotiating “down to the wire” on its CBS affiliation agreement, the good folks at Hearst Television let it be known that they would be just fine with following the Miami example and taking on the CBS network on the so-called “dot-two” digital subchannels of their stations—and just like that, CBS will be moving to those new homes in the following four markets:

WYFF 4.2 in Greenville/Spartanburg, SC (Market #36)

WVTM 13.2 in Birmingham, AL (Market #45)

KOAT 7.2 in Albuquerque-Santa Fe, NM (Market #48)

WAPT 16.2 in Jackson, MS (Market #99)

In North Dakota, CBS will move to the digital subchannels of two stations owned by Fargo-based Forum Communications, along with another station in that smaller group based in Rapid City, South Dakota, which will also pick up CBS on its digital subchannel.

This wasn’t a single market seeing a network affiliation move. Still, one group owner in Hearst made a major play for a group of markets where it will now program two of the “big four” broadcast networks over a single station. Before this, large-group owners had acquired second stations (either outright or through what were known as “sidecar” companies) to operate two major networks.

To simplify this idea: instead of two houses on two parcels, you build one multi-family unit on a single piece of land—one kitchen serving both families instead of two. You can charge each family less rent and still come out ahead, because your costs dropped more than your revenue did.

Given the current ever-declining economics of the local television station business, this “higher density usage” of the over-the-air “real estate” makes a lot of business sense, and there may well be more of it to come.

In fact, late last night, TheDesk.net reported that the ABC affiliation in St. Louis may be heading from its present home on Sinclair-owned KDNL 30 to the 4.2 digital subchannel of KMOV, owned by Gray Television.

All of this will mean that viewers may have to do a little more work to find their favorite network programs at their new home addresses. And that the previous addresses will have to find new tenants, or rather, networks to occupy them. In Nexstar’s case, it will move the FOX network in Albuquerque from co-owned KASA 2 to KRQE to replace the CBS fare. In the other markets, it will elevate the CW—which Nexstar itself holds a controlling stake in—to replace CBS. Worth noting: these stations aren’t changing hands. Nexstar keeps the real estate; it’s just swapping out “the tenant”. It says it will use the opportunity to add more hours of local news programming to those stations’ schedules, which these days is seemingly the default option for filling whatever holes exist in a local station’s broadcast day.

The problem with that plan is that very few resources are typically added to the news department at said local stations to produce all the additional hours of news content. In turn, the overall quality tends to suffer, and there is a lot of repetition in hour after hour of more local news.

But that’s a topic for another column, on another day.

Today, the Roman Seneca might put it this way:

Loyalty is worth exactly what you are willing to pay for it.

Never has that been more true in the broadcast television business than right now.

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The huge television audiences the matches drew to Fox, the English rights holder domestically, and Telemundo/Peacock, the Spanish rights holder, dominated TV viewing for the weeks of matches from June through the final match this past Sunday. (A belated congratulations to Spain and their 19-year-old phenom Lamine Yamal on winning the tournament.)

The final results of the ratings performance for this World Cup will likely be impressive enough to drive negotiations for the television rights for the 2030 tournament up by some eight times from the $485 million that Fox paid for the privilege of airing the 2026 matches. That will put the price tag in the $4 billion range, with the proceeds headed to FIFA's coffers.

We believe it’s safe to say the World Cup has now arrived as a major sports television event, right up there with the various championships, save for the pinnacle of America’s take on football, the NFL’s Super Bowl. For comparison, the World Cup final this past Sunday drew a domestic TV audience of about 36 million across both Fox and Telemundo, compared to the 125 million who watched the Super Bowl on NBC back in February.

All the impressive numbers aside, the other breakthrough of this World Cup was not only the matches but also the countless stories of players and fans from around the globe who came to North America to celebrate what legendary footballer Pele dubbed “the most beautiful game.”

Put another way, football made a huge dent in the news cycle for the past six weeks.

Which leads us back to considering the role that sports play in our daily diet of news and information. From the tongue-in-cheek drama of Scotland’s “Tartan Army” descending on greater Boston and unapologetically drinking it dry to the real-life global drama of the apparent interference by the US President to get a red-carded player of the US Men’s National Team reinstated before their crucial match with Belgium. The World Cup made headlines in the news sections of virtually all news media—and not just the sports sections.

Even on local television newscasts, the World Cup made its way into the rundown of the “A Block” regularly. (Even those insipid live shots from empty venues where watch parties were long over before the late newscasts began…)

The examination of the role Soccer has come to play in the US across all levels of play, from the rec leagues of young children to the fast-growing professional level of Major League Soccer, was on full display. It shouldn’t come as a great surprise to anyone paying attention. From the climbing audiences for those MLS matches, not to mention the nascent but impressive women’s league, the NWSL, to the delivery of the Premier League for NBC Universal or the “Golazo” portfolio of coverage on Paramount’s CBS and CBS Sports networks, soccer/football is now all over American television.

Let us not forget the contribution that AppleTV+ has made to the spread of football into the American consciousness. Its deal to carry MLS games was brilliantly paired to the arrival of its hit comedy series “Ted Lasso,” which happens to be returning next month with a new season. And for our money, AppleTV’s podcast “After The Whistle” with Rebecca Lowe and Brendan Hunt (Coach Beard on “Ted Lasso” and one of the show’s Executive Producers) was nothing less than “must-watch or listen” to every episode.

Their combined joy and agony over the performances of their respective national teams (England for Lowe and USA for Hunt) is the stuff that we think all local TV sportscasters should study. The idea is to capture what ABC’s Jim McKay once announced as “the human drama of athletic competition,” which encompasses not only those who play the games, but also those who witness and support them.

The scores, the stats, and the strategies of every sport matter far less than the storytelling about them does. This is how sports coverage earns its place in the local newscast rather than be the first thing to be cut when stations look to save a few bucks, supported by the old thinking that half the audience doesn’t care about sports—or they already get everything they want from the various platforms of ESPN or any of its countless competitors “on the dial.”

(Though admittedly we haven’t had dials on televisions since the days of “The Honeymooners” and Lucy.)

Nobody understood this better than Roone Arledge, who built ABC Sports and later ABC News on the same idea: coverage that was “up close and personal.” It’s why Jim McKay’s Wide World of Sports open didn’t stop at “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat”—it landed on “the human drama of athletic competition.” The drama was always the point, not the scoreboard.

Our former colleague Todd Summers, the weekend sports anchor at WSPA-TV in Greenville/Spartanburg/Asheville, has built a multiple-EMMY®-winning tradition out of covering the Super Bowl every year without using a second of the game’s actual highlights. It’s Arledge’s philosophy, still working, six decades later, within a local newscast.

That’s what the World Cup did for six weeks, and what soccer has been doing here in the United States in recent years—catching up to a truth the rest of the world already knew. It made you care about a sport you might not have known much about. It focused on the stories beyond the final scores.

As we said off the top, this is why after the past six weeks, we’re all footballers now.

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The coalition includes Arizona, California (whose AG, Rob Bonta, is leading the charge on this action), Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington.

OK, maybe the fact that all of this “baker’s dozen” of top lawyers in these states were all Democratic was maybe even less surprising. (Though, to be fair, not all of those states would be considered Democratic strongholds. Both Arizona and Nevada went for Donald Trump in the 2024 election.)

As California AG Bonta put it in his explanation to Variety.com:

“Giving that much power to one media company would wipe out competition, jack up prices, hurt the quality of content we’re offered, and bring fewer movies and shows to our screens. Combining cable news channels would mean fewer journalists informing our electorate and fewer opportunities for Americans to hear the full breadth of information and opinions on a subject. Consolidation would mean fewer voices speaking truth to power and fewer documentarians, filmmakers, showrunners, producers, writers, and artists shedding light on important stories that too often go untold.”

All of which sounds like it would justify Bonta’s declaration that the deal is “a death knell for the film and TV industry — and for our democracy.”

At least Perry Sook wasn’t labeled as being that anti-democratic by the California AG. His deal to combine Nexstar and TEGNA was only called: “A gut punch to a thriving democracy that relies on an informed population.”

Whatever threat to American journalism that might be concerning about the Nexstar-TEGNA combination doesn’t seem to be as prevalent in the creation of a merged “WarnerMount,” as it is being called in some circles. The whole specter of rolling Paramount’s CBS News together with WBD’s CNN got only minimal reference in Bonta’s remarks.

Obviously, being potentially deprived of some movie titles and the production business that supports them is of more importance in the state where Hollywood lives, even if it is also the one that Jimmy Kimmel calls home.

And we’re not exactly sure which cable news channels Bonta thinks get combined in the proposed WBD-Paramount merger? CBS News is a broadcast-centric operation compared to CNN’s cable & satellite distribution. Both are struggling to reach large audiences with their streaming offerings on digital platforms.

That doesn’t pose the more ominous threat of local markets seeing fewer local news offerings that the Nexstar-TEGNA deal is being scrutinized for. Legal minds we have talked with tend to concur that the legal case that Perry Sook will be fighting for the next year is stronger than the one that David Ellison’s lawyers will be racking up millions of dollars’ worth of billable hours to defend.

Not to mention the millions of dollars that Paramount-Skydance will owe if it doesn’t close on Warner Bros. Discovery by September 30th. After that date, the so-called “ticking fee” is a cool $7 million every single day afterward.

Sheesh, at least Perry is getting to rake in those TEGNA profits as a wholly owned subsidiary of Nexstar at least until he gets a judgment in federal court, which isn’t likely before this time next year.

And we continue to believe that Mr. Sook and his reassembling of the band of heavyweight leadership to complete the full assimilation of TEGNA into “the gigantic Nexstar” have more than one plan for getting the majority of what they want approved by the federal courts.

Kara Swisher’s favorite media columnist, Puck’s Dylan Byers, wrote yesterday that the notable lack of legal concerns expressed by “The Dirty Dozen” of state AGs about David Ellison and his editor-in-chief at CBS News, Bari Weiss, getting their hands on CNN was “both remarkable and wholly unsurprising.” He went so far as to label his main article on the subject: “Let CNN & CBS News Eat Their Cake.”

While we are unabashed fans of Ms. Swisher, it does seem, in reading Mr. Byers’ take on things, that he may be carrying a little water for the much maligned Ms. Weiss and her reign at the former “Tiffany Network.” He posited this opinion:

“Meanwhile, at the risk of drawing the ire of some already voluble critics, any honest assessment of Bari’s tenure at CBS News should be able to discern that, the “Inside CECOT” debacle notwithstanding, she’s not actually transforming it into a MAGA-fied right-wing network. (Seriously, folks, watch it.)”

For the record, Dylan, we actually have. And while it doesn’t appear that CBS News has yet moved to the right of Newsmax, it sure hasn’t improved much in the Weiss era. And we’re still waiting to see what the final product ends up looking like on both the CBS Morning and Evening News, let alone the next season of “60 Minutes.”

But come the fall, that iconic ticking stopwatch may be marking a lot more of David Ellison’s money going out the door to pay for trying to grow his media empire.

And from his vantage point, Perry Sook has got to feel like his much smaller, yet still stalled deal, is something of a bargain.

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Things eventually settled down a few years later, and the AP recognized that it was better to have a wider membership, so it allowed radio stations and networks to join the cooperative and in turn created “the radio wire” in 1941, just ahead of the United States joining the Second World War.

Though, to be fair, radio (and later television) were always treated as a bit less-than-equal members of the AP. They were referred to as “associate members” of the cooperative, which remained newspaper-centric for decades that followed. But radio and television stations would pay subscription fees to have an AP teletype machine on hand to deliver the latest news headlines from around the world to their respective newsrooms.

This was why many radio stations would subscribe to the smaller and cheaper competitor, United Press (renamed United Press International, or UPI, after a 1958 merger) until 1999, when UPI ceased services to broadcast clients, leaving the AP to be the sole provider of news wire service to the nation’s broadcast newsrooms, which it continues to be today.

