This past Monday afternoon, Sinclair Broadcast Group President & CEO Chris Ripley sent an all-hands email telling the employees that “our Board of Directors has begun a process to explore strategic opportunities for the Broadcast division and to evaluate a possible separation of our Ventures division.” The email went on to explain how “this review is about unlocking new opportunities through innovation and scale” and about how the company has expressed in the past “the standalone value of our ventures and broadcast assets exceeds what the market has historically recognized."

Ripley tried to address the obvious fears that his email would generate amongst the workers with an encouraging “As far as what that means for us all, it’s business as usual.”

The industry press lit up with the headline that Sinclair was undertaking a "comprehensive strategic review" of its business.

Checking in with our universal BS translator device to decode this swirl of corporate PR puffery, we were greeted with the response: “Reply hazy, try again.” So we put down our “Magic 8-Ball” and began scratching our heads in puzzled bemusement.

Why on Earth would anyone put out such a collection of words posing as informative and helpful, but with the obvious meaning of "we don’t really know what we are going to be doing, and we don’t know how long it will take. And when we are done, we may be buying, selling, merging, or doing something else, but don’t you worry about it.

In essence, the proverbial "Nothing to see here, folks--so just keep moving along."

We’d guess there also is nothing to wonder out loud about—except there are the billions that were pissed away in that whole Diamond Sports Group fiasco, when Sinclair spent $10.6 billion to buy Fox Sports’ former group of regional sports channels. That bet is now worth (checks notes...) yes, it is worth absolutely $0 today, Sinclair even had to spend $500 million just to settle lawsuits that came in trying to extract itself from the business.

Now comes Monday's announcement that left everyone shaking their heads.

Here’s what we think it means: Sinclair needs to find some room to maneuver, especially as the deluge of real--and rumored--deals for local television stations begins. It has a large portfolio of local TV station assets that still have some value in the current marketplace. And there has been much speculation that Sinclair would like to be in any of the conversations for the local station properties that are—or soon will be—up for grabs. That’s all in their Broadcast division. As for the Ventures division, things like the company’s "digi-networks” (like Comet, Charge, and TBD) and Tennis Channel would likely prosper more if they weren’t tied to all the “questionable long-term prospects of local television stations.

Sinclair, which began life as a technology company, selling UHF television transmitters as Dielectric, still has that business along with interests in various firms deeply involved in the slow-moving transition to “NexGen TV” which is the ATSC 3.0 television standard. It also has investments ans real estate holdings, according to the company’s website.

That “comprehensive strategic review” would seem to mean that the company is going to try to figure out what it needs to do from a list of possible options that includes too many conceivable (and maybe some inconceivable) options to list here. By Tuesday, the company announced it was spinning off its “NewsOn” app, which provided streaming of local newscasts from over 275 stations from over 135 markets. NewsOn was a promising marketplace for local news that never reached its potential. It will now be part of the streaming technology company Zeam.

But the truly puzzling thing, to us at least, is the timing of Sinclair’s announcement. For weeks, Sinclair’s name has been popping us as being involved with everything from being a possible buyer for the Cox Media Group stations that Apollo Global Management wants to sell—to thinking about selling off some of their own smaller markets where they presently own stations. Then there is the persistent chatter that Sinclair might be willing to finance some sales of those smaller stations. That’s not a crazy idea, given that financial institutions aren’t as interested in writing loans for someone looking to finance their acquisitions of those stations.

All of these potential moves would seem to position SBGI as still the hunter, rather than becoming the hunted.

We were trying to decode the cryptic tea leaves coming our the company’s headquarters in Cockeysville, Maryland, when a couple of readers started asking if we believed that there may be some major “head fakes” going on in the industry, given all of the recent “hot takes” on who is (and isn’t) going to be buying stations in the near future.

Sure, the whole Wall Street Journal article last Friday about Nexstar being in talks to acquire TEGNA’s portfolio of stations got everyone talking, including us. But what if that story was strategically leaked to disrupt other negotiations that were quietly going on? What if TEGNA were a company buying rather than selling TV stations? One line of purely speculative thinking involved the idea that if TEGNA acquired another group or a package of stations, it could become to big for anyone else to swallow up. Certainly, the executives in the C-Suite of TEGNA’s Tysons, Virginia offices may not be ready to turn over the keys to the company and just walk away. Taking on an acquisition of more stations could act as a “poison pill” to hold off any potential acquirers of TEGNA itself.

As we said before, this particular game of "musical chairs" for the largest owners of local television stations may just be getting started, and every CEO is likely trying to figure out if there will be any chairs left open whenever the music stops.

So there probably are a whole bunch of “comprehensive strategic reviews” going on right now. Our advice to those of you still working as if “it's business as usual?” Keep those resumes and reels updated, friends.

Our experience is that those “comprehensive strategic reviews” rarely lead to plans to keep the same number of employees.

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