Perry Punches Back

Today is the last day of the National Association of Broadcasters’ annual shindig in Las Vegas. It’s the short, final day on the show floor. The day when all the private jets will be leaving the Signature Aviation terminal at Harry Reid (formerly McCarran) airport. It is the day when the NAB Show will hand out its “Best In Show” awards to a few of the many vendors whose booths have populated three of the four massive halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because…Vegas, man.

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