The Inbox....

Yesterday, FTVLive showed you how Tegna’s WBNS in Columbus was able to “Verify” a story that most of us learned in 7th grade.

One Columbus insider wrote the Inbox to say how Tegna is flushing WBNS history down the toilet.

Here’s the email:

As you can see, for a station that has only been under Tegna ownership for a little over a year, they've pretty much ruined a long-dominant station. Dispatch Broadcasting Group set them up pretty well, with the competition being a Nexstar station (WCMH) and a Sinclair triopoly (WSYX/WTTE/WWHO)--and you see the results under Tegna.

The competition isn't exactly pushovers, but WBNS has long dominated them. WCMH, a former NBC O&O, has placed a lot of local emphasis on their news coverage since NBC sold them off in 2006.

WSYX is, yes, Sinclair, but for a station that has been owned by Sinclair since 1996 and is in a swing state, is actually one of their better stations with regards to news content. They rarely air Sinclair's must-runs and tend to be relatively unbiased in their news coverage compared to other Sinclair stations. Additionally, their LMA partner WTTE (which was actually built and signed on by Sinclair in 1984 and has been owned by Sinclair-controlled sidecar Cunningham Broadcasting since acquiring WSYX) actually gets better ratings than the senior station and Columbus has long been one of Sinclair's most profitable markets. WTTE also airs the majority of Ohio State football games through its Fox affiliation, which needless to say are huge rating draws in Central Ohio.

So yeah, despite the relative strength of the competition, WBNS was still dominant under Dispatch but Tegna has ruined them. Enough to the point that people I know who watched them before are now watching the competition.

---