Television broadcaster Nexstar Media Group, which owns WBRE and operates WYOU, the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton affiliates of NBC and CBS, is in advanced talks to acquire rival Tegna, the owner of WNEP, the local ABC affiliate, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Gary Weitman, executive vice president and chief communications officer for Nexstar in Irving, Texas, would not elaborate on any potential sale.
“Nexstar does not comment on rumors or speculation,” he said in an emailed statement.
Molly McMahon, a spokeswoman for Tegna, based in Tysons, Virginia, , declined to comment on the matter Tuesday.
Attempts to reach WNEP and WBRE officials Tuesday were unsuccessful.
Mission Broadcasting of Wichita Falls, Texas, owns WYOU, but Nexstar operates the station under a shared services agreement.
The Federal Communications Commission imposes limits on the number of broadcast stations — radio and TV — an entity can own, officials said. FCC rules effectively prohibit a merger between any two of the big four broadcast television networks: ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC.
WNEP’s station in Moosic on Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2025. (REBECCA PARTICKA/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)
An entity is permitted to own up to two television stations in the same Designated Market Area (DMA) if the service areas of the stations don’t overlap or at least one of the stations is not ranked among the top four rated stations in the DMA based on audience share, FCC officials said. However, an applicant may seek to demonstrate that a top-four combination would serve the public interest despite the prohibition.
In December 2018, Nexstar agreed to buy former WNEP parent company Tribune Media for $4.1 billion. The company later identified WNEP as one of the stations it intended to sell so its acquisition could obtain regulatory approvals.
WNEP was one of 11 stations Tegna acquired from Nexstar in March 2019 for $740 million.
Tegna was formed in June 2015 when it was split off from Gannett. The company owns 64 television stations in 51 U.S. markets.
Carl Abraham, who retired as WNEP’s news director in April 2021 after more than 37 years at the station, fears the potential deal could have adverse consequences on both employees and viewers of the local news stations.
“If the FCC changes the current ownership rules to allow the proposed Nexstar/Tegna merger to happen, it could be devastating to TV news organizations and stations in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre DMA,” Abraham said in an emailed statement. “The consolidation of the local stations would likely mean the loss of numerous jobs and fewer resources to cover news in 17 counties of northeastern and central Pennsylvania.”
WNEP’s station in Moosic on Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2025. (REBECCA PARTICKA/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)
WNEP’s station in Moosic on Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2025. (REBECCA PARTICKA/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)
WNEP’s station in Moosic on Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2025. (REBECCA PARTICKA/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)
The WNEP-TV news building on Montage Mountain Road in Moosic. (TIMES-TRIBUNE FILE PHOTO)
Analyst Keith Kobland, who worked for WTVH-TV in Syracuse, New York, for more than 20 years before being laid off when the station shut down in 2009, also worries Nexstar’s potential purchase of Tegna could negatively impact NEPA residents.
At the time, WTVH, a CBS affiliate, entered a shared service agreement with the NBC affiliate, which basically took over newsroom operations, Kobland said.
“It was done under the guise of this will expand our news coverage and create more news opportunities, but at the end of the day you have two stations running the same news,” he said.
Kobland currently serves as adjunct professor of broadcasting and media relations manager at Syracuse University.
While he understands the deal would likely make sense from a business standpoint, he expressed concerns about other potential ramifications.
“If you can run operations out of one newsroom, you’re going to be able to save money and theoretically put that money back into the product,” Kobland said. “But what my fear is and what my experience has been is when you have one station essentially consuming another station, you’re going to have more of a temptation among ownership to reduce costs or at least figure out a way to do things more cost effectively. From a purely employee standpoint and a journalism standpoint, it just makes me very nervous, because from what I’ve seen it leads to less news coverage, or more of a central editorial theme and not more of an independent editorial theme.”
Kobland added Nexstar owning such a large volume of local news stations also raises some concerns.
“Nexstar is a very big player — they have more than 200 stations and this is going to put them over 250, 260, if they take over Tegna,” he said. “That’s a lot of property for one broadcast group to control from an editorial standpoint. There used to be the an expression in journalism classes about the gatekeeper. This is one gatekeeper for a lot of different gates. From a standpoint of having boots on the ground covering news, having this kind of consolidation is dangerous for viewers and employees.”