We were reminded of this history today when we spotted an article from the AP via its LinkedIn page that highlighted the work of a trio of online volunteers known as “Nashville Severe Weather.” In the paragraph highlighting the full article, there was this provocative sentence:

“Their hyperlocal focus allows Nashville Severe Weather to fill a niche left open by the local TV meteorologists who have to report on dozens of surrounding counties.”

Well that seemed to us like a bit of a shot towards our colleagues in the local television station newsrooms that serve the nation’s 26th largest market. So we opened up the full story on the AP’s website.

In his story that is headlined “Prepared, not scared: Dedicated volunteers in Nashville relay calm, straight-talk info during storms” AP reporter Travis Loller opens his profile of the three men behind Nashville Severe Weather with a frothy reference to the television show “9-1-1 Nashville” by suggesting that anyone who has watched an episode of the show could be forgiven for thinking that the place is “constantly beset by tornadoes.”

By the time we arrive at the article’s third paragraph, we get this lofty characterization of Nashville Severe Weather: “It’s a service that evokes the early promise of the internet, before the rise of the influencer.”

Which is followed in the very next sentence with this pronouncement: “This is happening at a time when many people no longer watch local news and weather reports.”

So it is pretty clear that the focus of this profile is to highlight the work being done by the online group and how they are somehow a calmer influence than the trained meteorologists who are seen on local television. No less than the Executive Director of the Tennessee Academy of Physician Assistants proceeds to call out the local TV coverage of severe weather as “a little over the top.” She adds about Nashville Severe Weather: “They’re a little more calm and telling it to you straight,” she says. “They don’t get people overly excited.”

Let’s make it clear here that we have no axe to grind with the folks at Nashville Severe Weather or any other online streaming weather coverage. We absolutely think they have every right to compete for an audience looking for local weather coverage, particularly during severe weather events, which are seemingly increasing in frequency and intensity in many locations, including Middle Tennessee.

And we also know that severe weather coverage has become a mainstay of local TV news outlets, with various approaches to that coverage, ranging from professional to a bit more dramatic than some folks might care for.

Our issue with this AP story is that it wants to put all severe weather coverage on local television in one box, and then proceed to tell us how wonderful this online service is because of its hyperlocal focus on just two most populated counties in the market. “One of the things that Nash Severe can do that even the TV stations have trouble doing is really bring it down to intersection level, school level, church level to let people know where the danger and the threat is.”

That quote is from Tom Johnstone, a veteran meteorologist who joined Nashville Severe Weather after 33 years with the National Weather Service. On the group’s website, their self description contained in the “About Us” section does contain a legal disclaimer from one of the groups’ founders who happens to be a lawyer: “We are not meteorologists. When we call ourselves tweeteorologists or media-orologists, we do not mean we are meteorologists.”

Of course the AP article includes the now seemingly obligatory reference to changing habits of local news consumption, with Kevin Trowbridge, a teacher at Nashville’s Belmont University, highlighting that in his informal survey of students in his strategic communications course, “many are turning to Nashville Severe Weather.” Just to underline his point that for college students, “their source of information is that handheld device.” Trowbridge then adds, “It’s not turning on a TV. And it’s not even looking at a traditional media outlet’s online presence. It’s finding sources that provide them quick information when they need it.”

At this point, we wonder why the four television stations in Nashville don’t just turn off their transmitters and call it a day.

One might suppose that the 47 other counties that are covered by the meteorologists working in their weather departments might have to hope that there are some dedicated weather hobbyists ready to start providing the vital severe weather coverage they might need to be “Prepared…not scared.”

(We’ll note here the irony that the first time we ever heard that phrase was from legendary broadcast meteorologist James Spann down in Alabama. He even used it in the title of his 2021 children’s book about weather than can be scary: “Benny & Chipper: Prepared..not scared.” And if you were looking for an example of a TV meteorologist who always strikes the right tone in telling folks about severe weather, James Spann would be role model that many working in the field would point to.)

To wrap this up on a positive note, let us state again for the record—we are happy to hear about the success of Nashville Severe Weather, as we are for all of the folks who do online coverage of severe weather in a reliable, professional manner. We believe that any way people in the path of the storm can be informed to take the actions needed to protect themselves is worth having. We recognize that social media’s advantage of connecting those people in a community where they can have a dialogue is a good thing.

We don’t think that has to be at the expense of the local broadcasters who have been serving those communities for decades, and do so without any ask for support via subscription fees or patreon donations. Let alone what they have to pay each month to be a member of the Associated Press.

In recent years, a small, but growing number of radio and TV stations have decided to drop their AP service and go without that support in their coverage. They’re not alone, in the past two years, the major newspaper groups of Gannett and McClatchy stopped using most AP content.

After reading this particular offering from AP.org, we can only think of the quote from the legendary comedian Joey Adams, who left us back in 1999.

“With friends like that…who needs enemies?”

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Or as it’s known everywhere else in the world, football.

“Football is Life!” exclaims the character Dani Rojas in the uber-popular Apple TV+ series “Ted Lasso.” The character is played by Cristo Fernandez, an actual soccer player turned actor. (And yes, we can’t wait for the show's return this August either.)

But aside from the brief education we’ve gotten courtesy of Richmond A.F.C. and Coach Beard’s indirect recommendation of the treatise on the sport titled “Inverting the Pyramid,” we still don’t understand the offside call.

We do find it amusing that in almost every match in every football league, there is a moment when the referee draws the outline of a screen and then jogs to the sideline to watch… a television.

They call it the VAR, short for Video Assistant Referee (not video-assisted replay, as we first thought). The VAR enters a soccer match for two types of interventions. The first is when the officials operating the video replay room (conveniently sponsored by the technology brand Lenovo) decide that the on-field referee should review a play for a “clear and obvious error.” This is when a jog to a waiting monitor on the side of the field, or the “pitch” as it is correctly called, is called for.

It’s a similar application to sideline instant replay in professional and college football, which is also known as “going under the hood.” We’re not sure why soccer doesn’t feel the need to have the ref shrouded while watching the replay.

The other way VAR makes itself known is for more factual matters. In cases like the aforementioned offside infraction, the VAR can simply relay the correct call to the referee on the field, via the headset they wear during the match.

But the role of the VAR is itself confusing. It isn’t used to review everything in a match, but supposedly only for reviewing four categories of decisions: Goals, Penalty Decisions, Red Cards (ejections for severe penalties), and correcting the mistaken identity of players receiving either Red or the lesser Yellow Cards.

Of course, the 24 hours leading up to last night’s highly anticipated World Cup match between the United States and Belgium, crossed over from being a sports story to a global news story. The Athletic reported that the President of the United States called the President of FIFA to inquire why the Red Card had been given to star US player Folarin Balogun in the previous Wednesday’s match between the United States and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Let's call this what it is: FIFA blew up its own rulebook because the President of the United States picked up the phone. Balogun's red card wasn't even a real-time call — the referee waved play on, and it was VAR that sent him to the monitor, where he issued the card after watching the replay in slow motion. That was openly questioned at the time. FIFA’s protocol is that the use of slow motion in the review shouldn’t determine the severity of the foul. By that standard, Balogun should have received a yellow card instead of the red one given, which automatically suspends the player for the next game.

Then Donald Trump called Gianni Infantino, by his own admission, because he "didn't think it was a foul," and by Sunday the suspension had evaporated. FIFA's disciplinary committee dressed it up as an independent legal process in which the phone call played no role, but nobody outside FIFA's press shop is buying that explanation. Especially since the last time a red card didn’t result in a one-game suspension was in 1962.

Even before the US team’s 1-4 loss Monday night in Seattle, that phone call became the controversy that washed away much of the global goodwill generated by three weeks of World Cup matches played in stadiums across major cities in the United States.

The US will now watch the rest of its own World Cup, played on its own soil, without its national team on the field.

You might understand why other nations, far more soccer-crazed than we are, might feel some sense of justice in the outcome of this particular Monday’s events. That’s not the fault of the team itself, though the consensus is that the USMNT played far below the level they needed to challenge the higher-ranked Belgium team.

The other loser may turn out to be Fox Sports, which had been riding a wave of record viewership for its World Cup coverage. The network’s price tag this year was only $485 million for the rights to carry the English-language coverage of the 104 matches, divided between Fox’s broadcast network and its FS1 cable sports outlet. (The Spanish-language coverage is carried in the US via NBCUniversal’s Telemundo network, both on broadcast and on NBCU’s Peacock streaming app.)

When you compare that to the likely price tag of $1.5 billion to air the 2030 World Cup here (or even to the $2.25 billion that Fox pays each year for NFL rights), this year’s well-received World Cup coverage was already a blockbuster of a bargain.

It will likely still be considered that — when the final match ends in the New Jersey Meadowlands on July 19th.

But likely with fewer viewers than anticipated, given what transpired over the past couple of days.

As a friend who lives “across the pond” put in a half-joking message to us: “Leave it to the ugly Americans to tarnish the beautiful game a bit.”

We defended our nation by reminding our "Eurotrash friend" that we invented trash-talking here in the good old USA, and that we were just getting warmed up.

Turns out we didn't need to. We've got a guy who calls the ref's boss.

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Hyperscaling, as you might guess, is the verb applied to what is known as hyperscale computing. In the IT world, hyperscale computing is “the ability of an IT architecture to seamlessly scale (grow) computing, storage, and networking resources to meet massive demand.” Hyperscaling is at the foundation of modern cloud computing and, in turn, AI. Put more directly, it is the idea where, instead of building or upgrading a single machine, providers add thousands of servers to a distributed network.

Hyperscaling is really just the tech world’s term for what civilians might mean by something going from the proverbial “zero to one hundred” in no time at all. The tech management philosophy that springs from this (also known as the Bari Weiss school of management) is encapsulated in the pithy phrase: “Move fast and break things.”

Speaking of the broadcasting business, which is what we do here, we think of the current poster boy for hyperscaling, Nexstar Chairman and CEO Perry Sook. As you surely know by now, his argument for the future of local television is that, to survive the battle for the future of media against tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple, it has to get bigger.

It has to hyperscale.

Mr. Sook has taken to various outlets lately to make his case for growth and, in turn, to get the approval needed to basically end-run any current federal regulations that would require him to limit his company’s growth by acquiring more local television stations. That’s the current legal purgatory he finds himself in with the acquisition of rival group owner TEGNA. And it appears that the fight is headed for a federal courtroom in roughly a year from now.

In other words, Nexstar tried to move fast, and it broke things.

Now, TEGNA is operating as a separate, but wholly owned subsidiary of Nexstar Media Group. It has a new CEO and C-suite of officers as it continues to operate a portfolio of 64 local TV stations in 51 markets across the country. The acquisition of TEGNA by Nexstar was approved by both the FCC and the Department of Justice. But it turned out that a group of state Attorneys General had filed a motion to block the already-closed deal.

So now, the whole mess will likely be sorted out in a federal courtroom, and that won’t happen until sometime in the summer of 2027.

Meanwhile, Perry Sook isn’t showing any signs of worry. He made a bit of news this week when it was reported that he bought nearly 2 million dollars worth of Nexstar stock with his own money. The purchase puts Sook’s holdings in the company he founded at just shy of 900,000 shares, worth roughly $160 million. He and his wife “indirectly control” roughly another 976,000 shares through a holding company (“PS Sook Ltd.”), which would be valued at an additional $174 million.

In other words, he definitely can afford the purchase.

The buy did help move the stock off its recent 52-week lows; it gained nearly 5% in trading after Sook’s purchase was reported and closed on the last day of June at $178.59. Given that, over the last year, NXST shares traded above $250 per share at their peak, industry analysts would note that it was a bargain to buy.

(We will take a moment to remind you, dear reader, that this reporting should not be taken as financial advice of any kind. Based on our current 401(k) investments, we are the last people you should look to for any financial wisdom.)

