Did Sinclair buy WWLTV?

Yesterday morning we learned via the Times-Picayune that the conglomerate that owns Channel 4 has been bought by a private equity firm. 

Tegna Inc., owner of WWL-TV in New Orleans, its digital affiliate WUPL-TV and 63 other U.S. television stations, is being sold to a private equity firm in a deal valued at $8.6 billion, Tegna said Tuesday.

The buyer is Standard General L.P., which will take the publicly traded Tegna private.

"After evaluating this opportunity against Tegna's standalone prospects and other strategic alternatives, our board concluded that this transaction maximizes value for Tegna shareholders," Tegna Chairman Howard Elias said in a company statement.

“As long-term investors in the television broadcasting industry, we have a deep admiration for Tegna and the stations it operates and, in particular, for Tegna's talented employees and their commitment to serving their communities," Soo Kim, founding partner of Standard General, said in the statement.

This NY Post story says the deal might still be blocked by FCC because the combination of companies it involves could leave Standard General in possession of more than 39 percent of the nation's TV audience. But there are moving parts to that might get them back within compliance. Here is a Bloomberg article that goes into more detail.  

In 2020, Soo Kim acquired the Bally's casino brand partly in order to get in on the booming online sports betting business which, you may have noticed, pushes a lot of advertising and even straight up content through local media these days. He tells Bloomberg that he's going to fix "uncertainties" in the casino and media businesses by "injecting a level of technology and evolution."

“Bally’s and Tegna have one very common denominator, which is their core businesses throw off a lot of earnings today. Whether it’s gaming or TV, they’re both license driven and there’s limited competition in every market,” Kim said. “But both of them face a little bit of uncertainty due to the internet.”

Tegna shares were nearly flat Wednesday at $22.43 while shares in Bally’s were up 1.3% at $25.72. 

For Bally’s, it’s an aging customer base and online gaming, he said. For Tegna, it’s that those in the younger generation aren’t watching the 11 p.m. news the way their parents did, he said.

“So, how do these very strong but old franchises actually survive in the internet era?” Kim asked. “We think that injecting a level of technology and evolution into the business will be amazing.”

Can't wait to place all of my bets directly over the WWLTV app. 

Anyway, here is another detail about Kim's acquisition of Bally's. His partner is that deal was Sinclair Broadcasting. 

PROVIDENCE, R.I. and BALTIMORE, Nov. 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Bally's Corporation (NYSE: BALY) and Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: SBGI) today announced that they have entered into agreements for a long-term strategic partnership that combines Bally's vertically integrated, proprietary sports betting technology and expansive market access footprint with Sinclair's premier portfolio of local broadcast stations and live regional sports networks ("RSNs"), STIRR, its popular Tennis Channel, and digital and over-the-air television network Stadium. Bally's and Sinclair will partner to create unrivaled sports gamification content on a national scale, positioning Bally's as the premier omni-channel gaming company with physical casinos and online sports betting and iGaming solutions united under a single brand. The transaction is expected to position Bally's to capture a significant share of the fast-growing U.S. sports betting and iGaming market.

This is how it came to be that fans of the New Orleans Pelicans watch games over a channel with the Bally's branding. (For now, anyway.) 

It's not clear to me what Sinclair's role in the Tegna deal is. But if it does mean the Tegna stations purchased by Kim are going to be run like Sinclair stations, that's not great news for local viewers. 

Critics have claimed that Sinclair — a company with close ties to the Trump administration and conservative politicians — is pushing its stations away from local coverage and toward a partisan brand of political reporting on national politics.

In new research, we find evidence that that appears to be the case. Stations bought by Sinclair reduce coverage of local politics, increase national coverage and move the ideological tone of coverage in a conservative direction relative to other stations operating in the same market.

New Orleans is traditionally a highly parochial market. And I mean that in a good way. People in New Orleans are generally very interested in New Orleans. They can spot phonies and don't take well to outsiders who get key things about them wrong. On the other hand, as we've noted repeatedly, the city has changed greatly over the past decade. Gentrification has physically displaced people and disrupted a generation of cultural reproduction.  We're not sure what the long term consequences of that will be but it does often feel like nobody actually lives in New Orleans anymore. At least, fewer New Orleanians live here now. 

Couple this phenomenon with the degradation of local news media that's occurred at the same time and it's hard to deny that New Orleans in 2022 is a smaller, less informed and less locally engaged city than it was before Newhouse started its fire sale at the T-P ten years ago. Maybe you really could just flip all the TV stations to Trumpist propaganda and no one would notice.   

Or maybe it's not as bad as all that and Kim's Tegna deal isn't really about Sinclair programming. Maybe we'll just get more gambling everywhere.