By FishbowlLA Staff
A week of paperwork with teeth. Paramount put a number on what the state of California is costing it and asked twelve attorneys general to write the check. Nexstar quietly emptied a boardroom to get out from under a judge. Charter finished swallowing Cox, which is how the Dodgers ended up on more televisions. And the Christian talk broadcaster behind two Los Angeles signals went private for a dollar a share. Here’s the week.
Paramount asks the states to post a $1.88 billion bond — and Bonta says no, again
On Monday, August 17, Paramount asked a federal court to require the twelve state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America suing to block its Warner Bros. Discovery merger to post a bond of $1,884,726,092.73. The arithmetic is not mysterious: starting October 1, Paramount owes WBD shareholders a 25-cent-per-share “ticking fee,” which works out to roughly $7 million a day, or $650 million a quarter, for as long as the deal sits unclosed. Trial is set for March 2 to March 19, 2027. Paramount’s filing estimates $1.3 billion in ticking fees will have accrued by the time closing briefs are in.
Rob Bonta’s office answered the same day, and the word was familiar. “It’s Blackmail: The Sequel, and we remain unmoved,” the California AG posted, adding that Paramount “willfully decided to include a costly ticking fee as a provision in their merger contract” and “stipulated to the timing it is now protesting.” That is the second time in eight days Bonta has reached for the same noun — he used it about the threat to move Paramount out of California, too.
The detail worth watching from an LA desk is buried further down: the DGA and IATSE have floated their own settlement terms, and one of the conditions is that the combined company remain based in Los Angeles. Two unions are trying to negotiate a zip code into an antitrust remedy. That tells you what the crews think is actually at stake here, and it isn’t cable pricing.
Nexstar clears its own executives off the TEGNA board
Four of the five directors Nexstar installed to oversee TEGNA have resigned, including founder and CEO Perry Sook, according to a status report filed Thursday, August 13 and reported by The Desk the following day. The fifth, general counsel Lee Ann Gliha, stays on only because Delaware law requires somebody to be there, and she has agreed to take no action without the court’s permission.
This is the cleanup from Judge Troy Nunley’s August 6 order, which found that stacking TEGNA’s board with sitting Nexstar executives contravened the hold-separate injunction he issued in April. A TEGNA board meeting scheduled for the afternoon of August 6 was cancelled after the order landed; the board has not met since. Nexstar has asked for until August 31 to seat replacements.
Nexstar owns KTLA, which is where this stops being a Sacramento courtroom story and starts being a Los Angeles one. Channel 5 spent February losing Mark Kriski, Lu Parker, Glen Walker, Kacey Montoya and Ellina Abovian to the layoffs that came with this empire-building. The people who made those cuts have now been ordered off a board for moving too fast to consolidate. The station is still short the anchors.
Charter closes the Cox deal, and SportsNet LA quietly gets bigger
Charter completed its $34.5 billion acquisition of Cox Communications on Thursday, August 20, and the first thing Angelenos will notice has nothing to do with broadband pricing. Spectrum SportsNet LA — the exclusive home of locally televised Dodgers games, and the network at the center of a decade of blackout grievance in this town — is now available to Cox subscribers in Las Vegas, Orange County, Palos Verdes and Santa Barbara, whose service is being rebranded as Spectrum TV.
It is a small footnote to a very large merger, and also a neat illustration of how LA sports media actually works: the carriage map moves when the cable companies merge, not when the fans complain. Orange County households that spent years unable to buy the channel at any price now get it because of a corporate transaction they had no part in. “LeadOff LA” and “Access SportsNet: Dodgers” go with it.
Salem Media goes private at a dollar a share
Also on Thursday, August 20: Salem Media Group completed its sale to WaterStone, the operating name of The Christian Community Foundation, which acquired all outstanding common stock at $1 per share and ended Salem’s run as a public company after more than five decades. WaterStone already held a 49.5 percent voting interest before the buyout, so this is less a takeover than a formalization. Salem said the price represented roughly a 250 percent premium to where the stock traded before the deal was announced in May, which is a sentence that tells you more about the stock than the premium.
Salem’s Los Angeles presence is the twin talk signals 99.5 KKLA and 870 KRLA “The Answer.” CEO David Santrella called it “an exciting day”; WaterStone president Richard von Gnechten said the deal “is not about changing what Salem is.” For the Los Angeles cluster that means the format stays, the debt pressure that pushed Salem to sell its Texas headquarters and ground its jet in March eases, and one more piece of the local dial answers to an owner nobody can look up on a ticker.
That’s the week
Four transactions, no newsroom hires, and a quiet stretch on the LA dial — RadioInsight didn’t log a single Los Angeles item all week, which is its own kind of news in August. Hearing something we’re not? FishbowlLA runs on tips. Send them along, and we’ll see you next Friday.