Speaking of wealthy folks making investments in media, allow us to direct your attention to a purchase on the radio side of the broadcast industry. David Hoffmann, who controls the Hoffmann family of companies and last year bought a controlling interest in Lee Enterprises, a major newspaper publisher that owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has purchased the six St. Louis radio stations owned by Audacy, Inc. That group includes the heritage 50kw AM station, KMOX.

It’s a purchase of local interest for Mr. Hoffmann. The billionaire founder of DHR Global, the world's largest privately held executive search firm, Hoffmann grew up in Washington, Missouri, just 50 miles west of St. Louis. Among the “family of companies,” Hoffmann Commercial Real Estate has considerable holdings near its current home, in nearby Augusta, Missouri. He stepped down as CEO of the Hoffmann family of companies in 2022, because “my wife and I wanted more time to spend on our investments in Augusta.”

Whatever Hoffmann’s motivation is to grow his media holdings in St. Louis, the transaction removes Audacy, the nation’s second-largest radio company, from the country’s 25th-largest market. Audacy, like most major players in the radio business, has had a tough financial time since its 2017 merger with CBS’s radio stations division. (It was known as Entercom back then; it changed its name to Audacy in 2021.) Now the company is privately owned, with Soros Fund Management having a controlling interest.

Audacy isn’t alone in struggling with the business of owning and operating a lot of radio stations. Its portfolio of 220 stations (before the St. Louis sale) was built beginning in the “go-go” years of the 1990’s, following FCC deregulation on how many radio stations a single company could own. At that time, the company followed the rush to acquire as many radio stations as possible, following the lead of Clear Channel Communications. Clear Channel became iHeartMedia in 2014, now the nation’s largest radio station owner with more than 850 stations in its roster,

It was the hyperscaling era for radio, long before the term was coined.

So the question we’re pondering is this: Does the purchase of an entire local market of radio stations from a large group owner like Audacy by a well-funded local owner like David Hoffmann represent the beginning of a sea change in the broadcasting industry — or is it just a “one off” type transaction that brings in some quick cash to a large owner like Audacy who could use the cash, especially if the buyer was willing to pay a decent price for the properties to go along with its ownership of the major local newspaper? (As of this writing, we haven’t seen the price that Hoffmann paid for the radio stations.)

All that brings us to the week’s other big media news, the announced spin-off of NBCUniversal by owner Comcast. The new NBCUniversal will include ownership of the NBC television network and the NBC-owned stations. And while, at first glance, it might appear that Comcast's move supports the view that this is another example of an anti-hyperscaling trend developing, there is strong belief amongst the financial community that separating the two companies makes the new NBCU a target for acquisition.

Or the split could free up NBCU to be an acquirer. Maybe bringing its just-spun-off cable networks, now known as Versant, back under the same company-owned roof (though not necessarily under the same physical roof at 30 Rock in NYC). Then there is the not-entirely-crazy scenario that NBCU could consider going on its own local station-acquiring spree, and buy up any number of current local NBC affiliates.

After all, if Perry Sook is successful in his quest to hyperscale his company’s ownership of local TV stations beyond whatever toothless regulatory limitations may be on the books, why couldn’t a TV network owner do the same?

Because when it comes to hyperscaling, maybe those 1990s Pringles commercials put it best:

“Once you pop, you can’t stop.”

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“To do do, down dooby doo down down. Comma, comma, down, dooby doo down down…”

Sedaka’s tune seemed to be the soundtrack our subconscious wanted to attach to the big breaking news in the financial world. Comcast will split itself into two companies. The move will place its NBCUniversal media holdings into a separate company, which will include the NBC and Telemundo television networks, the Peacock streaming business, Universal’s movie studios and theme parks, and also the various European holdings under the Sky brand.

Comcast will return to its roots as primarily the nation’s largest broadband (also known as cable) services provider, while adding wireless services to its consumer-facing Xfinity brand. Comcast will hold nearly 20% of the new NBCUniversal for some period. The deal, expected to close in less than a year, will result in current Comcast shareholders receiving stock in the newly spun-off media company, which will be known as simply “NBCUniversal.”

This will make the three largest companies in the media/entertainment sector look remarkably similar over the next 12 months or so. Disney has television networks (ABC), various movie studios, and, of course, a few theme parks amongst its holdings. Paramount/Skydance will have a similar portfolio, if and more likely when it closes on Warner Bros. Discovery. That will include television networks (CBS), various movie studios, but notably, no theme parks.

But while Disney and Paramount will hold various cable networks (like ESPN for the former and CNN for the latter) within their portfolios, NBCUniversal will emerge from its Comcast ownership unencumbered by those declining businesses. Comcast spun off its cable network group, including MSNBC (rebranded as MS Now), CNBC, and others, into a separate business known as Versant earlier this year.

The piece that will make the new NBCUniversal the most different from its two main rivals will be outside of the United States, and it’s this part of the split between the legacy cable operator and its various media holdings that we find the most interesting part of today’s announcement.

We’d speculate that most people don’t know a ton about Sky, which is technically named Sky Group Limited. The UK-based company is Europe’s largest media company and the largest pay-TV provider. It was Comcast Chairman Brian Roberts’ consolation prize when he dropped out of 2017’s bidding war to acquire Fox from Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch had held nearly 40% of Sky since its founding as the offspring of the 1990 merger of pay-TV rivals Sky Television and British Satellite Broadcasting into BSkyB, which eventually dropped the two Bs to simply be known as Sky. Murdoch would eventually sell his Sky holdings to Comcast in 2018.

In the 1990s, direct-to-home satellite providers were booming. Seen as the first real viable alternative to cable TV for delivering all the channels that weren’t available from terrestrial broadcasters, Sky grew in Europe at the same time DirecTV did here in the U.S. That included swallowing up rivals as small satellite dishes began to dot the landscape.

For its part, Sky is a much larger media company than its US-based cousin. Sky operates more like a broadcast network in that it produces a large quantity of original programming, including coverage of the very popular Premier League in the football (soccer) crazy UK, along with F1 racing and other major sports. It also operates a large news network, with Sky News rivaling the BBC in the 24-hour news business.

All of which might explain why Comcast chose to put Sky into the soon-to-be-separate NBCUniversal portfolio. It is a major content acquisition and production company, but it is also a major distribution and infrastructure provider, similar to what the newly slimmed-down Comcast will be. Color us a bit intrigued that Sky didn’t stay with Comcast.

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Dealbook newsletter from The New York Times speculates on what deals might be ahead for the newly split Comcast and NBCU. He suggests that NBCU could be a target to either do some hunting for acquisitions like AMC or Starz, or NBCU could become the hunted, and be eyed for being taken over by the likes of Netflix, Apple, Amazon, or even Disney itself.

Could one company own two broadcast networks, such as ABC and NBC, in the United States? Well, if one company can own two local television stations affiliated with two different networks, you have to wonder what the logic would be to prevent that on the larger network level?

On the call with investors this morning, Chairman Brian Roberts was asked if the move to split Comcast from NBCU was a step toward potential strategic transactions for either company. His response: “absolutely not.” But given the current penchant for consolidation in the media business, we don’t believe that anything is beyond the possible these days.

In early trading on the stock market, Comcast (CMCSA) shares were trading at least 10% higher. The stock has been, like much of the media sector, pretty stuck in neutral for the past few years. It will be interesting to see what else transpires throughout that sector as we count down the next 12 months.

Back in 1975, when we were starting our broadcasting career by spinning records on the radio (and yes, it was still AM radio) we were informed by the late Casey Kasem on his eponymous “American Top 40” weekly countdown that Neil Sedaka had first recorded “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” as a single in 1962. It would top the charts, reaching number one in August of that year. The 1975 remake would only reach the No. 8 spot on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart.

But that was better than another remake of the song, done just three years earlier in 1972. That version never made it past the 28th top spot on the Hot 100 chart. A bit of a surprise, given that the artists were being seen weekly at that point. The artists? That would be television’s “The Partridge Family.”

As Casey would always say at this point in a musical backstory: “Now…on with the countdown!”

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The Apple story was pretty easy to tell on the surface level. The maker of iPhones and Macs raised its prices on most everything it sells, with the exception of iPhones, the company's best-selling product. The reason for the price hikes? Apple’s outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, blamed the worldwide memory chip shortage on the meteoric rise of AI-supporting data centers, seemingly everywhere.

OK, seems simple enough. But maybe this isn’t a general interest story. Maybe it’s just another business item that perhaps warrants pulling in an AP story for the website and letting the network handle this one?

But hold on, is this a story that the audience might be interested in? Given that we have seen local TV newscasts dutifully cover every announcement of a new iPhone or the recently announced upgrades to the Siri assistant that is built into every iPhone, and whether those AI-powered features represent a larger story in Apple’s lagging in the artificial intelligence race?

We saw many of those stories on local newscasts we checked in on.

Again, we would argue that the fundamental topics of these stories, all centered on the same company, one of the world’s largest, are telling of a larger struggle in every local newsroom. Figuring out what stories actually matter to the audience and delivering those in a manner that makes people want to consume the newscast in some form, on some platform.

The Apple price increase story has a fair number of angles. The stated reason for the move is that memory prices have skyrocketed as the chips have gone into short supply. Is it true that as of this article’s publication, there is only one significant memory “fabrication” plant in the entire United States—and that single Micron Technology plant in Virginia generates only two percent of the worldwide supply of memory chips? Plus, wasn’t there a recent government plan to address this problem?

Yes, yes, and yes.

The CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law by former President Joe Biden in 2022. The approximately 280 billion dollars allocated by the bill included over 50 billion targeted towards “the manufacturing of semiconductors” here in the United States. What has happened since? To directly quote the Wikipedia page on the Act: “…these projects are faced with delays in receiving grants due to bureaucratic hurdles, shortages of skilled workers, and congressional funding deals that have limited or cut research provisions of the Act by tens of billions of dollars.”

There are new semiconductor manufacturing plants, known specifically as “fabrication plants” or just “fabs” by the tech world, under construction. But getting from breaking ground to producing chips at volume takes years, and projects to bring new “fabs” online won’t be completed until 2027 at the earliest.

Until then, the U.S. is at the mercy of large semiconductor makers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Samsung Electronics. And of course, prices for their products have been impacted by the on-again, off-again, and back-on-again imposition of tariffs.

We’re reminded here of Ben Stein’s hilarious role as the economics teacher in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” who is doing the deadpan roll call and asking “Bueller?…Bueller?…Bueller?” If you’ve seen the movie (and what is wrong with you if you haven’t), you’ll recall that in the next scene, we see Stein’s classroom, where he is lecturing about the effectiveness of tariffs with the dialogue that includes: “Anyone..anyone? Raised or lowered tariffs? Raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.”

Given the frozen teenage faces that director John Hughes intercuts with Stein’s lecturing, the same faces that anyone who ever sat in a high-school classroom has made, it is no wonder that a local TV newscast might avoid this kind of economics story.

But given the real-world reality of Apple raising prices on its products, just before the back-to-school buying spree gets underway in the coming weeks, this development would even qualify for some coverage under the heading of consumer news. Perhaps even more so, because Amazon’s Prime Day sales event, currently underway, still has most of the same Apple products either at the original (lower) prices or possibly on sale at their lowest price this summer.

Perhaps you are thinking of the inevitable defense to why this story didn’t make your local news last night: “It’s not really a local story. It doesn’t impact that many people in the community.” Well, that might seem the case, but we’d counter by asking just how many people in the community were impacted by the random crime event or vehicle crash that was probably on your local newscast last night?

By example, we’ll offer up what we saw on our local Fox O&O’s newscast last night after the coverage of the USA vs. Turkiye World Cup match. A Breaking News animation alert came on the screen, and the anchors delivered the news that a single-engine private plane had crashed four hours earlier at an airport some two hours south of the Twin Cities, near Rochester, Minnesota. The 74-year-old pilot, the single occupant of the aircraft, had died at the scene, but there were no other injuries and no other damage to any structures near the airport. Those were all the details available at the time.

