Palm Beach CBS affiliate WPEC along with the rest of the television stations its parent company Freedom Communications owns, has been sold to Sinclair Broadcasting. The deal, announced today and pending regulatory approval, is worth $385 million dollars for all eight TV stations in Freedom’s portfolio, the largest of which is WPEC.
With WPEC Sinclair Broadcasting will now have a duopoly in the Palm Beach market having already aquired CW affiliate WTVX with the purchase of Four Points Media in September 2011. Getting a regulatory approval will probably be a breeze since according to current duopoly rules, in order for a company to own two stations in the same market there must be at least 8 full power stations in that market and one of the two stations in the duopoly can not be ranked in the top 4. WPEC is often second or third in ratings while WTVX ranks below WPBF.
I guess that means Goodbye Enforcer, Hello Sinclair Theme. I was, however, hoping Post-Newsweek or Gannett would buy WPEC, but I’ll take Sinclair.
Maybe, maybe not.
Will be interesting once Sinclair assumes control of these stations. Perhaps WPEC can resume producing a 10pm newscast, but this time for WTVX? (Ironically, WTVX was the CBS affiliate for West Palm Beach before then-ABC station WPEC replaced it in 1989.)
could happen but Sinclair is notoriously cheap so who knows what they’ll think up
If anything, the 10pm newscast would be on WTVX to compete with WFLX. When CBS owned WTVX there was a time they aired WFOR CBS 4s 10pm news on WTVX as well as WBFS.
Problem is Sinclair then also owns WTCN, WWHB, and WTVX…Can they really own WPEC also?
This is pretty much the worst-case scenario. Sinclair is notoriously cheap.
GB: Under current FCC rules yes, they can. WTCN and WWHB are not “significantly viewed” stations.
Which is wrong. WTVX IS the CW affiliate, WTCN IS the MyTV affiliate, WPEC IS the CBS affiliate. WWHB is the only independent. So this means that 3/6 major network affiliated stations in Palm Beach is all Sinclair owned.
This just seems like a significant loophole, and I bet this scenario doesn’t exist anywhere else. I would think this is almost an antitrust issue.
GB, FCC rules allow duopolies, etc. under the conditions which were outlined in the body of the story above.