We have just cracked into Andrew Ross Sorkin’s bestseller “1929” here at the TVND World Headquarters. We plan to make it our Thanksgiving-week read while traveling to see family, as we assume most everyone will be doing in some form in the days ahead. (We’ll note that we may be a bit sporadic in publishing anything new here, assuming that even the “always be dealing” types will take a break from the action.)

But the week that is just ending has had us thinking more about the premise that the business events of the roaring 1920s could be recycling now in the 2020s. And as we end this year, which marks the mid-point of the decade, the stop signals on the tracks ahead couldn’t be any more red in color.

And for our purposes here, we are not even considering the never-more-improbable landscape that is anything remotely political, either globally or just here on our shores. And pretty much everywhere in between.

No, we are still very much focused on the television business. Or at least whatever is set to be left of it when all the dust settles.

We started this week writing about the odd courtship between Sinclair Broadcasting Group (Stock Ticker: SBGI) and The E.W. Scripps Company, widely known by its surname, Scripps (Ticker: SSP). The week has progressed with suggestions that Sinclair is continuing to increase its stake in the publicly traded stock of Scripps, which continues to play its “reluctant bride” role about potentially heading to the altar to enter into an unholy union.

Tim Hanlon, one of the principal scribes over at TVRev.com, just wrote a fascinating look at a potential Sinclair-Scripps deal. He called it a 'reality check,” and we’d certainly suggest it is well worth your time to read his take. Tim doesn’t mince words (which is why we always enjoy his writing). He calls the situation "a tangle of structural, regulatory, and reputational hazards."

He proceeds to dissect the various challenges to consummating the marriage, and zooms in on the specific market challenges in Baltimore (where Sincalir is based), Cincinnati (where Scripps is based), and Nashville (where country music and its countless songs about bad relationships are based).  Tim concludes his analysis with this bit of clarity about the Sinclair-Scripps deal: "Combined with a corporate culture prone to political activism, financial overextension, and regulatory brinkmanship, it represents a high-risk consolidation of US local television."

(Don’t feel like you need to hold anything back, brother Hanlon.)

Forgive us, but we do have to ask precisely what isn’t "a high-risk consolidation of US local television these days?"

And is anyone actually worried about those “hazards” you mentioned? Certainly not the regulatory ones--because those seem to be as illusory as those perfect marriages we kept getting told about by the never-ending stream of “trad wives” pontificating from the front seat of their cars on seemingly every social media platform available.

The amount of sucking up to the power brokers in Washington and the money brokers in New York City isn’t too hard to follow. As mega-billion-dollar bids were submitted to acquire either all or part of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), the business press is running at full speed with speculation that the Father-Son duo of Larry and David Ellison of the newly minted Paramount-Skydance (PSKY) has the inside track on that deal because they have the ear of the POTUS. And they may have already tipped their hand: if they were to get their hands on WBD's assets, they would be kicking out those pesky CNN anchors--who aren’t beloved in the White House these days—right to the curb to join the ever-growing legion of unemployed journalists turned Substack authors. (No, that irony isn’t lost on us--at all.)

That is assuming that the Saudi Royal Family’s Investment Fund doesn’t just say to David Zaslav and the WBD board of directors: “name your price."

Meanwhile, Nexstar Chairman and CEO Perry Sook was making the rounds this week to friendly haunts he knew might be an important screen or two, somewhere in the District of Columbia. Sook told Fox Business anchor (and best female impersonator of the hyperbolic Jim Cramer) Maria Bartiromo, that his proposed deal to acquire rival TEGNA was “thanks to President Trump and his administration that is focused on eliminating unnecessary rules and unshackling businesses to compete in the current environment.” He went on to hail FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s determination that this is “a break-glass moment for local television”. He praised Carr’s promise to “review and we hope eliminate the outdated rules that govern the size and scope of a company like Nexstar."

Host Bartiromo declared that Sook was “absolutely right” and ticked off the shopping list of supposedly great things that the current administration wants to do. She then played a clip of Chairman Carr talking about the questionable relationships where unlicensed national programmers like Disney, Comcast, and Paramount put pressure on local television broadcasters.”

You know, to carry all that evil programming from the likes of Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and Stephen Colbert. (The latter only until next May.)

Chairman Sook then defended his projected synergy figure of $300 million in savings from taking over TEGNA, when Bartiromo noted that at least one industry analyst said that figure might be “light by 50% or more.” He responded that they are into the “second round of diligence” with TEGNA and that while there could be more costs to be cut—or rather more “synergies" to be discovered—and those might allow for even more to be invested in local news, though probably from one building rather than two in the “9 or 10” overlap markets they have identified where each company already has a station. And presumably a building and people working in it.

But lest you fear all that coming consolidation, Sook was quick to remind Bartiromo and her viewers: “We need strong companies that have the ability to scale and preserve local journalism…because as you know, we face an existential threat from big tech in an era of disinformation and fake news. And we, at the local level, we believe we are anti-fake news, maybe the last bastion of that serving local communities.”

Don’t worry about those local communities, because Perry put it plainly: “You need big companies that have the ability to, have the financial wherewithal to support local journalism and grow it over time. Otherwise, I fear we kind of go the way of the newspaper industry."

(Hopefully, that puts all your concerns to rest, because there certainly weren’t any big companies in the newspaper business before it was decimated in the changing media landscape of the previous decade. Of course, you may also remember that there were many more newspapers back in the 1920s. Don’t get stuck on those troubling details.)

The entire interview ran about twelve and a half minutes. It’s worth a watch if you haven’t seen it.

There was another figure from Mr. Sook that we thought worth noting. He said, “We see growth from expanding the amount of local news. If you look at the acquisitions we’ve done to date, and we’ve done about 40 of them over the nearly 30 years since I founded the company, we’ve increased the amount of local news serving those communities by about 30 percent over what they were producing at the time of acquisition.” 

He did not mention any figures on how many journalists or resources were added to produce this additional percentage of local news on the acquired properties.

Obviously, many players in the television business are hoping the FCC will put a big package of deregulation under the Christmas tree before the end of the year. And if they want that, they have to do the adult version of sitting on Santa’s lap and saying that the economy is definitely growing and the focus on “affordability” is definitely lowering prices for consumers. If you aren’t seeing that at the grocery store, don’t worry--they will come down even more in 2026. If that is what they have to say, then that is just what they will have to do.

After all, nobody wants to be on the naughty list at this time of the year.

Or at this time of the decade.

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