The anchors then made the jarring pivot — to return to covering the World Cup, and a small watch party with local people enjoying the game. A story, based on the daylight in the reporter’s stand-up, was clearly recorded before the end of the match that had just concluded with a disappointing, yet relatively meaningless loss.

Of course, the small airplane crash is a news story. But given the facts available, including the location being hours away, in a completely different television market, did it really impact that many people that it should have warranted being the breaking news lead story for the significant audience coming off the primetime World Cup match?

With no other facts known at the time, we will state with some confidence that Apple’s price hikes would be of more interest than the “Breaking News” of the small plane crash hours away. And for the record, no—we wouldn’t have led the newscast with either story.

Our point is this: Economics stories might not seem like the flashiest stories of any given day. But in most people’s worldview, the whole issue of “affordability” is a daily concern. Like the completely disengaged faces in the movie classroom, you may not need to know the specifics of the significance of “The Smoot-Hawley Act.” Still, you definitely care about what is going on with the cost of everything, every single day.

And that should be reported more in every single newscast.

A final note about that scene in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” We recently saw an interview with Ben Stein in which he tells the story of how John Hughes asked him to step in as the teacher in the classroom for the scene in the movie! Stein had just been on the set, visiting a friend who was a producer on the film, when Hughes noticed his distinct voice and asked if he’d like to be the unseen voice of the teacher.

Stein jumped at the chance and so entertained the cast and crew on the set that Hughes decided to put him on camera in what became an unforgettable scene in the now 40-year-old comedy film. (It was released in June of 1986.)

Oh, and he improvised his entire dialogue for the scene. No script, no pages. He just adlibbed the entire thing.

“Anyone? Anyone?”

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Now this was back in the pre-internet days, and part of the appeal of watching SportsCenter for its many fans was actually learning who won and lost in any given sport, on any given evening. To that end, SportsCenter anchors prided themselves on setting up the inevitable highlights with a carefully crafted storyline that usually didn’t give away the game’s ending. The final score was revealed in the graphic that immediately followed the highlights. (This had been the format of ESPN’s nightly flagship show since it had debuted with the network’s launch in 1979.)

According to Eisen and Cohn’s recollections, the news announcing that “the ticker” would be airing during editions of SportsCenter was not greeted with much enthusiasm by those who appeared at the anchor desk. Many of them believed that this ticker would “give away” the story of games long before they would be shown during SportsCenter telecasts.

(We would note that there was an equal lack of enthusiasm some years earlier when the network debuted the ticker’s predecessor, known internally as “the 28/58 updates,” which was the airing of sports scores at the bottom of the screen, twice each hour at :28 and :58 minutes past each hour. We happen to know this because we were part of its launch during our time in the 1980s working at the “World Wide Leader.”)

Tickers had become common on 24-hour news channels at the time. CNN had featured one since the 1992 Gulf War. So, ESPN decided to make them a persistent feature of the sports network’s programming. A reminder to the younger members of our audience that we are talking about a time before everyone was getting scores and then video highlights delivered instantly to the phones in their pockets.

Rich Eisen recounted how he went into a manager’s office at ESPN to say he thought putting this ticker thing on was a bad idea, especially if it was going to air during SportsCenter editions. He was apparently given a few minutes to present his case, only to be told that the ticker was a “done deal” and more or less to show himself out. (He would be told he could show himself out of the network a few years later, when he would join the new NFL Network as its first on-air hire.)

We’ve been thinking about this story ever since hearing it with this question in mind: In an age of always-available information at the tap of a finger, via countless devices, have TV’s on-screen “tickers” outlived their usefulness?

That question could be followed by perhaps the even larger one: Is there too much crap on the television screen, especially during newscasts (yes, even sports-centric ones)? Morning news seems to be primetime for tickers, displaying everything from news to last night’s sports scores to the morning commute times. The ultimate display of this visual excess can be found every day on Bloomberg Television. It is that network’s attempt to emulate the company’s ubiquitous Bloomberg Terminal that sits on the desk of every financial trader, much like the old ticker-tape machines once did.

The timing of this query isn’t just from listening to Eisen’s conversation with his colleague, Cohn. No, we have been pondering the question for a few days since watching the various explanations of why they called it a “ticker-tape parade” in New York City, during the celebration of the city’s latest heroes, the Knicks as NBA Champions.

In case you don’t know the history, at the beginning of the 1900s, Wall Street financial types received stock quotes telegraphed from the floor of the stock exchange via a mechanical device that punched out the information on a long ribbon of paper. This was known as a “ticker-tape.” Each day produced a significant quantity of the stuff, and at some point, for some celebration in the streets of Lower Manhattan, somebody had the bright idea to throw it out the windows, raining down on those being honored.

Technology replaced the ticker-tape machines with electronic displays by the 1960s, and so for the occasional parades in the “canyon of heros” for everyone from the astronauts to the Yankees after winning a World Series, the paper tape would be replaced with shredded bits of paper.

We’d argue that the ticker displays on television newscasts should follow their paper tape predecessors and become relics of the past.

Given the amount of information that is now displayed during a typical TV newscast, including the multiple instances of on-screen branding that typically appear, what does a line (or two) of text marching across the bottom of the screen tell you that the newscast isn’t going to tell you — or that you didn’t already know about from the incessant pinging of your smartphone throughout the day? It isn’t like the on-screen ticker is that well curated in many instances.

Maybe we should concede here that tickers can have a place during breaking news or severe weather situations. A ticker (or “crawl,” as some newsrooms prefer to call them) is a definite plus, if only to deliver crucial information continuously throughout the event.

But we’ve seen too many tickers labeled “Breaking News” featuring outdated or overblown headlines.

We’d go so far as to say that one of the best possible use cases for the long-promised “NextGenTV” digital television format (aka ATSC 3.0) would be to allow viewers to see a newscast with or without tickers displayed on the screen non-stop. This idea doesn’t really have to wait, it could be done right now utilizing a “dot-two,” or other numbered “digital subchannel” from any local TV station.

Of course, that would require the bandwidth currently occupied by one of the countless recycled television filled channels called MeTV, RetroTV, COZI TV, etc., Or the occasional home shopping channels that are still in business.

Honestly, we don’t expect this idea to take off anytime soon. Ditching the ticker seems like a bridge too far in 2026. Especially as some local stations actually make money from their ticker presentations, usually by attaching the logo of one of the countless personal injury law firms. Or some other local business.

Like lemmings to the sea, the headlines will likely keep marching across the bottom of the screen.

Before we sign off for today, congratulations to the aforementioned Linda Cohn on the announcement of her retirement from ESPN this week. She’ll do her final shows this Friday, June 26th, after being recognized as anchoring more SportsCenter shows than anyone else. The tally is over 5,500 in her nearly 34 years with the network. In a business that was predominantly male for so many years, it’s nice to see a woman sign off holding that record.

Wonder if it will earn a spot on that night’s ticker?

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Obviously, we could pontificate at length about NBCU’s Anzio Williams saying “the quiet part way out loud” about Comcast donating to the controversial White House ballroom before a gathering at the IRE conference in Maryland. Whether his comments will rise to a Scott Pelley-level event remains to be seen. Still, many eyes are waiting to see if Mr. Williams’ use of the “my comments were taken out of context” defense will be enough to save his job as EVP of “Talent, Strategic Initiatives and Team Impact” for the NBC Owned Stations.

But aside from the news in the news business, we thought we’d share some content we consumed over the past week that you might enjoy to fill some time during what we hope will be a great summer weekend ahead. (As always, we’ve included helpful links to our selected offerings where possible.)

First on our list would be the documentary titled “Lorne” that is now available to stream on YouTube or via your Peacock subscription. (Should we still say “stream” versus just saying “watch”? Seems like a dated reference somehow.) “Lorne” would be Mr. Lorne Michaels to those of us who have only watched the television show he has helmed over the past 51 seasons. The documentary seeks to bring to the big screen a profile of the enigmatic Michaels. (“Lorne” was a feature film release before landing on Peacock.) The film builds on the terrific biography by Susan Morrison, published last year. If you haven’t read it, it is out in paperback and a great read.

The film version of “Lorne” is a great watch, even if you may not be a huge fan of “Saturday Night Live.” But for anyone who has ever produced anything on television, regardless of what level, the look inside the process that brings a live 90-minute network show together in just one week is definitely must-see TV.

While you’re on Peacock, you might also take in some episodes of “30 Rock,” one of the funniest shows ever, especially knowing from the “Lorne” documentary that Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin had the roots of the latter’s character “Jack Donaghy” based in the real-life Michaels.

But if you might favor something that you could just listen to while perhaps lounging in the sun near a body of water, then allow us to recommend the Tuesday, 6/16 edition of the Pivot podcast from Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. We’re unabashed fans of both hosts across their separate mini media empires. Still, the combination of the two just talking about everything from the UFC spectacle on the White House lawn to why Fox buying Roku makes a ton of sense.

While you’re at it, you might as well listen to today’s episode as well. Kara and Scott usually nail an alpha podcast twice each week. They are in “heavy rotation,” as we used to say in our days of playing hit records on the radio (that being waaaaaay back in the day.)

If you are tired of reading all the sudden items appearing about why the Nexstar-TEGNA merger, currently in legal purgatory, must be allowed to be fully implemented, lest local journalism as we know it will come to an end, then let us recommend a couple of other things you might want to read.

On our bookshelf at the moment is the very interesting and best-selling title, “How to Rule the World” from Stanford University student Theo Baker. The book is a revelation into the world within that storied academic institution and how it produces the “dweebocracy that sets the agenda for the planet” according to the New York Times Book Review. To us it was just a fascinating read that we’d recommend to everyone.

If you need a shorter item to peruse poolside, we’d point you to this article in The Hollywood Reporter titled “What Hollywood Can Teach Harvard.” It’s a fascinating look at a class in storytelling as a political tool, held at another storied academic institution. The list of guest speakers is a who’s who of famous creators from Hollywood and their key lessons are summarized by Marc Adelman who held the class at Harvard’s “Institute of Politics.” Even if you have zero interest, you’ll take something away from reading this. Trust us.

While you are on THR’s site, you might also want to read up on Hollywood’s hottest topic this morning, just why did Netflix cancel its series The Boroughs, before the show’s premiere week was even over. You could also watch the series, knowing that there will be only the one season to enjoy. (A fate reaching far too many shows in the uber-competitive business of streaming TV.)

Hopefully we’ve given you some decent suggestions on how to spend some time before getting back to the grind next week.

We’ll be back to it then as well, and look forward to seeing you back here.

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Well, for starters, it’s fried. In the same machines that fry the chain’s amazing French fries. It contains a filling similar to that of an actual apple pie, if that pie were made by a giant food corporation and filled with not-quite-all-natural ingredients.

And it’s damn delicious.

At least it was when we last had one. Which turns out to be in the early 1990s, when McDonald’s moved to having baked apple pie pockets on the menu. It was done, “for health reasons,” the chain said at the time. Apparently, on the occasion of the nation’s 250th anniversary of being founded, health considerations may be briefly suspended so that said pies can accompany orders — even to places like the White House.

Listen, we think a lot of things from the 1990s are worth reconsidering and appreciating for their true greatness. One of those things is the television program Inside the NBA.

Technically, Inside the NBA debuted in 1989, but it was 1990 that Ernie Johnson, Jr. took over the role of hosting the program, so that’s the decade we place the show’s true birth in. And some 36 years later, Inside the NBA, because it moved to a new network and due to that move, the show was able to wrap up its greatest season ever.

Inside, as we’ll shorthand it for the rest of this column, was born when Turner Network Television acquired its first NBA contract to televise games in the 1989-1990 season. From inauspicious beginnings, the show has grown into what many now call “the best studio show in sports television.” The additions along the way of opinionated and outspoken NBA greats Kenny “The Jet” Smith in 1998, Charles Barkley in 2000, and finally Shaquille O’Neal in 2011 have made the show truly “must-see TV” not just for basketball fans, but really any sports fan.

