The history of television would not be complete without the name of Monty Hall. Mr. Hall was the original host and co-creator of the classic TV game show “Let’s Make A Deal” from its birth in 1963 through various incarnations on various networks and in syndication until 1991. The game show was revived in 2009 by CBS for its daytime schedule, with Wayne Brady filling the role that Monty Hall was synonymous with for nearly three decades. When Hall passed away in 2017 from heart failure at the age of 96, Wayne Brady took a moment on the show to recognize Monty Hall for being a big supporter of the show up until the day he died. He acknowledged him for raising “hundreds of millions of dollars for charity."

It is true that Monty Hall was quite the philanthropist, and his name is on hospital wards in both his native Canada and in his adopted United States. He was a regular for years on Jerry Lewis’s annual telethon for Muscular Dystrophy and lent his name to many other charities. His name appears on various honors, including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

And as anyone who has ever watched “Let’s Make A Deal” can tell you, in either the original or current versions, Monty Hall created and perfected the show’s ultimate climax in each episode where a contestant from the audience is offered “the big deal of the day.” In the game, the contestant must choose one of three large “doors” on the studio stage. Behind one door is a fabulous prize, another has a lesser consolation prize, and the third has a gag prize worth nothing, or what is known in the show as a “Zonk."

The fun is in watching to see if the contestant selects the correct door and wins the biggest prize.

This very dilemma is at the heart of a probability puzzle conceived by a statistician in 1975 and detailed in a journal called The American Statistician. The puzzle was dubbed “the Monty Hall Problem,” and it addressed the probability of what happens after a contestant in the game-show scenario learns what is behind one of the two doors they didn’t pick. The host offers the contestant the opportunity to switch their choice or sometimes to take a cash amount in exchange for walking away from their choice.

This brings us to today’s story from the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Flint and Lauren Thomas, which reported that Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBGI) has taken a significant 8% stake in the stock of broadcasting rival E.W. Scripps Company (SSP). The value of the stake was estimated at just over $15 million. The news turbocharged Scripps shares, sending them over 30% higher in midday trading on this Monday, even as Scripps quickly said it would “take all appropriate steps to protect the company and the company’s shareholders from the opportunistic actions of Sinclair or anyone else."

For its part, Sinclair said that it has “been in talks for months" about a deal that would combine the companies. You will recall that the WSJ’s Flint reported on August 19th that Sinclair was going to merge with TEGNA. It was a blockbuster story until Nexstar’s Chairman and CEO, Perry Sook, did his best impersonation of ESPN’s College Football legend Lee Corso and said, “Not so fast, my fine friend!” Sook then rolled out his 6-plus-billion-dollar offer, in which Nexstar would acquire TEGNA, and remain the nation’s largest owner of local television stations—assuming the current FCC will relax its ownership rules to allow the transaction to proceed. (The just-ended government shutdown slowed things down a bit on that front.)

Apparently, Sinclair then set its sights on a more affordable partner to merge with. And that was the Cincinnati-based Scripps, which currently owns 61 television stations—though it has announced plans to sell its Indianapolis station, WRTV, to DuJuan McCoy’s Circle City Broadcasting, which already owns and operates WISH-TV and WNDY in that market.

Adding Scripps' 60 TV stations, across some 40 markets, to Sinclair’s 185 “owned and operated” stations in 85 markets would make the combined entity the second “mega TV group” after a combined Nexstar-TEGNA. And that total station count doesn’t include the 100-plus stations owned by so-called “sidecar” companies such as Cunningham Broadcasting, Howard Stirk Holdings, and Deerfield Media. Those companies have agreements that have allowed Sinclair to operate their stations as if they were owned by Sinclair, without running afoul of those pesky FCC rules limiting one owner to no more than 39% of local TV stations.

So Scripps now knows what is behind “Door Number One,” and that is an eager Sinclair with an “urge to merge.” And that leaves the fate of Scripps CEO Adam Symson and his entire team in the Scripps tower in Cincinnati a bit uncertain if that deal were agreed to. Scripps is the smaller of the two companies, with a market cap of nearly $365 million, compared to Sinclair’s about $1.2 billion. The “enterprise value” of the two companies is closer, with Scripps at $3.40 billion and Sinclair at $4.84 billion. But Sinclair has a larger amount of debt of the two, which is probably what triggered it to begin ”a strategic review” of its operations earlier this year.

The question now for Scripps is what would be behind “Door Number Two or Door Number Three,” as Monty Hall would have put it. We can deduce that door number two would be to tell those Sinclair folks from Cockeysville, Maryland, to “go pound sand” and keep running Scripps as the noble enterprise that still professes it strives to “Give light and the people will find their way.” To accomplish this, Scripps likely needs to unload some stations to bring in some cash that would give Symson & Company some “dry powder” to work with in rebuffing Sinclair’s advances.

Then there would be door number three. What might be behind it is anyone’s guess. Another suitor better suited to Scripps’ legacy as a “higher calling” rather than treating journalism merely as a for-profit business. After all, the company still hosts the National Spelling Bee each year, a tradition that dates back to its days as a major newspaper publisher. Another complicating factor is the significant control still held by the descendants of the Scripps family through their ownership of a special class of voting shares in the company.

Door number three could have just about anything behind it. And thus the “Monty Hall Problem” comes into play. In the “Let’s Make A Deal” game, a contestant would pick one of three doors, giving them a 1-in-3 chance of winning the largest prize available. If the host, who knows which door has that prize behind it, showed them what was behind one of the doors they didn’t pick, then probability suggests that the contestant’s chances are now one in two, or basically 50/50. But in an interview in the New York Times in 1991, Monty Hall explained that because he controlled the game and knew what was behind each door, he could play on the psychology of the contestant and make a tempting offer for the contestant to switch their choice to the other remaining door, which raised the drama of that moment in the show.

But the secret was that he didn’t have to do so. He could play the moment out however he wanted to because there wasn’t a rule that required him to make an alternative offer. The contestant just had to live with whatever door they originally selected. And hope that there wasn’t a “Zonk” waiting for them behind it.

So it is a pretty tough decision for Scripps. Whether to take what it now knows is behind Door Number One, a merger with Sinclair, or Door Number Two, which is staying on its own through whatever means necessary, or then again, whatever solution might await behind Door Number Three. One that hopefully isn’t one gigantic “Zonk."

Of course, in the game show, there would always be another contestant playing for “the big deal of the day” come the very next episode. In the real world of the television business, as it stands in late 2025 — nothing is nearly that certain.

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