poledo said:
The way things are playing out in Mobile today appears to give Sinclair borderline monopoly status or at minimum far too much power when it comes to negotiating and setting values in retransmission or even advertising.
Maybe the FCC should allow COX to purchase the Mobile Press Register and a couple of TV and radio stations in this market to bundle with their CATV holdings here? That seems more reasonable than putting ABC and NBC under the same umbrella seeing that the newspaper is desperately trying to stay profitable and Cox cable is loosing customers hand over fist to Sat and UVerse.
Am I making much sense?
I follow where you're going here, now.
Let me say first of all that I've never been to Mobile or Pensacola (and need to fix that one of these days), so it's hard for me to say from a distance how much ownership is too much ownership.
Easy answer, off the top: because retrans consent is negotiated on a national scale between broadcast companies and cable/sat companies, it probably doesn't make a bit of difference whether Sinclair owns/controls one station or four in any given market. The leverage Sinclair holds over Direct or Dish or Cox or TWC stems much more from the total number of markets in which it's present than from the number of stations it controls in each. If anything, it seems to me that owning more stations gives a group a little more of a fair shot against a national player like Direct or Dish.
More complicated answers: The media world is changing incredibly quickly right now, and ownership regulation isn't even coming close to keeping up. Pretty much everyone these days (including many FCC commissioners) agrees that we are long past the time when owning a daily newspaper provided so much media dominance by itself that cross-ownership between that newspaper and radio/TV/cable should still be automatically banned. But in decades of batting the issue around, nobody's quite been able to come up with a way to repeal that ban that will get through both the FCC and Congress, so it remains on the books.
From what I know from a distance about Mobile and Pensacola, I think it's fair to say that they're a little unusual as DMAs go. If TV stations were being allocated to the region for the first time today, instead of in the 1950s, I think it's likely that Mobile would be its own DMA separate from Pensacola/FWB - and that both would thus be smaller markets than the combined Mobile/Pensacola DMA is now.
It's my guess (and please correct me if I'm wrong!) that for local advertisers, Mobile and Pensacola/FWB sort of function as separate markets anyway. There are a handful of "cobbled-together" DMAs that share TV stations but don't have much overlap across the rest of the media landscape - if you're in Springfield, Illinois, you read different newspapers and listen to different radio stations and thus live in a rather different advertising landscape from the people in Danville or Champaign-Urbana, 80-some miles away, right?
In cases like that, it's always seemed to me that the TV stations end up functioning a little different from the way they'd operate in other DMAs that might be the same size on paper but are more coherent geographically. Instead of competing against one newspaper and three or four radio clusters that service the same large-ish market (and can charge similarly large-ish market rates), a TV station in a cobbled-together DMA like Mobile-Pensacola or Johnstown-Altoona or Chico-Redding has to compete against a larger number of smaller, more nimble radio and newspapers that can charge a lot less for ads that are better targeted to the areas local advertisers really serve.
Which is a long-way-round way of saying that in your particular case, I'm not convinced that it's an absolute given that Mobile/Pensacola really
can support four completely separate TV operators. Sure, operating the NBC and ABC affiliates (and WFGX and WJTC) gives Sinclair somewhat more leverage to set ad rates...but maybe not as much as you'd think, especially on the Alabama side, where WALA and WKRG probably have a lot more influence over ad rates than WPMI could ever hope to have. And, again, that's just TV...add in two newspapers and a whole bunch of radio clusters on both sides of the state line, and local cable ads, and Groupon, and outdoor, and direct mail, and the reality is that local advertisers in Mobile and Pensacola (and pretty much anywhere else in the country) likely have more options now for good ways to reach an audience than they did 30 or 50 years ago.
One more thought here: I've long believed that the bigger problem with ownership-cap deregulation isn't on the local level, but rather national. What would serve Mobile better: the present situation where you've got three competing TV operators, one formerly-daily newspaper, several radio clusters, a cable company and UVerse
all owned by bigger national players with no specific interest in Mobile...or a scenario that might have put the newspaper and a TV station and a radio cluster all under one owner -
if that one owner had to abide by a national cap that limited it to operating in only a handful of markets?