Yes, Inside has all the trappings of every sports-centric studio show. But the standard-issue highlights and analysis take a back seat to the personalities and one-upmanship of the participants. And giving credit where it’s due, host Ernie Johnson plays it all with a deftness and amusement that gives the proceedings an insouciance that would be perfect, even if it didn’t come with an occasional seriousness and gravity that gives the program a total range that is surprisingly impressive.

That network move we mentioned before was on full display this past NBA season. In getting itself ready to be sold to the highest bidder, WarnerBros Discovery, which owns TNT (and all the former Turner networks, including CNN) lost its contract to carry NBA games and it looked like “Inside the NBA” was headed for the shelves of television history. But in one of the smarter moves to ever be made in Bristol, Connecticut, the headquarters of the self-proclaimed “Worldwide Leader” of sports television, ESPN, Inside The NBA was drafted to be part of that network’s NBA coverage.

The truly inspired part of ESPN’s pickup of the show was to simply “not screw around with it.” Inside is still produced by TNT Sports in its Atlanta studios, and delivered to ESPN pretty much the same as it was in previous years. The on-camera folks all returned and what makes the show great is still on full display before, during and after each NBA game that ESPN airs.

And because the ESPN schedule includes the NBA Finals, which airs on the sister Disney-owned ABC television network, Inside the NBA got to do something this season that it never has been able to do before: Be live at the sites for each of the final games that determined the league’s champion.

It was some glorious stuff to watch. On top of the games that were pretty good as well. (Especially if you happened to be a Knicks fan.)

We share this appreciation of what could just as easily be dismissed as “another studio-based sports highlights show” because we think it has some lessons to teach about how to create any version of “must see TV” on any scale.

Inside may be the best example of what we were talking about in our last item here discussing Quarterbacks versus Teams at the anchor desk. While “EJ” as fans know Ernie Johnson is called, could be considered “the quarterback” of the show, he sets up and questions each of the other three stars like a conductor cueing sections of a symphony orchestra. His knowledge and love of the game are evident, but so is his understanding of the personas he is working with. The foursome is so strong that they added doing studio work during the annual NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament back in 2011, when Turner Networks began sharing “Final Four” coverage with CBS.

It is just as watchable when they are talking about college basketball rather than the pro game. Kudos as well to the production team behind the broadcast for being smart enough to roll with whatever the on-camera folks want to do and creating moments around things as simple as one of them having to take an unscheduled trip to the restroom during a commercial break.

Also, as the TV music aficionados that we are, a shout out to the memorable Inside The NBA theme frrom film composer and former frontman for the band “Yes,” Trevor Rabin. Airing for well over two decades, it is among the all-time great sports-on-TV themes. Even The New York Times said so. (ESPN has kept it as well.)

The foursome at the Inside the NBA anchor desk is reminiscent of when the best local television newscasts had foursomes that not only delivered the news, weather and sports each day, but also attracted an audience because of the interactions between the four that took place throughout the newscast. What was initially derided as “happy talk” by journalism purists, was seen by the audience as an attractive quality to have in the people they choose to invite into their home each night (and later, each morning as well.)

It turns out that people like to watch people who are interesting and have something to say.

Given that the 2025-2026 NBA season has ended, the Inside crew has “Gone Fishin’” until this October when they will return. We can hardly wait to see them again.

We just hope that the McDonald’s Fried Apple Pie is still on the menu then.

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We were immediately intrigued, since we are in the midst of a small quarterback drama here in the home of the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings. There is a growing controversy over who will get the starting job when the regular season opens in a few months. (That’s right, with the NBA and NHL championships being decided over this last weekend, it is time to start thinking about football.)

The ad got us to do what ads are supposed to do, and that was to click on it to land on Barry’s Substack, where he explains the argument for moving away from the standard pairings of news anchors in local newscasts to having one “context-capable anchor” for a “context-capable newscast.” He goes on to lay out the thought-provoking case for making systemic changes in newsrooms to build a team to support the rise of newscasts centered on a single on-air host who can do more than just read introductions to each news story. A quarterback, if you will, who can execute the challenge of “managing the game,” as football analyst-types love to say.

All of which we think is interesting, but ultimately flawed in its premise.

If we take the football QB analogy further, the history of the game teaches us that for every Hall of Fame name you can think of, there are at least two or three names you can probably come up with who never found that level of success. And often, the most successful quarterbacks were not the ones most heralded coming out of college or picked first in the NFL’s annual player draft.

This is where we would remind you that Tom Brady was the 199th pick in the 2000 draft and was considered at the time, “a lightly regarded prospect” coming out of Michigan. Of course, he went on to become (with apologies to Larry David) “pretty, pretty good” at the position, winning seven Super Bowls and being widely regarded as “the GOAT” at the position. (We’ll avoid the far-too-easy commentary about his uneven transition to the broadcast booth in the years since ending his playing days.)

If you need a name to be the polar opposite of Tom Brady as a QB, then consider the less-than-remarkable playing years of one Ryan Leaf. Or perhaps JaMarcus Russell. Neither of those gentlemen will have a place in Akron, never mind down the road in Canton.

We point all this out to say that any team that bets its future on a single player is usually disappointed by the results. For every Most Valuable Player named Tom Brady, there are the names of all the other players on the same team who make all those championship seasons possible. Maybe even a coach like Bill Belichick had a hand in creating that success.

Yes, coaches have been known to help turn a good player into a great one.

To his credit, Barry Nash has long worked as a coach for folks who earn a living in front of a television camera. And his message here is not without merit. It is a modern-day variation of what was once widely endorsed as the “command anchor” model.

Our counter to the message is that great news anchors, just like great quarterbacks, aren’t in strong supply. And while we are at it, let’s make it clear that, unlike in football, there have been — and are — great anchors who are women. So the pool of potential greatness is a bit larger than on the gridiron.

Furthermore, the best local newscasts we have ever seen, both past and present, have been those in which the entire on-air team was competent and cohesive. Co-anchors who presented the news with real and relatable interactions, rather than trying to play ping-pong as if they were auditioning for the sequel to “Marty Supreme.” Those teams always included Weather and Sports anchors who could have genuine conversations with the news anchors and were given the breathing room to do so during the program, rather than appearing like they were coming from another part of the building.

One person can tell you something. A group of people can share something with you. It’s the difference between having an influencer in their basement or spare bedroom on a webcam telling you something and a team of professional communicators informing you about what is going on in the world.

In recent years, great news teams have become harder to find. The business has multiple narratives as to what has led to this point. The expense of paying commensurate salaries to multiple people is no small consideration, as the business's economics have contracted. There also isn’t much patience anymore in selecting and developing a team. It takes time and, of course, work.

Again, as in football, a lot of hard work is required to achieve greatness. Coaches (in this case, newsroom leaders) have to build a foundation for success and then be relentless at pushing to achieve it each day in every aspect of the newsroom.

“It’s supposed to be hard. If it were easy, everyone could do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.” The words of the fictional baseball manager Jimmy Dugan, as delivered by Tom Hanks in the movie “A League of Their Own.” (Another GOAT who knows a thing or two about communicating in front of a camera.)

Another great football coach, Bill Parcells, may have made our argument in the fewest words.

"Individuals play the game, but teams win championships.”

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The surprising, if not shocking to some, announcement came from longtime WABC-TV anchor Bill Ritter in the midst of Friday’s 6 pm newscast. The words, delivered in Ritter’s signature tone, were heard but didn’t really register at first. Our friends, who are viewers in the market, told us they were listening, as many of us often do during the evening newscast while engaged in some other activity. Perhaps making or eating dinner. Looking at their phones or out the window. Going about life as it normally is when the words landed in the active part of the brain.

“What was that? Did he just say this was his last newscast?”

Attention now fully locked in to exactly what the man appearing on the screen was saying. And yes, Bill Ritter had just told his viewers that this indeed would be his final time in the anchor chair of “Eyewitness News at 6 pm.” There had been no fanfare, no long build-up to the announcement. No week of career retrospective or countless messages from celebrities and colleagues wishing him the best.

Just there in the 6 pm newscast, coming out of a commercial break, one man looking straight to camera, delivering one of the most personal messages anyone has likely seen during a local TV newscast. And as he has done on countless occasions over his 28 years with ABC’s flagship station in New York City, Bill Ritter delivered the details of what had led him to his decision.

As he had a year ago, when he told the audience of his decision to cut back his workload at reaching the age of 75, and that he was moving from anchoring the station’s weekday 5 pm and 11 pm newscasts to only anchoring at 6 pm, Ritter explained that in becoming a grandfather for the first time, with a second opportunity to be one coming this year, and his youngest daughter graduating high school next year, he was deciding to spend more time with his family.

But also because, in his words, “My life has taken a turn.”

The diagnosis, after a series of recent tests: Alzheimer’s.

The progressive neurodegenerative disorder that nearly seven and a half million Americans over the age of 65 are living with. The one that has no cure and is ultimately fatal.

Bill Ritter, the 76-year-old man who anchored New York’s most-watched nightly local newscast for nearly 25 years, was telling us that he was now one of them. Worldwide, a new Alzheimer’s diagnosis is made every 3.2 seconds, according to Alzheimer’s Disease International.

Ritter is no stranger to the disease. His father died from it in 1988. Since then, he has been active in efforts to fund research to find new treatments and advance a cure. He told his audience that he plans to stay on at the station and report on those developments, as well as the significant economic impacts of treating and caring for people with Alzheimer’s and related diseases.

And he was staying on to help, as he put it, “the younger journalists at Eyewitness News.” He quickly added that at age 76, “everyone in the newsroom is younger than I am.”

(Before our own departure from a TV newsroom some 18 months ago, we were reminded on a near-daily basis of the growing age gap between us and the majority of our colleagues, who seemed to keep getting younger. And younger.)

Over the decades we have worked in local TV newsrooms, we have witnessed countless on-air colleagues say their goodbyes to the audience. They were always heartfelt and often emotional. Bill Ritter’s version was definitely from the heart, but with the kind of sincerity and warmth that made each person watching feel like he was speaking just with them.

Bill Ritter took over as anchor of Eyewitness News from the legendary Bill Beutel in 1999. It was a huge job to follow an anchor of Beutel’s stature and popularity in New York City. Like Beutel, Ritter had transitioned from working as a reporter on the network level at ABC to the local anchor desk at WABC-TV. Ritter found his success in leaning into his ability to deliver the news with a deft balance of anchorman gravitas and genuine humanity.

So much so that we’d recommend you watch his announcement. (We’ve linked it for you here.) It is a true masterclass in conveying a difficult, personal message in a way only those who have mastered the art of communication can. No wonder the guy set the record for being part of the station's longest-running anchor team.

Ritter noted about his own diagnosis: “It’s ‘early stage’ Alzheimer’s, and they say the treatments I’m getting are keeping it at bay. For now. But there is no guarantee, because there’s no cure yet for Alzheimer’s. So, unless someone finds an amazing cure, and soon, tonight (Friday) will be the last newscast I anchor.”

He went on to acknowledge his co-anchors and point out that he and his newscast producer had worked together for 25 and a half years, calling out that they were “a Muslim producer and a Jewish anchor.” He added hopefully, “It’s what the melting pot of New York and the Tri-State - and I would hope the country - is all about.

We’ve never met Bill Ritter. We know some of the same people in this business, and by all accounts he is “a class act.” His announcement that he was leaving the anchor desk was the same. We wish him the very best in the next chapter of his life’s journey.

One more thought before we let you get back to your own life, already in progress.

We have reached that stage in the proceedings where each day brings some news on the well-being of family and friends. Alas, much of it isn’t as good as we’d like it to be. Health concerns (along with the affordability of addressing them) are the dominant topic in those stories.

