During an earnings call with analysts where Nexstar Media Group reported massive revenue from political advertising, founder, chairman and CEO Perry Sook also told analysts that he sees opportunities for deregulation in the newly elected Trump administration and both the station group and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) will be pushing for those changes.
In June 2023, Sook was elected chairman of the joint board of directors of NAB.
Sook called deregulation, the No. 1 priority and named NextGen TV, aka ATSC 3.0, as the No. 2 priority.
“Obviously, the No. 1 legislative priority of Nexstar and our trade association, NAB, is the deregulation of ownership at both the national and the local level,” Sook said. “When you step back and look at it, our industry's real competition comes from big tech companies, who have unfettered access to every screen in America from phones, desktops to the TV in the living room, yet our ability to compete with those behemoths is stymied by regulations that were last updated in 2004.”
“To preserve local journalism, this industry needs strong companies, who can compete on a level playing field for both viewers and advertisers on every screen in America, not just some of them,” he continued. “And the time is now to seek this reform and Nexstar is once again prepared to lead. We’ve established our own government relations presence in D.C. to work with both the regulatory agencies and the new Congress. Ultimately … we see this as a bipartisan issue, appealing to Republicans due to its deregulatory nature and to Democrats as a consumer issue by preserving local news service in communities across the country.”
Sook also argued that deregulation would boost the value of broadcasters, noting: “I took the company public in 2003 at roughly a 12 times EBITDA multiple, due in part to the prospect of deregulation coming from the 108th Congress, which took office in January of 2004. My point being that progress on deregulation has been a catalyst for multiple expansion in the past. So we plan to move with a sense of urgency on this as well as push for the formal adoption of ATSC 3.0 as our industry's transmission standard. That is our and our trade association’s No. 2 priority with this new administration.”
During the Q3 earnings call, Sook also said that “with the election behind us, we have pretty clear visibility into the 2024 political advertising revenue picture. As of Election Day, we booked political advertising revenue of $491 million year-to-date, a record presidential election year so far versus the $479 million we booked through Election Day in 2020. Once again, local television received by far the largest amount of political spending, and it remains the medium of choice for candidates and interest groups to reach local voters at scale.”
