With its shares in the upper-$20 range and regulatory approval of its privatization offer from Standard General getting positive and negative input as the FCC decides whether or not to approve the deal, TEGNA‘s Board of Directors have moved ahead with declaring a regular quarterly dividend.
With its quarterly earnings report expected between November 2-7, the TEGNA Board approved a dividend of $0.095.
The dividend is payable on January 3, 2023, to stockholders of record as of the close of business on December 9, 2022.
The reward to shareholders comes 10 days after Soo Kim, head of Standard General, on October 17 responded to the “repeated ad hominem attacks made by opponents” of its proposed acquisition of TEGNA with the FCC, raising concerns with “certain opposing parties’ conduct in the proceeding.”
He touted Deb McDermott, who is slated to succeed Dave Lougee as TEGNA CEO upon the deal’s closing. “As a woman and a minority, respectively, we may well have had to work twice as hard as most to get to where we are in the media industry,” Soo said. “We will bring decades of experience and perspectives to the ownership and leadership of TEGNA, an important media company.”
In particular, Standard General is “extremely concerned” by the manner in which Jon Schleuss, David Goodfriend and Andrew Schwartzman of the NewsGuild “continue to ignore the facts of this deal.”
Soo, in particular, slammed the men for their “sexist and racially charged ad hominem attacks.”
He said, “To be clear, I am ethnically Korean, and I am a proud American citizen. These three men are attempting to define what constitutes a minority or what is the right kind of diversity—this is offensive and inappropriate. And it is beyond the pale for Schleuss, Goodfriend, and Schwartzman to use my ethnicity to postulate theories of my being an agent of foreign ownership. These fact-free statements are careless given that even a cursory inspection of the documents we have provided would show that I am currently the attributable owner of multiple radio and television stations today.”
Noting the supporters of the merger, Soo concluded by noting, “We are confident that our applications are in order, our deal complies with all regulations, and we have been happy to answer forthright any and all questions. In full transparency, we have submitted 3 million documents and over 12 million pages of records and have nothing but respect for the regulatory process. We will continue to work collaboratively with FCC staff in their review of the facts of the proposed transaction. We are confident that the public statements from these three men will be seen for what they are—sentiments that have no place in America today.”