We know that navigating the medical system for every issue, both large and small, can be tough. But allow us to encourage you not to be daunted by it. Make the time, see the professionals, and give all aspects of your own health the priority it deserves.

As anyone who has ever written a news story anywhere can tell you, it is so much better to have one with a happy ending.

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We’ve been thinking about this ever since and have some observations about the situation.

One of the biggest realities is that the opportunities for television news managers to gather are fewer than ever. The collapse of the RTDNA’s annual convention would be the leading example of this argument. We’ve written before about this topic, so we won’t totally revisit it here. But there is little doubt that not having an annual meeting focused on broadcast news leaders from across the country has limited opportunities to share best practices and socialize.

And despite our best efforts to encourage more news directors to attend the annual NAB Show in Las Vegas, we didn’t see a sharp uptick in their attendance last April.

Is this a problem qualifying for “end of the world” status? Of course not, but it is a definite loss.

We’ve noticed that a number of news directors make the effort to attend other ongoing conferences. For some, this is a focused conference for groups of professional journalists, such as NABJ, NAHJ, NLGJA, etc. For others, the annual conferences of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) are events worth attending each year.

Those can certainly be opportunities to network and socialize, but they typically aren’t geared specifically towards newsroom leaders and the challenges they face.

Also worth pointing out is that with newsroom budgets being scrutinized and squeezed for every penny, the budget for travel and professional development is usually the first to be trimmed—or eliminated entirely.

With this shift has come a narrowing of opportunities to meet people outside the ownership group a news director happens to work for. We know that most groups have regular conference calls. But these weekly or monthly gatherings are mostly centered on the dispensing of policies or wisdom from corporate staff, rather than truly open forums.

Some groups do an annual in-person meeting that is part in-service training and part company pep rally. At least these kinds of events present some opportunity for more face-to-face interactions, both formal and informal. But there is zero opportunity to learn what might be working elsewhere or to commiserate over what isn’t working anywhere.

Plus, you can’t really “let your hair down” when your corporate bosses are in the same hotel meeting room for a couple of days.

Again, we are not suggesting here that this change has led to any serious deficiency in the local TV news business, just a loss of opportunity to make the lives of the people who lead these operations better, or even easier.

And dare we say the quiet part out loud: these jobs aren’t easy. Aside from leading the editorial charge each day, there are also the aspects of the position that require one to be an HR expert, a financial analyst, a logistics professional, a video critic, and a host of other roles that have seemingly little to do with, you know…the news.

Sometimes just venting is essential to retaining one’s perspective, if not overall mental health. And it’s nice to do so with someone who understands the demands of the job and has maybe worked through whatever crisis you might be dealing with on any given day.

This is why we think that any reduction in opportunities to network and build a broader circle of colleagues is a greater loss for the industry and the people called upon to lead it. We’ll add that this is our viewpoint, and as always, your mileage may vary. But in checking in with our own circle of newsroom denizens, we’re hearing the same sentiments expressed.

So here is a suggestion: reach out to a few colleagues in the next few days and check in on them. Ask how things are going, how they’re doing personally, and whether there’s anything — big or small — you can help with.

You’ll be surprised at how much it will be appreciated, and how much you’ll get out of the experience.

And if you don’t have anyone to do this exercise with, or if you want a new perspective, drop us an email at editor@tvnd.com. No charge, no catch. We’re always happy to talk about TV news — or, come to think of it, almost anything really.

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“Steve Austin…Astronaut. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better….stronger…faster.”

It has been a week since Nick Bilton, the new executive producer of “60 Minutes,” held his first meeting with the show’s team. You’ve likely heard that it didn’t go well. We wonder if invoking “better, stronger, faster” might have changed the outcome.

Perhaps that was what he was hoping for when he walked to the front of the room, pulled out his phone, and began reading remarks to the team.

Maybe if CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss hadn’t been notable by not being there to introduce her new hire, Mr. Bilton. Maybe if Scott Pelley hadn’t canceled a previously planned vacation to be in that Monday morning meeting. Maybe if there had been other correspondents in the meeting (there weren’t).

Maybe it all wouldn’t have led to the moment that triggered Mr. Pelley to say exactly what was on his mind.

But it wasn’t the first indication that Mr. Bilton was thinking along the lines of “We can rebuild this fifty-eight-year-old institution. We can make it better…stronger…DIGITAL.” (Just as every news executive has said in the past decade.) Bilton telegraphed his intentions in the initial email he sent the entire “60 Minutes” staff the previous Thursday, coming just after what would be called “the Black Thursday massacre” had taken place.

In the course of a single day, the “60 Minutes” team would learn that not only Sharyn Alfonsi, the correspondent who had been the first to tangle with Bari Weiss publicly, would not have her contract renewed. But that wouldn’t have come as much of a shock to anyone.

The real shock came when word got out that fellow correspondent Cecilia Vega was being let go. A bigger tremor followed when the entire “60 Minutes” leadership was told they were being fired as well. That would include Executive Producer Tonya Simon, Executive Editor Draggan Mihailovich, and other veteran producers, including the person behind the show’s digital growth. (Why yes, “60 Minutes” has heard of digital. It’s actually been doing pretty good numbers there.)

This wasn’t just a small change for the very tight-knit group working on what is still television’s most-watched news program. It was a wholesale sacking of colleagues who were, by all accounts, very respected and admired.

For correspondent Scott Pelley, a former anchor of “The CBS Evening News” and a 37-year veteran of the network, it was all “impossible to believe.”

We’re hearing from Pelley for the first time in a sit-down interview with New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro in a recurring feature the paper calls, “The Interview.” The paper published the story, along with a video of the interview, yesterday (Sunday) morning. (If you haven’t read or watched it, you can do so via this free gift link. We would certainly encourage you to do so.)

The interview conducted by Ms. Garcia-Navarro is both detailed and wide-ranging. Throughout their discussion, she asks many of the questions that anyone interested in just what led one of the most prominent broadcast journalists of the day to confront the man selected to be his new boss — in a scene dramatic enough to end his career.

For his part, Pelley appears to be more than ready to talk about what he thinks about recent changes at CBS News since Bari Weiss’s arrival last fall and explains why he chose to speak up in the first meeting with the program’s new Executive Producer, Nick Bilton.

(We assume that you, dear reader, are familiar with the details of that meeting by now. If you need a refresher, we’ll point you to our previous coverage, linked here and here.)

What comes across most in his interview is that Scott Pelley cares deeply about the program he has worked on for the past 24 years and, perhaps even more so, about his colleagues there. He also believed his strong challenge to Nick Bilton during that meeting just one week ago was consistent with the program’s internal dialogue tradition, and that his remarks weren’t intended to be made public.

Perhaps Pelley had more than a little naivete in failing to realize that those remarks would lead to his termination from CBS less than 36 hours later. (Garcia-Navarro did not ask about earlier reports that Pelley had prepared a resignation letter.) He says that when he was invited the next day to a meeting with Bilton, Weiss, and other CBS management, being fired was “the furthest thing from his mind.”

Pelley then adds: “Some reporter I turned out to be.”

What we now know at the one-week anniversary of that fateful meeting is that ever since it ended, Nick Bilton has been busy doing damage control inside the “60 Minutes” offices on New York City’s West 57th Street. Dylan Byers, writing for Puck last Friday, called Bilton’s efforts “a charm offensive.” He’s held meetings with several staff members, including most importantly, the show’s three remaining on-air correspondents, Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim.

Bilton delivered another staff-wide email by week’s end that was notably different in tone from all his previous communications. Key to that email was Bilton’s declaration that he was committed to “maintaining the journalistic independence” that is a key part of the “60 Minutes” legacy as the program approaches its 59th season on the air.

Byers reports that Bilton’s efforts seem to have worked, leading to the joint statement from Stahl, Whitaker and Wertheim, stating that the trio would be staying on because, in their words, “We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die.” They went on to make their terms quite clear: “If we can continue doing the work that made this show what it is— committing acts of independent, fearless journalism and storytelling—we’re here for it. If not, we leave.”

On Sunday evening, another Puck columnist, this time William D. Cohan, published the first interview with Lesley Stahl about her thoughts on the past week's events and her decision to stay with the program, even though her pending contract extension has yet to be finalized.

In his NYT interview, Pelley’s accusation of editorial interference was detailed with a single example of what he says was Bari Weiss asking for changes to his February story about the ICE killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two protestors to the “Operation Metro Surge” operations in Minneapolis. It is Pelley’s contention that Weiss sent a note to then-EP Simon asking for the protestors to be made “to look more violent” in video shown in the story. Pelley refused to make the changes. CBS now says there was no political motivation and the four changes suggested by Weiss were part of the normal editorial collaboration.

Meanwhile, five days would seem to be a fairly quick education for Nick Bilton in the fine art of managing television talent. It’s a job we’ve done for more years than we want to count, and experience helps. We’ve had on-air talent scream at us, sob at us, and pretty much run the gamut of human emotions, including once being shoved into a wall by a former football player who was angrily insisting that we were being just too negative while trying to motivate a newsroom to put a better broadcast on the air.

We’ve said many times over the years that it takes a specific genetic makeup to have both the ego and confidence needed to regularly put one’s face in front of a camera and perform as a journalist. It is a required performance on top of the reporting skills used by every journalist in gathering and editing the story.

As if to remind us of this point, we’ve just watched the first episode of Rich Eisen’s new podcast series titled “This was SportsCenter” for ESPN and Disney+. In the premiere episode, Eisen goes one-on-one with former SportsCenter anchor and colleague Dan Patrick. Patrick recounts a lunch with then-ESPN President Steve Bornstein, who said to him, “You’re just ‘f-ing’ talent.” (The full word was used at the time.)

Patrick had heard Bornstein say this line before. But this time, Patrick says he responded with “Steve, do you think I could do your job?”

Bornstein thinks for a moment and says, “Yeah.”

Patrick then says, “Do you think you could do my job?”

Bornstein thinks for another moment and responds, “No.”

Patrick: “Then don’t call me ‘f-ing’ talent again.“

And he never did.

The takeaway is that being on television and being any good at it isn’t something that just anyone can do. No matter how easy it might look. Frankly, the real skill that the best have is making it look so damn easy most of the time.

According to Dylan Byers’ reporting on Puck, Nick Bilton received a three-year contract to become the new Executive Producer of “60 Minutes.” It will pay him $2.3 million a year to lead what will either continue as the most-watched non-sports show on television or become just another once-mighty relic of the dying medium of broadcasting.

He’s certainly had a hell of a first week on the job.

Whether Mr. Bilton can rebuild the franchise and make it better, stronger, and faster remains to be seen. He will have to do so now under much more scrutiny. That will also be true for the woman who hired him and made him “The Six (plus) Million Dollar Man.”

Lee Majors only had four seasons as Colonel Steve Austin before his series was canceled.

Because friends, the audience always has the final say.

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The first headline from this past week was the surprise announcement that Roger Goodell, the normally affable Commissioner of the National Football League, was putting himself on the equivalent of the “unable to perform” list and was declining an invitation to appear before a June 10th hearing by the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee about the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. The committee’s chairman is convening the hearing, the always pugnacious Jim Jordan of Ohio.

And for his part, commissioner Goodell is skipping the hearing, citing a note from his lawyer stating that he can’t appear “due to litigation related to the topic of the hearing.” What that means in English is that the commish doesn’t want to have to defend the practice of moving NFL games over to places like Amazon, Peacock and Netflix, which wasn’t quite imagined some 65 years ago when the Sports Broadcasting Act was passed by Congress and signed into law.

The law is what gives the NFL (and other professional sports leagues) their limited exemptions to the nation’s antitrust laws. That’s what allows the league to collectively bargain the TV rights to all 32 teams’ regular- and post-season games. But the law was written back when a whopping three national networks were the only way that fans could watch professional football games on television.

