Sinclair Broadcast Group
Sinclair, Inc., doing business as Sinclair Broadcast Group, is a publicly traded American telecommunications conglomerate that is controlled by the descendants of company founder Julian Sinclair Smith. Headquartered in the Baltimore suburb of Cockeysville, Maryland, the company is the second-largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations (after Nexstar Media Group), owning or operating a total of 193 stations across the country in over 100 markets (covering 40% of American households), and is the largest owner of stations affiliated with Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, MyNetworkTV, and The CW. Sinclair also owns four digital multicast networks (Comet, Charge!, The Nest, and TBD), and sports-oriented cable networks (Stadium, Tennis Channel, and Bally Sports Regional Networks). On June 2, 2021, it was announced that Sinclair had become a Fortune 500 company, having reached 2020 annual revenues of US$5.9 billion (equivalent to $6.8 billion in 2023).[3]
Sinclair Broadcast Group
Chesapeake Television Corporation (1971–1985)
Nasdaq: SBGI (Class A)
Russell 1000 Index component
United States
- David D. Smith (executive
chairman) - Christopher Ripley (president
and CEO)
Broadcasting equipment
Sports and news programming
$2.73 billion USD[1] (2016)
$233.4 million USD[1] (2016)
$245.3 million USD[1] (2016)
$5.96 billion USD[1] (2016)
$557.9 million USD[1] (2016)
Smith family (controlling)
11,500[2] (2022)
- Sinclair Broadcast Group
- Chesapeake Television
- Sinclair Networks
Sinclair Original Programming
A 2019 study in the American Political Science Review found that "stations bought by Sinclair reduce coverage of local politics, increase national coverage and move the ideological tone of coverage in a conservative direction relative to other stations operating in the same market."[4][5] The company has been criticized by journalists and media analysts for requiring its stations to broadcast packaged video segments and its news anchors to read prepared scripts that contain pro-Trump editorial content, including warnings about purported "fake news" in mainstream media, while Trump has tweeted support for watching Sinclair over CNN and NBC.[6][7][8][9][10]
History[edit]
Early roots[edit]
The company's roots date back to the late 1950s, when electrical engineer Julian Sinclair Smith and his wife Carolyn B. Smith, owning 34.5% of the shares, along with a group of shareholders, formed the Commercial Radio Institute, a broadcasting trade school in Baltimore, Maryland. In March 1958, Commercial Radio Institute applied to build an FM radio station in Baltimore,[11] with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granting the construction permit – for the estimated US$25,964 (equivalent to $271,400 in 2023) construction project – in April 1959.[12] Sinclair's first station, WFMM-FM (now WPOC), signed on the air in February 1960.[13]
By 1967, Smith (as Chesapeake Engineering Placement Service, partly owned by the name-shortened Commercial Radio Inc.) had applied for, and was granted, a construction permit for a new UHF television station in Baltimore, expected to be operating by September 1968 on channel 45 (no call sign yet assigned).[14]
Chesapeake Television Corporation[edit]
Channel 45, with the call sign WBFF, did not sign on until April 11, 1971. By that time, Chesapeake Engineering Placement Service had changed its name to Chesapeake Television Corporation. The Commercial Radio Institute, by then a division of Chesapeake Television Corporation, would found WPTT (now WPNT) in Pittsburgh, in 1978; and WTTE in Columbus, Ohio, in 1984. All three stations originally were independents, though WBFF and WTTE became charter affiliates of the Fox Broadcasting Company at its launch in 1986. The Fox affiliation in Pittsburgh went to higher-rated WPGH-TV, which would be purchased by Sinclair in 1990.
Chesapeake's first foray into local news came in the early 1980s when it launched a newscast on WPTT, a rarity at this time for stations not affiliated with the then-major networks (ABC, CBS and NBC). This newscast was called WPTT News, and in the opening segment, the letters "news" were formed from a compass indicating the four cardinal directions. This opening segment, featuring then-anchorman Kevin Evans, appeared briefly (and was audible) in the movie Flashdance during a scene where Jennifer Beals' character returns home and turns on the television. The presentation was relatively low-budget, with the anchor simply reading copy, with no field video shots other than the weather read over a stock video shot denoting the conditions outside, and was not a factor in taking ratings away from then-market laggard WIIC-TV (now WPXI), much less solid runner-up WTAE-TV and then-locally owned Group W powerhouse KDKA-TV. As WBFF did not air newscasts until 1991 and WTTE would not air any newscasts from its 1984 sign-on until Sinclair purchased ABC affiliate WSYX in 1996, this marked the company's only foray into local news for years, a genre it would become much more involved in from the mid-1990s on.
Programming[edit]
Sinclair had experimented with using a centralized news organization called News Central that provided prepackaged news segments for distribution to several of the group's stations. These segments were integrated into programming during local news broadcasts. Mark Hyman, a high-ranking executive at Sinclair, also created "The Point", a series of conservative editorial segments that were broadcast on stations operated by the group that maintain news departments.[155][156]
In October 2015, Sinclair premiered Full Measure, a syndicated public affairs program hosted by Sharyl Attkisson.[157]
On July 1, 2017, Sinclair launched a new daily morning kids' TV block called KidsClick, partnering with This TV.[158] The block was moved to TBD in 2018, and was eventually discontinued 8 months later.
In June 2020, Sinclair announced it would launch "a headline news service" that would air weekday mornings (6:00 AM – 9:00 AM local time) and rely on news-gathering services of Sinclair's stations as well as original content, similar in format to NewsNation produced by Nexstar Media Group for WGN America.[159] The show, titled The National Desk, launched on January 18, 2021, and airs on Sinclair's CW and MyNetworkTV-affiliated stations along with its Fox-affiliated stations that do not have their own local morning news shows.[160] On September 27, 2021, The National Desk expanded to a two-hour evening newscast, airing 10 pm to midnight Eastern Time.[161]
Company type
Television broadcasting
Broadcast television
Advertising
3,928,000,000 United States dollar (2022) 
3,980,000,000 United States dollar (2022)
2,652,000,000 United States dollar (2022)
Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc.