Sales 2023: $ 3.134 billion (€2.898 billion)

Overview

Founded in 1985, Sinclair has grown through aggressive acquisitions, with 185 television stations, to become the second-largest operator of regional TV stations in the United States (after Nexstar Media Group, ranked 44th). The group includes various sports and entertainment networks and a streaming service. Critics call Sinclair the "most dangerous media company in the United States" due to its strictly conservative orientation. (Deutschlandfunk)

An updated company profile will be published shortly.

General Information

Headquarters
Sinclair, Inc.
10706 Beaver Dam Road
Hunt Valley, Maryland 21030
USA
Telephone: 001 410 568 1500
website: www.sbgi.net

Branches of trade: TV, streaming
Legal form: Stock Company
Financial year: 01.01-31.12
Founding year: 1985

Basic economic data (in billion US$):

	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019	2018
Revenue	3,134	3,928	6,134	5,2	4,24	3,01
Profit (Loss)	(0,291)	2,652	(0,414)	(2,41)	1,147	0,341
Stock price (year end)	13,77	15,51	26,43	31,85	32,00	27,95
Employees	n/a	7.900	11.500	11.600	11.800	9.000

Executives and Directors

Management:

• David D. Smith, Executive Chairman
• Christopher S. Ripley, President & Chief Executive Officer
• Robert D. Weisbord, President of Broadcast & Chief Operating Officer
• Lucy A. Rutishauser, Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer
• David Gibber, Senior Vice President & General Counsel
• Brian Bark, EVP & Chief Information Officer
• Scott Shapiro, Executive Vice President & Corporate Development and Strategy
• Donald H. Thompson, Executive Vice President & Human Resources
• Scott Ehrlich, Chief Innovation Officer / Head of Corporate Strategy
• William Bell, SVP, Head of Distribution and Network Relations
• Mike Kralec, SVP, Chief Technology Officer
• Scott Livingston, SVP News
• Delbert R. Parks III, President of Technology

Board of Directors

• David D. Smith, Sinclair Broadcast Group
• Frederick G. Smith, Sinclair Broadcast Group
• J Duncan Smith, Sinclair Broadcast Group
• Robert E. Smith, Sinclair Broadcast Group
• Laurie R. Beyer, Greater Baltimore Medical Center
• Dr. Benjamin Carson, Sr., US Department of Housing and Urban Development
• Howard E. Friedmann, Lanx Management LLC
• Hon. Benson E. Legg, JAMS
• Daniel C. Keith, Cavanaugh Group

History

The company's roots go back to Julian Sinclair Smith, a Baltimore engineer who specialized in building television stations in the 1950s and soon began producing local news formats with his Chesapeake Television Corporation, which was independent of the major networks. Sinclair Smith's son, David, then embarked on an unprecedented buying spree in the 1980s, acquiring TV station chains across America, including Act III Broadcasting (1995), River City Broadcasting (1996), the Four Points Media Group (2011), Barrington Broadcasting (2013), and other local stations. Until 2017, however, despite its considerable size, Sinclair remained known only to insiders.

With Donald Trump, that changed abruptly. Sinclair became one of the Republicans' most important allies. And vice versa. However, Smith's masterpiece was put a stop to by the FCC in 2018: The regulator prohibited the nearly four billion dollar takeover of Tribune Media's 42 stations – in order to prevent the creation of a de facto regional television duopoly in the USA, consisting of Sinclair and the Nexstar Media Group (ranked 54th in the IfM ranking). Sinclair's offer to divest itself of various stations in individual regional markets also failed to convince the media watchdogs, with the result that Tribune sued Sinclair for one billion dollars in damages over the failed deal. In 2019, however, Tribune merged with Nexstar.

Meanwhile, Sinclair's clearly right-wing orientation increasingly came into focus. Even during the Obama era, Sinclair had attracted attention for spreading conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party, but during the 2016 presidential election campaign and the four years of the Trump administration, critics accused the company of operating "Trump TV" and damaging regional media diversity in the USA with a right-wing conservative orientation. The format of the so-called "must-run segments," for example, short opinion pieces by commentators close to the Trump campaign, which all Sinclair stations across the USA were required to broadcast, influenced the last independent bastions of the American media landscape: local TV news, which the US population has trusted more than national cable news channels for years.

The Smiths also dictated from the company's headquarters in Maryland what to read from the teleprompter to local news anchors scattered across 87 regional markets. One of the scripts presented to the anchors read: "We are concerned about the disturbing trend of irresponsible, one-sided news plaguing our country: The sharing of biased and false news has become commonplace on social media. Even more disturbing is that some media outlets are publishing these same fake stories without first checking the facts." Trump himself was enthusiastic, praising Sinclair as a genuine alternative to the "fake news networks" CNN, MSNBC, and ABC.

management

Since 2017, Chris Ripley has succeeded David D. Smith as Sinclair CEO and is "the man behind Sinclair's meteoric rise in sports media" (Forbes). Ripley's strategy: To avoid the "streaming wars," the "war" among streaming services, Sinclair purchased the 21 "Regional Sports Networks" from Fox/Disney for around ten billion dollars at the end of 2019 (Disney had been forced by the Department of Justice to sell the so-called RSNs as part of its $71.3 billion acquisition of Fox's entertainment division due to antitrust concerns). Ripley: "We will be the leading provider of local news and sports nationwide. And these two genres are vastly superior to all other genres in terms of live viewership." He added: "The current market is flooded by big tech companies—Netflix and Amazon—in the general entertainment space. That's a problem for anyone who wants to make money. We didn't want to compete against an 800-pound gorilla with unlimited money." (Chicago Tribune)

Another look back: David D. Smith, born in 1950 and son of company founder Julian Sinclair Smith (1921–1993), was CEO from 1990 to 2017. He built Sinclair into the largest group of television stations in the USA, with a clear political orientation. His family donated massively to the Republican Party through Super PACs during the Trump presidency. A former Trump spokesman, Boris Epshteyn, was even hired as a political analyst for Sinclair. And during the 2016 election campaign, Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, negotiated a series of exclusive interviews that, in return for preferential access to Trump, were broadcast specifically on Sinclair's high-viewership news formats in swing states. The deal included a promise to broadcast Trump's statements without journalistic commentary or context. Furthermore, the networks provided Trump with significantly more airtime overall than his rival, Hillary Clinton.

Business segments

With 185 TV stations in 86 smaller US markets, Sinclair is the largest local television empire in the US and operates, among others, the nationwide networks Comet (science fiction), Stadium and Bally Sports (sports), Tennis Channel, Charge! (action), and TBD (curated online TV content). The two streaming platforms STIRR and NewsON specialize in local news in addition to sports and entertainment.

A study by the Pew Research Center demonstrates how important local television is to Americans: For 50 percent of them, it remains their dominant source of information. And at 76 percent, more Americans trust their local station than their friends or family.