Standard General, Apollo General and Tegna have pledged to the Federal Communications Commission that they will not jointly negotiate or share information on retransmission consent after their proposed merger-station swap, but that’s not enough for ACA Connects and the other members of the American Television Alliance (ATVA). They want conditions on the deal and an enforcement mechanism.
Standard General agreed to acquire Tegna in an $8.6 billion deal that includes the assumption of $3.2 billion in debt. Apollo Global Management (AGM) is providing some of the funding for the deal. AGM controls Cox Media Group (CMG), which will own some of the Tegna stations if the deal is approved.
In comments on that proposed deal, which is still being vetted by the FCC, ATVA said the parties are just trying to prevent conditions with a statement that has two big loopholes: “1) none of it applies to affiliates of the named parties, and 2) the part about joint negotiation does not apply to Cox.”
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The group also points out that the Justice Department has found, in another context, that CMG and Tegna have “already” (emphasis ATVA's) unlawfully shared information. In 2019, the DOJ settled with CMG, Tegna and other broadcast groups over issues of sharing competitively sensitive information related to the ad market. Justice had alleged that the broadcasters — and, in the case of CMG, its CoxReps ad-rep firm — illegally shared information that harmed the spot ad market.
Given those issues, the FCC “cannot rely on a single-paragraph assurance about Applicants’ behavior,” ATVA asserted. Instead, it said the FCC should include a provision explicitly preventing the parties from “jointly negotiating retransmission-consent agreements for stations in the same market through collusive actions, such as by sharing retransmission consent terms and fees for any of their broadcast stations with each other.”
ATVA said the FCC “should also promulgate the kind of reasonable enforcement mechanism based on the Sinclair consent decree,” which the group proposed in its initial comments and it said should be no sweat if the applicants’ statement about their intentions regarding retransmission consent is believable. ▪️
