If anyone one show is cancelled or not renewed, or a high profile celebrity or business person leave the company, the company should be able to continue forward.

It will absolutely have long term consequences. Lead out or lead in programming. The long term value of the ad slots. The tentpole show or spokesperson that brings in other new viewers.

CBS is saying they're making 15 million on the deal they've negotiated right now on this special time slot. Maybe next year they only make 10 million. Maybe affiliates lose several million more.

But, to be honest, maybe they make up for it all in streaming or other Internet ventures. Maybe the cost is already built in to the merger calculation.

Time will tell.

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 points 21 hours ago

Or maybe they don't care about the profits, as long as they get to spew Fox News level propaganda into every home on America. The Ellisons are wealthy enough to take a loss on CBS, knowing that Trump will feed them plenty of much larger opportunities in the future. CBS is just a loss leader.

And it's not just about their control of the news. Their propaganda is insidious, and is already oozing into their programming. I watch that bad FBI show because I'm too lazy to change the channel, and in one recent episode, the guys were from some terrorist group that arise out of the Portland Occupy protests of 2012, and they had done bombings, arsons, corporate kidnappings, etc. Except none of that ever happened. I know they were supposed to be fictitious, but they could have created some fake militia group to blame it on, or even some dumb fictitious liberal group, or some foreign terrorist org, etc., but they chose to make it a group that would reinforce MAGA propaganda.

Another episode had the bad guys being a family of Iranian spies, embedded in America for years, and were now causing trouble. We've never had a case of an embedded Iranian spy family in America, but we have had numerous embedded RUSSIAN spy families that we have discovered. Again, reinforcement of MAGA lies.

Portland, Iran, favorite MAGA targets. Not a coincidence.

And that's an old show that was already in production. We can expect that any new shows that go into production, will be heavily MAGA-coded, and I won't be bothering to watch any CBS programming. There's already more than I can possibly watch, so CBS is doing me a favor by taking themselves out of my queue.