By FishbowlLA Staff
A week where the biggest LA media story happened in a meeting that never took place, the second-biggest happened in a court filing, and the two most entertaining happened on the FM dial. Here’s what moved between August 21 and 28.
Bonta calls off the Paramount talks before anyone sits down
California Attorney General Rob Bonta cancelled a settlement meeting with Paramount that had been scheduled for August 24, accusing the company of leaking and mischaracterizing an earlier round of talks. “Not only did Paramount leak the alleged substance of settlement discussions, but they misrepresented these discussions, demonstrating a lack of good faith,” Bonta said in a statement to the New York Times.
The dispute is over Paramount’s roughly $110 billion pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery, which twelve state attorneys general are suing to block. Bonta has signalled that any deal would have to change the structure of the combined company — meaning Paramount would have to sell off parts of the business it has spent months trying to buy — and has pushed back on behavioral promises, including CEO David Ellison’s pledge to release 30 films a year. Absent a settlement, trial is set for March 2027.
The local politics here are worth watching, because they cut against the AG. Governor Gavin Newsom has made clear he would rather see this settled, and Mayor Karen Bass has called for a quick resolution out of concern for production and employment in Hollywood. Bonta is now the man standing between a nervous industry town and a deal it half wants, half fears — and this week he made clear he is in no hurry to make it easy.
Nexstar finally seats a TEGNA board it might get to keep
Nexstar told a federal court on Tuesday that it has installed a new TEGNA board of directors: TEGNA CEO Patrick Paolini, investment banker Bruce Levy, and former Media General director Eugene Davis, with TEGNA general counsel Marc Sher serving as board secretary without a vote. Lee Ann Gliha, the last Nexstar executive left on the board, resigned Monday once the new slate was in place.
This is the cleanup from a judge’s ruling earlier this month that Nexstar’s first attempt — stacking TEGNA’s board with its own C-suite — violated the hold-separate injunction in the antitrust case brought by DIRECTV and a group of state attorneys general. The plaintiffs’ worry, spelled out plainly in the filings, is that a bigger Nexstar consolidates and closes local newsrooms.
Angelenos have a specific reason to follow the housekeeping: Nexstar owns KTLA. Whatever governance structure survives this case is the structure that will eventually decide how much newsroom Channel 5 gets to keep.
Entravision fully unwraps Reyna 103.1
After a soft launch in June, Entravision this week formally rolled out “Reyna 103.1” — KDLD Santa Monica and KDLE Newport Beach — pitching it as a creator-led multimedia platform built by and for Latinas. The mix is roughly 80 percent Spanish and 20 percent English, spread across on-air, streaming, podcasts, social and a mobile web app, with a roster of LA-based creators including Vicky Loza, Raq-C and South Central native Emily Tapia.
“We’re challenging ourselves to rethink what a radio brand can be by creating content the way our audience consumes it today,” Entravision audio president Eduardo Maytorena said in announcing the lineup.
The realism check: 103.1 is a limited signal covering only parts of LA and Orange County, and it registered a 0.3 share in the April 2026 book. Reyna is not going to win a ratings period. What it might do is prove whether a legacy radio company can build an audience the way a creator does — and Entravision picked the toughest, most crowded media market in the country to find out.
Christmas came to the dial on August 21
Saul Levine’s Mount Wilson FM Broadcasters flipped 105.1 KKGO-HD3 to all-Christmas music on Friday, August 21, branded “America’s Christmas Station.” Levine told RadioInsight the subchannel will keep playing carols straight through to the start of 2027 — roughly nineteen weeks of holiday music beginning in the last full week of summer.
The subchannel has had a strange year. It spent months looping Gene Autry’s “Back In The Saddle,” teed up a Classic Country format that never launched, and passed through a stretch of Keith Urban covers and California-themed oldies before landing on Yuletide. Before all that it was classical “K-Mozart+.”
RadioInsight declined to award the flip the season’s first-all-Christmas title, reserving that honor for a station on a primary signal. Fair enough. But this is a very LA piece of radio history in the making: the market that gave the format world some of its most stubborn independents now has tinsel on the HD tier four months before anyone asked for it.
That’s the week
Quiet stretch on the local TV and newspaper side — no LA newsroom hires, exits or layoffs surfaced in verifiable reporting this week, and we would rather say so than pad the column. Radio, as usual, refused to be boring. Hearing something we should be chasing — a memo, an exit, a format flip, a masthead change? Send it along. FishbowlLA runs on tips.