Needless to say, the TV landscape has changed just a bit since those days in the Kennedy administration.

And some members of Congress do not like that watching some games now requires multiple paid subscriptions to streaming services. To be clear, they weren’t thrilled about games being on cable when ESPN picked up its first NFL package. That little problem was addressed by allowing a broadcast TV station in each team’s home market to air the ESPN game over the air—for a more-than-modest fee, of course. (The same solution is still used for any game not part of the broadcast network’s NFL schedules.)

The Trump administration has put the league under scrutiny for the ongoing shift of NFL games to streaming services in recent seasons. First, the Department of Justice was reported to be investigating the league’s potential “anticompetitive practices.” Then the Federal Communications Commission asked for “public comments” from consumers about their experiences with the shift of NFL games from broadcast TV to streaming.

So naturally, Congress wants to ride in and get its members’ faces on the record, asking some tough questions of the league and some experts on the topic.

Apparently, those experts will include Outkick.com founder and talk radio mouthpiece Clay Travis, who is always down for some of the rational, reasonable discussions sports talk radio is known for. (Why yes, that is sarcasm right there.)

For his part, Commissioner Goodell’s lawyer explained the league’s position on the subject of the hearing: “The NFL’s decision to license a few more games to widely adopted streaming services is simply a reflection that those platforms now offer significantly more reach than the current pay TV ecosystem and that broadcast television remains the foundation of our media distribution.”

He could have added (but didn’t): “Until those streaming guys pay us a lot more money for our product.”

In fact, the matter being litigated is what will keep the Commissioner from appearing on Capitol Hill. It centers around the league’s popular “Sunday Ticket” package, where you can pay to watch every game, on every Sunday during the regular season. “Sunday Ticket” moved from its original home for 29 years on the DirecTV satellite service to the YouTube TV streaming service in 2023. (That’s YouTubeTV, the paid streaming service — not the free YouTube.com featuring all those cooking videos.)

The lawsuit in question has a twisting history. It began as a class action lawsuit against both the NFL and DirecTV covering the years from 2011 to 2023. The central claim was that the league and the satellite company wouldn’t sell either individual games or just a single team’s season (which many fans would want). Instead, it forced subscribers to buy a package that included all of the teams’ games every Sunday. In June 2024, a California jury found against the NFL in the case and awarded some $4.8 billion in damages. But two months later, the Federal judge in the case tossed the verdict on a technicality, claiming that two witnesses used flawed economic data to calculate damages before the jury. The case is currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

And so, it’s a “no-go” for the Commish to sit before Congress on June 10th.

Also this past week, headline number two was an interesting development about watching the games of another professional sports league on television, and this time it’s the Stanley Cup Championship of the National Hockey League that is underway, featuring the two teams from the traditional Hockey towns of Las Vegas and Raleigh?

So much for the growth of Canada’s greatest sports export.

The NHL’s championship series is airing on ESPN and ABC. That would be all well and good, but just as the Stanley Cup was getting underway, on June 1st, The E.W. Scripps Company, owners of some 54 television stations across 36 local markets in the country, pulled its stations off of the DirecTV service in an all-too-familiar “retransmission negotiation dispute.” That’s when a broadcaster can’t reach a financial agreement with a multichannel video program distributor (MVPD), such as a cable or satellite TV provider, to carry the broadcaster’s TV stations.

Scripps owns a significant number of ABC-affiliated stations in its group, including KTNV, which serves Las Vegas. This “blackout” of the station on DirecTV means that subscribers to the satellite service will not be able to watch ABC's telecasts of the Golden Knights in the Stanley Cup. Such blackouts are a common effect of these retransmission disputes, and sports is usually one of the things that brings the broadcaster and MVPD back to the bargaining table.

But in this case, TheDesk reported first that ESPN was going to make all of the Stanley Cup games available via the ESPN app, including to those DirecTV subscribers in markets like Las Vegas, where the local Scripps-owned ABC affiliate would not be available due to the blackout from the “retransmission negotiation dispute.” This meant that hockey fans who are also DirecTV subscribers could still see the games—just via a different way than they normally would on their local ABC station.

It’s the first time we are aware of where a network owner, in this case Disney, owner of both ESPN and ABC, has allowed the network to effectively “bypass” its network affiliates to deliver sports programming directly to the audience via its streaming service. That means DirecTV subs who might otherwise be deprived of watching sports programming because of what’s known in the television business as a “retrans dispute” will still be able to do so — just via a different source.

This will not sit well not only with Scripps but with all ABC affiliate owners, who will definitely see this as a betrayal by their network that benefits the “other side” in future blackouts over “retrans disputes.” Expect to hear more about this going forward.

And finally, ABC is also carrying another major sports championship this week.

That would be the NBA Finals, featuring the San Antonio Spurs and the New York Knicks as they play for the Larry O'Brien Trophy. Knicks fever has gripped NYC hard in the first week of June, as the Knicks haven’t been in the championship series since 1999. For its part, ESPN and ABC have substantially beefed up their NBA coverage, and for the first time in eight years, there isn’t a “Presented by YouTube” sponsorship plastered all over the Finals.

It’s a welcome change after years of so many YouTube logos appearing on the court and in TV broadcasts. In the 2023 finals, fans could see nine different YouTube logos at the same time.

So far in 2026, basketball fans who happen to be DirecTV subscribers in places where Scripps owns the local ABC station won’t be seeing those YouTube logos, or for that matter, the games themselves at least until Scripps reaches a new deal with DirecTV.

Hopefully they won’t miss seeing Spike Lee courtside being very happy—or very sad, as the case might be for his beloved New York Knicks.

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It was a broad sample of the best work of 2025 from 13 regions across the United States and a 14th that covers all of Canada. (Fortunately, our North American neighbors are still speaking to us when it comes to recognition of quality journalism.) And it sure seems like the awards are the main thing keeping the RTDNA relevant after it shut down its annual convention last October, in favor of an odd “world tour” where association leadership is now just showing up at other annual gatherings held by various journalism and industry groups. (The next appearance will be at the IRE conference later this month).

We’ve previously written here about the challenges facing the RTDNA, and we’re sorry to say that we don’t see any clear path for the association to reinvent itself, at least not in the near future. That’s a shame, because the broadcast news business could use a strong and vibrant RTDNA that advocates for the essential nature of “The Fifth Estate” and helps train the leaders it needs.

But in scoring the list of regional Murrow winners for 2026, we were struck by what seemed to be a noticeable trend. Like any current C-average high school student, we did some research (meaning we just asked Google’s Gemini AI chatbot) and had our hypothesis confirmed. There has been a sea change in who is winning more of the annual plaques bearing the name of the patron saint of broadcast journalism.

At least in the group owning the TV stations that win them.

The 2026 regional Murrows featured only one TEGNA-owned station winning the “Overall Excellence” award: KGW in Portland. The group took home a total of 50 regional Murrows, won by some 16 TEGNA-owned stations. (And of course, that’s really now correctly said as “TEGNA, a wholly-owned, but not-directly-operated subsidiary of Nexstar.”)

The usual TEGNA newsroom standouts took home their above-average haul of Murrows. KARE in Minneapolis led the group with 9 awards, KING in Seattle scored 7, and KUSA in Denver captured 6. But none of those were in the Overall Excellence category, which is still seen as the biggest prize awarded in each region. (Each of the regional winners goes on to compete for the national Murrow award in each category. Those will be handed out this October.)

One year ago, TEGNA had three stations win regional Murrows for Overall Excellence. Some 23 stations amongst TEGNA’s current portfolio of 64 stations won at least one Murrow, compared to only 16 this year. But lest we assume it was just an off year for the TEGNA newsrooms, perhaps due to the distraction of being acquired by Nexstar, the reality is that things have been changing for years.

Back in 2022, TEGNA won a record 96 Murrow Awards across the association's 13 regions in the US. Half of the regional Overall Excellence winners were TEGNA-owned stations. In that same year, 27 of the group’s newsrooms won at least a single Murrow. By the following year, 2023, the group’s total had slid to 84 regional Murrows, and in 2024, the total slid further, down to 73. Then in 2025, the total dropped to 59, before another drop to just 50—or just slightly over half of 2022’s total.

In that banner year of 2022, we may have wildly speculated to a few colleagues that there was something a tad suspect about the dominant performance by the TEGNA group in the competition for Murrow winners. To be clear, the RTDNA’s rules absolutely, positively prohibit judges from evaluating award entries from their own corporate ownership groups. So that kind of cross-promoting of sister stations within the same group couldn’t possibly have been going on.

Forgive the digression into the conspiracy thinking that is running rampant in so many aspects of life these days.

The reality is that while TEGNA’s dominance of the Murrow awards has slipped in recent years, there has been a simultaneous rise in challengers from other station groups — one in particular — that have shown the same willingness to field a large number of entries each year, and have steadily increased their total of wins.

The one in particular would be Atlanta-based Gray Media, with its footprint of 180 stations in 113 markets. In this year’s competition for regional Murrows, some 41 different Gray stations won a total of 93 awards, including 4 for Overall Excellence. That’s not a surprise, given the group’s strong focus on investigative reporting by all of its stations. It’s a playbook championed by Lee Zurik, Gray’s Senior Operating Officer for News Strategy and Innovation.

Gray’s WVUE in New Orleans collected a strong haul of 9 different Murrow awards in RTDNA Region 9’s Large Market division. Gray’s other big Murrow winner was WMTV in Madison, which won a total of 6 Murrows in the Small Market division of Region 4. Four Gray stations took home the Overall Excellence award, including WANF in Atlanta, WCSC in Charleston (SC), WDBJ in Roanoke, and WRDW/WAGT in Augusta (GA).

But the big group winner for the Overall Excellence award was Hearst Television, with 6 stations taking that title: KCRA, Sacramento; KOAT, Albuquerque; WBAL-TV, Baltimore; WDSU, New Orleans; KCCI, Des Moines; and WCVB, Boston.

And a tip of our press fedora to WCVB, which pretty much dominated the large-market division in Region 10, winning 9 of the 14 categories awarded there. It won the crown for the most regional Murrows collected by a single TV station.

Other groups to have stations cited in the Overall Excellence category included two stations each for Nexstar (KXAN, Austin and KHON Honolulu), Scripps (WTMJ-TV, Milwaukee and KSHB, Kansas City), CBS Stations (WBBM-TV, Chicago and KDKA-TV, Pittsburgh) and the aforementioned Morgan Murphy (KXLY-TV Spokane and WISC-TV in Madison).

Finally, groups with a single station winning for “Overall Excellence” included Capitol Broadcasting’s WRAL-TV in Raleigh, Griffin Media’s KOTV in Tulsa, Sinclair’s WJAR in Providence and Weigel’s WBND in South Bend.

Once again, we offer our sincere congratulations to all the Murrow winners. We could follow the lead of some online industry pundits who like to throw shade on awards like the Murrows. And yes, the audience doesn’t really care who is (or isn’t) an award-winning station.

But our view is that the Murrow awards acknowledge that there is still a body of great work to be celebrated in broadcast journalism. And that’s even if it’s true that “Broadcast is an ice cube that is melting.”

At least, according to that newly minted broadcast industry sage, Mr. Nick Bilton.

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Put more succinctly by the closing question of the late Jerry Springer: “So what have we learned here today?”

Let’s start with the obvious platitudes: No one player is bigger than the entire team. If you never want to know what it is like to be fired, then be your own boss. And if you’re going to stand up for what you believe in, prepare to pay a price for your convictions.

All of these quotes could apply to the situation that unfolded at “60 Minutes.” The chain reaction began days before the Monday morning confrontation that featured Scott Pelley challenging his new boss’s attempt to channel his inner Kevin Bacon-as-ROTC-crowd controller from the movie “Animal House” and assure the “60 Minutes” team that he was hired to lead to, in essence, “Remain Calm, All is Well.”

