It appears that Tegna believes that viewers who want to watch comics anchor the newscasts, should pay more to do so.

Tegna is now demanding at AT&T’s DirecTV and U-Verse pay them more per viewer.

“As many station owners like Tegna keep losing viewers and sponsors, they’ve resorted to blacking out popular local teams or any remaining hit shows at the worst possible time in order to extract unwarranted increases over their already high fees despite their fading popularity, leaving consumers to foot the bill,” AT&T said in a statement.

What AT&T says is very true, not just for Tegna but for many TV station groups.

TV stations are losing viewers and advertisers at a fast pace and then feel that retransmission fees are the best way to recoup that lost money.

Think about how many stations are on your cable system. Now, think about how every time the contract comes up, TV stations and networks demand more money from a cable/satellite company to carry their signal. It’s not hard to see why some monthly cable bills can rival that of a car payment.

I can remember when my cable bill was about $20 a month and when I dropped cable years ago it was over $120 a month.

TV stations are chasing viewers to streaming services and away from cable. You no longer have hit shows like Seinfeld, Friends or the Big Bang Theory to offer and viewers are getting sick of paying more and more for less.

When newspapers started dying off, many TV executives said that would never happen to television, but yet here we are. TV groups have put almost all their eggs in the retransmission basket and are ready to ride it right into the ground.

Look at Tegna. Do you really think there is a single station owned by Tegna that is worth paying more for than two years ago?

Of course not. But that is exactly what Tegna is doing, by demanding that AT&T pay them more for each viewer. In the end, AT&T will give them more money and the customers will see their bill go up yet again.

We are in a pandemic and people are hurting right now. Millions are out of work and are trying to make ends meet. While all that is happening, Tegna is demanding that those people pay more money to watch their stations.

Tegna raked in millions and millions of dollars on political advertising this past year. Do they really need to demand more money from the viewers that watched those ads as well?

How fair is it that Tegna is asking the viewers that were bombarded with political ads to pony up more money to watch that kind of thing?

Maybe TV stations can not demand more money this time and show the viewer that you care about them more than the money.