Sinclair currently owns 173 stations across the country, mostly in smaller markets, while Tribune’s 42 stations are in some of the nation’s largest, including Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. | Scott Olson/Getty Images Union boss threatens campaign against Sinclair Planned merger with Tribune would cost jobs and coverage in major markets, union leader claims.

A union leader representing news employees at television stations across the country is threatening to lead a public campaign against the proposed Sinclair-Tribune merger, highlighting the job losses and decrease in local coverage he claims would result from the deal.

Though the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group has denied that the merger would have those effects, its $3.9 billion bid to buy Tribune, forming the largest owner of broadcast television stations in the country, has attracted panicked opposition in some media precincts, both on the left and right. While the FCC and Justice Department perform their reviews, Congress has, to date, passed on holding hearings.


Now, Dave Twedell, a business representative for the International Cinematographers Guild Local 600, says he hopes to rally the public against the deal and compel members of Congress to act.

Twedell pointed to places like Seattle, one of ten cities where both Sinclair and Tribune own stations, as potentially facing a drastic loss of local news coverage – and jobs -- through consolidations.

Twedell is scheduled on Monday to meet with Sinclair representatives for a session of collective bargaining for photojournalists at its station there, KOMO. Unless Sinclair agrees to protect his members’ jobs, he said, he will immediately launch a nationwide publicity campaign.

“If they decline to make that commitment, we are going to make a very big noise about it,” Twedell said. Of his members, he added, “They are terribly concerned about the threat of their station being either dramatically reduced in scope or closed.”

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Twedell anticipates holding forums with politicians across the country, with the first scheduled for November 16 in Seattle. He said he’s still finalizing the invite list, but would be reaching out to Washington senator Maria Cantwell.

“We’ve been in contact with some of the congressional delegation from the state of Washington,” he said.

Twedell said that the Washington State Labor Council, an organization comprised of more than 600 local unions, is assisting with outreach to other labor organizations nationwide.

“I think demonstrations are a very likely possibility,” he said.

Sinclair has received significant attention lately—including on comedian John Oliver’s HBO show—for the “must run” segments it requires stations to air. Conservative commentaries from the likes of Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump campaign advisor who briefly served in the White House, or updates from Sinclair’s “Terrorism Alert Desk,” the segments have been criticized as ideological intrusions into local news.

In December, POLITICO reported that the company had struck a deal with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign for increased access to Trump in exchange for running his interviews nationwide without commentary. Sinclair’s aggressive rightward tilt has fueled speculation that it is constructing a nationwide network of station in hopes of competing with Fox News.

The acquisition of Tribune would allow the company to reach 72 percent of U.S. households. Sinclair currently owns 173 stations across the country, mostly in smaller markets, while Tribune’s 42 stations are in some of the nation’s largest, including Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. There are ten markets in which both companies currently own stations, including Seattle, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City and Portland, Oregon, where FCC rules would prohibit owning both.

Sinclair did not return requests for comment, but in an October 5 FCC filing, said that efficiencies from the merger would be found first at the corporate, not news gathering, level. “Sinclair does not plan to make any immediate changes with respect to station-level staffing until it has learned more about the Tribune stations’ operations,” it said.

In the ten markets where Sinclair and Tribune each have stations, the merged company would “not expect” job reductions, Sinclair said in its filings. In the cities where one of the two stations has a demonstrably larger news operation, the filing said, it would host a merged news center.

“Sinclair would follow the successful approach it has taken in San Antonio and elsewhere by locating the news resources into a shared newsroom and developing distinct newscasts for each station, each targeted at a particular demographic or geographic region,” it said.

In Seattle, though, both the Sinclair station, KOMO, and the Tribune station, Q13, boast robust news operations. Twedell said that if the FCC and Justice Department approve the acquisition—a review process likely to stretch into next year—those stations would be especially at risk.

“It is the logic of buying Tribune, to consolidate,” Twedell said.

In addition to job cuts, Twedell said, his members fear that the deal would also lead to more nationally produced segments at the expense of local news. “Instead of having a locally based news team, you would have a national news team and the local news would be analogous to the Fox News channel,” he said.

Twedell also represents employees at a Sinclair-owned station in Portland, Oregon, and Tribune-owned stations in Los Angeles and Cleveland. At all of those stations, he said, “People are very afraid of what the company is planning to do. Nobody knows for sure, but the past record is alarming.”

The FCC currently has rules against a single company owning more than one of the top four broadcast stations in any market—as would be the case in Seattle—though FCC watchers believe those rules could soon be relaxed. Sinclair may also need to sell some stations to satisfy FCC ownership limits.

In the October 5 FCC filing, the company said that it had hired TV station broker Moelis & Company to help find buyers for stations, though did not specify which stations might be on the block.

In any case, Twedell thinks it is unlikely that Sinclair would simply sell off KOMO or Q13, the Tribune-owned station in Seattle. Much more likely, he believes, would be combining the stations and running them at reduced cost.

In liberal Seattle, KOMO has been something of a squeaky wheel in the Sinclair empire, with employees at times resisting the “must run” commentaries passed down from corporate. “The members are very nervous about how the company is going to react about the noise coming out of their station,” said Twedell, who represents more than 30 photojournalists and editors there.

Despite assurances in its FCC filing that the company plans to invest millions in local news gathering and increased programming, Lewis Friedland, a University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism professor who previously managed a news station in Milwaukee, said that he expects Sinclair to make cuts to news operations.

“Sinclair is two things. It’s a very conservative organization, but it’s also a bottom line oriented organization,” he said. In the markets where both Sinclair and Tribune own stations, he added, “chances are very high that there’s going to be consolidation and probably a reduction in the overall output of daily news, which would almost certainly result in layoffs.”

As Sinclair has amassed its 173 stations across the country, he said, it’s had a consistent track record of cutting costs and centralizing procedures. For example, in 2001, it shut down news gathering operations at KDNL in St. Louis. More recently, in February, it announced that it was moving the news gathering operation at WNWO in Toledo out of state, to a station in South Bend, Indiana, some 150 miles away.

“There’s just so much evidence,” Friedland said. “It would have to be a reversal of all of Sinclair’s practices and policies for them not to actually consolidate and cut local news rather than expand it.”

On Wednesday, the FCC announced a 15 day pause to its 180-day “shot clock” for reviewing the Sinclair deal, so that it could receive additional comments. While Friedland believes Twedell’s efforts are unlikely to stop the merger on their own, he said a more realistic goal would be to simply make enough noise to draw attention to—and further delay—the issue.

“I think there’s potential for certainly slowing this down,” he said, “and slowing this down frankly is probably the single most important thing that can be done right now, until the public can at least catch up with the facts.”