For his part, Pelley decided to go all “Eric Stratton” (As played by Tim Matheson in the same movie) before the Faber College Pan-Hellenic council and deliver a dramatic defense of the program he’s worked on for the past 24 years. Lines were drawn, positions were taken. No one was backing down.

To carry our absurdist movie analogy a little further, CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss dutifully played the role of Dean Vernon Wormer of Faber College, and skipped past putting Pelley on the equivalent of “Double secret probation” and proceeded directly to having Bilton parroting the Dean’s speech of “You’re Out! Finished at Faber! I want you off this campus by Monday Morning!”

Bilton delivered the message via a termination letter, seemingly intended for a much larger audience than just Mr. Pelley and, probably, his lawyer(s). Even Megyn Kelly noted in a post on X that Bilton sounded “needy” in his lengthy explanation of why Pelley was being let go. She notes that simply saying: “Dear Mr. Pelley: You’re fired, effective immediately” would have been far more impactful.

She makes a good point.

All written correspondence about any termination, whether to the employee being dismissed or to the remaining staff, should typically be done with as few words as possible. That’s management 101 kind of stuff. It may seem a tad cold to do so, but any HR professional would tell you it's the best way to go.

Bilton makes a point of telling Pelley that he is being terminated “for cause.” Not being privy to all the conversations that may have happened behind the scenes (though it sure sounds like most of them have been made public by one or both sides in the matter), we have to wonder aloud exactly what would support that justification.

No matter how insubordinate or “rude” Mr. Pelley’s comments were in the Monday morning staff meeting with Bilton, such speech would be difficult to categorize as making it impossible for anyone to do their job. Heated discussions take place in newsrooms on a pretty regular basis, and by all accounts over the years, the offices of “60 Minutes” have been no exception.

For his part, Bilton is reported to have said during the Monday morning confrontation: “I have no problem taking a job in a place that I am not welcome in.” And he told Pelley directly in front of those witnessing the face-off between the two: “You are not going to intimidate me in front of this group of people. I want that to be clear.”

Sorry Nick, but your actions indicate the opposite.

Yes, we’ve read that Pelley refused to meet privately with Bilton and/or Bari Weiss before the Monday morning session. However, Pelley did not ignore the invitation to a meeting late Tuesday afternoon with the two and other CBS management. Whether whatever was said in that gathering led to Pelley’s defenestration, we don’t know. Oliver Darcy of Status.news reported that meeting, which “lasted less than 30 minutes,” was “contentious.”

Darcy notes in his story, “A person close to CBS News leadership told Status that there had been a genuine effort to find a way for Pelley to remain on the show, but that management believed Pelley was not interested in working with them on that front. To be fair, he had effectively dared them to fire him.”

This leads us to wonder if this was perhaps Pelley’s goal all along. One clue was when, in the heat of the Monday confrontation, another CBS News executive tried to intercede on Bilton’s behalf, saying: “This is not actually productive. This is not an interview.”

Pelley’s immediate response: “It’s working for me.”

Scott Pelley definitely had a contract with the network that reportedly paid him millions of dollars a year. The statement he publicly released following his termination (A copy of which was published online by Status) includes the specific claim that “new management has specifically instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” That sure sounds like Pelley was already unhappy with the program's direction before Bilton’s arrival on Monday morning, bearing free bagels.

What better way to be fired from a contract you might want to get out of, while exiting in a proverbial “blaze of glory,” that serves as both standing up for his colleagues in particular — and journalistic ethics in general. That sure sounds reminiscent of Eric Stratton’s declaration of “You can do what you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!”

As we initially noted, the biggest questions remaining post-Pelley’s departure from the program concern who else on the “60 Minutes” staff might decide to follow him out the door. Correspondents Bill Whitaker and Lesley Stahl haven’t said what their future with the program will be, and Jon Wertheim certainly wouldn’t relish the idea of being “the last man standing” when everything is said and done.

Should he desire to, Pelley can likely land somewhere new before the end of the week. Any number of outlets would happily fund the kind of long-form storytelling he built his reputation on, and it’s difficult to imagine CBS wanting the additional PR headache of enforcing a non-compete on top of everything else already in the public record.

At the very least, he could start a Substack. Plenty of recently displaced journalists have ended up there.

We’re told it’s not bad work.

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For those of you in a news blackout over the last 48 hours, we’ll remind you that back on Monday morning, Pelley had been very outspoken in the first “60 Minutes” staff gathering under Nick Bilton, the just-appointed Executive Producer of the venerable TV newsmagazine. Pelley’s strong challenge of Bilton came during what was probably intended as a casual introduction and “get to know you” session, instantly making headlines after the session ended some 15 minutes after it began.

There was much chatter around the television news industry on Tuesday about the substance and tone of Pelley’s grilling of Bilton, and in turn what might be the path forward — if there could be any — for both men.

Since the announcement last week, many have questioned the hiring of Nick Bilton, a journalist “of some 25 years’ experience” (as he insisted to Pelley) but with zero of them spent working in a television newsroom of any sort. Pelley pointedly picked up on that theme during the Monday morning face-off and, depending on your point of view, either took up the defense of the program’s storied legacy of journalism or mandated his own termination from both “60” and CBS.

The New York Times reported Tuesday night that Pelley delayed a scheduled vacation to be in his office today, where he penned a resignation letter that he never delivered. CBS News leaders set up a meeting late Tuesday afternoon with Pelley and Bilton, along with Bari Weiss and CBS News President Tom Cibrowski, and an HR representative joining by speakerphone.

The Times reported that meeting turned contentious and ended with no clear resolution. Status.news has the most detailed accounting of what transpired during the meeting, but the full story is behind the publication’s paywall. (We’ve said it before on multiple occasions: Status is a daily must-read about this business. Definitely worth the paid subscription in our view.)

By Tuesday night, Bilton had delivered a termination letter to Pelley (and apparently sent copies to various media outlets, including the Times, which published it online here). Bilton bluntly informed the remaining “60 Minutes” staff, “We have parted ways with Scott Pelley.”

Having been on both sides of the desk in situations that end in termination, we understand that Pelley’s actions may have left Bilton with little choice. But the more interesting detail to us is that Bilton states in his now-very-public termination letter to Pelley that the correspondent was “terminated for cause, effective immediately.”

With no knowledge of the terms of Mr. Pelley’s employment agreement, we do wonder under what grounds the CBS Legal Department would support the immediate termination for cause, based on what has been reported to have happened to this point. Such a move would very likely mean that the network intended to fight paying Mr. Pelley whatever his contract might state he was owed upon leaving the network. Given that Mr. Pelley probably has (or soon will have) excellent legal representation of his own, this would suggest that many billable hours could follow.

What could also follow is any number of other names, both in front of and behind the camera, following Pelley out the doors of the building on West 57th Street that houses the “60 Minutes” offices. The events of the last 36 hours, as Oliver Darcy of Status wrote on Tuesday night, have thrown the program “into an unprecedented and existential crisis.”

We don’t think he is overstating the situation in the least.

The NFL’s first Sunday of the 2026 regular season is set for September 13th. “60 Minutes” usually debuts its new season on that same day, or the next Sunday at the latest. With reports that no new stories are completed (or are near completion) for the upcoming season, our question is this: Will the program’s iconic stopwatch start ticking right after the announcer says “CBS Sports thanks you for watching this presentation of the National Football League?”

Ironically, while all this was going on in New York, down in Washington, the White House Correspondents Association announced that their annual dinner that was interrupted and ultimately canceled by a lone gunman back in April will now be held on July 24th. Association President Weijia Jiang (whose day job is being a CBS News White House Correspondent) said the decision to reschedule was made “after thoughtful consideration and input from our members.”

While the celebration could not be rescheduled in 30 days as President Trump had insisted would happen after the initial event ended in chaos, according to a post on the President’s Truth Social account, the dinner will now be held in the Waldorf Astoria hotel in DC, adding “a building and ballroom that I built.” Mr. Trump confirmed that he will attend the rescheduled celebration.

Which might lead some of you to ask the same question that is on our minds:

“When it comes to the state of American journalism, just what the hell is there left to celebrate?”

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And by all accounts, it did not go well. Even though Nick brought in bagels for everyone.

The first word we got on what happened was from Oliver Darcy in a rare “special early edition” of his indispensable Status newsletter. (Kudos to him for not slapping the overused “Breaking News” label on it.)

Darcy’s reporting was based on an audio recording of what he labeled as “a stunning confrontation” by none other than veteran correspondent Scott Pelley, who has been with the program since 2004. Pelley, who you will remember was also the anchor of “The CBS Evening News” from 2011 to 2017, and was arguably the most successful anchor to sit in the chair since some guy named Cronkite, and (for a while at least) a successor named Rather.

Nick Bilton wasn’t too far along in his remarks to the assembled team before Scott Pelley began grilling him like a cheese sandwich. Of all the reporting we’ve seen on what happened for the rest of the meeting, Darcy’s Status has the most detailed account of just what went down. But it is behind a paywall, so we will also point you to the later New York Times story. The Times also received a recording of the meeting. (Someone inside was busy with that recording!) Click here for a gift article link to read the NYT story, even if you aren’t a subscriber.

From the Times: “For me, the journalism is the journalism,” Mr. Bilton said, according to the recording. “That is why I am here. That is why we are all here.” Bilton later warned that the broadcast television industry that incubated “60 Minutes” would soon be obsolete. “Broadcast is an ice cube that is melting, OK?”

Bilton went on to defend his new boss at CBS, Bari Weiss: “Bari loves this institution,” he added. “She loves ’60 Minutes.’”

And with that, Pelley pounced with the money quote that will be remembered most from today’s kerfuffle (as we’d call it in the Midwest): “She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” the correspondent said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

Things did not improve from that moment on. (Again, check the NYT story link above for their full reporting of what else was said.) Bari Weiss was not in the room, but at one point, Charles Forelle, who Weiss has installed as the Managing Editor of CBS News, tried to interject on Bilton’s behalf and told Pelley he was “being rude.”

As the encounter between Pelley and Bilton had taken on the tension of a vintage Mike Wallace interview, Forelle told Pelley that “This is not an interview.”

Pelley shot back with “It’s working for me.”

There was more, until finally Bilton wrapped things up by thanking everyone for “being so welcoming” and encouraging them to “enjoy the bagels.” After he departed, the staff in attendance applauded Mr. Pelley.

You may be surprised to learn, as we were, that the whole meeting lasted “roughly 15 minutes,” according to the New York Times story. Seems like that much drama would have taken a little more time.

After the meeting, we assume that there was a debriefing between Mr. Bilton and Ms. Weiss. Though there is no recording of it that has surfaced, we would speculate that it went something like this:

(BariW): “So Nick, how did your first meeting with the team go?”

(NickB): “JFC, Bari—that was the very definition of a hostile work environment!”

(BariW): “Yeah, they were going to need to take their frustrations out on someone. And that someone wasn’t going to be me.”

(NickB): “Your absence was notable. One of your flacks said that you were prepared to come, but they asked you not to—because of the staff’s ill feelings around last Thursday’s firings.”

(BariW): “Sure, well that — and the fact that one of my team of bodyguards was out today, I think he was working his other job down in Jersey at Delaney Hall.”

(NickB): “Listen, Pelley is loaded for bear. But I stood my ground and told him that ‘I would not be intimidated in front of this group of people.’"

(BariW): “Good for you! How did that go over?”

(NickB): “Like a fart in church, Bari. I thought Forelle was going to have my back. He didn’t help when he called Pelley rude. And he did it more than once.”

(BariW): “Well, Nick, you knew the job was going to be tough when you took it. And when Pelley wouldn’t respond to our calls asking to meet with him privately, you had to know that today was going to be tough.”

(NickB): “Tough?? This morning was a gunfight at the O.K. Corral!”

(BariW): “Sorry. Things will be better the next time you go back in there.”

(NickB): “Oh, I’m not going back in there. Not until you can spare a couple of those bodyguards!”

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