I live in a Citadel affiliate's market and have lived in two of the other three. My occupation is such that I frequently work with approving our company's advertising expenditures, so I'm very familiar with how all of these stations are doing from a viewership standpoint. The thing people who have never lived here don't understand is that the Citadel stations are VERY, VERY weak performers. I can't over emphasize how weak their audience size is. For an example, at one point when we were relooking at where to allocate our advertising dollars during the local newscasts we didn't allocate ANYTHING to WOI because it had less than a 1 share in the Des Moines market. These stations are frequently run on a shoestring budget. When Citadel bought the station in the town I live in now they were the powerhouse station in town. The station was also quite profitable at that time. Citadel then cut expenditures to a bare minimum shortly after acquiring them, costing them all of their then highly rated local talent and reducing the quality of their local programming. Eventually it even started to impact their signal. Needless to say it didn't take long after the purchase for this once strong and profitable station to be very weak both in terms of viewers and financially. To Dish Network, while this is a loss, its not as much of one as it might seem. They can far easier afford to lose this station group, and keep the others, than Citadel can afford to lose the additional distribution that the Dish retransmission offers them.

Ok. Sounds great, but again the judge took my locals off Dish. So I look at it this way, Take ALL locals off ALL providers and every one just go outside and relax and forget the TV, after all that is what the judge likes.

I don't live in the target market, but this kind of 'brinksmanship', where
the subscribers are held hostage, is exactly the reason I cancelled my
long-held Dish (over 10 year) subscription. After the NBC/Young
Broadcasting issue I was forced to get cable in order to receive network
programming. Once the camel's nose is under the tent...