According to the lawsuit Sinclair “committed to use its reasonable best efforts to obtain regulatory approval as promptly as possible,” Tribune said in a statement, but instead “in an effort to maintain control over stations it was obligated to sell, [it] engaged in unnecessarily aggressive and protracted negotiations with [federal regulators].”
“Sinclair’s entire course of conduct has been in blatant violation of the Merger Agreement and, but for Sinclair’s actions, the transaction could have closed long ago,” Tribune said in its lawsuit, according to the statement.
The deal was worth $3.9 billion for Tribune Media and would have added more than 40 stations including KTLA in Los Angeles, WPIX in New York and WGN-TV in Chicago to Sinclairs list of local affiliates. (Tribune also has stakes in the Food Network and job-search website CareerBuilder.)
Sinclair already has 173 stations around the country, including KENV in Salt Lake City, KOMO in Seattle and WKRC in Cincinnati. The Tribune deal, plus other pending acquisitions, will give Sinclair a total of 233 TV stations. But the Hunt Valley, Maryland-based company had offered to sell some stations to comply with Federal Communications Commission rules.
The deal could still come back together but for now, it looks to be dead.
Source: New York Post
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