Since September 2013, when Sinclair Inc. announced it would be acquiring a large group of broadcast TV stations from New Age Media, a Wilkes Barre-Scranton property’s ownership has served as a prime example of what a company can do to operate a station it cannot legally purchase due to the FCC’s national TV ownership reach cap.
Now, Sinclair is taking the step to make this station an owned-and-operated entity, given the anticipated thawing of the cap by Commission Chairman Brendan Carr.
A transfer of control request and waiver documents have been submitted for the Media Bureau’s review and approval that would finally give Sinclair ownership of WSWB-TV, an affiliate of The CW Network serving Northeastern Pennsylvania.
The seller is MPS Media, which hasn’t operated the station since September 2007. That’s when New Age Media took control of WSWB via a Joint Sales and Shared Services Agreement.
With the New Age Media-Sinclair deal was drafted, MPS Media intended to sell WSWB to Cunningham Media, a cozy shared services partner of Sinclair. This would have had Sinclair enter an LMA with Cunningham, pairing WSWB operations with Sinclair-owned WOLF-TV. However, that deal didn’t happen. Instead, MPS remained the licensee of WSWB.
Now, that 2007 option is being executed by Sinclair’s “WQMY Licensee LLC,” giving it a “triopoly” in NEPA. That’s because Sinclair owns not only WOLF-TV but also WQMY-TV.
As Sinclair sees it, owning WSWB, WOLF, and WQMY — all UHF stations — will not result in any change to Sinclair’s national ownership reach. The issue is the ownership of three full-power TV stations in the Wilkes Barre-Scranton DMA, thus the waiver request of the Local Television Ownership Rule. “Further, the Wilkes-Barre DMA is struggling with increased competition from digital and other programming sources,” Sinclair states, echoing arguments voiced by the NAB in recent months.
The FCC is expected to grant this request, given the relationship between WSWB and Sinclair that has long existed.
