Robert Marich

Analysts are scratching their heads over why political advertising on TV has been light so far in measured national and spot broadcast TV business. Local cable ad sales executives say they've solved the mystery -- the missing money is going into their pockets.

Federal Communications Commission member Jonathan Adelstein made an impassioned plea for more tests on the consumer impact of dropping analog-TV broadcasting, including praise for an Oct. 28 test planned in New York.

After falling in lockstep in Monday's scary 4.5% stock-market decline, Wall Street trading was steady at midday Tuesday, but TV and cable stocks kept falling. The broad stock market was down around one-tenth of a percentage point at midday, but broadcasting stocks fell about 1.5% and cable stocks slumped around 1%.

"The 10 O&Os [owned-and-operated stations] are the last bastion of distribution-oriented assets Disney has left, for which they receive no credit in their stock price," said an investment research note from Caris & Co.

Now that the duopoly in satellite radio is about to get regulatory approval for a merger, Wall Street is pondering whether the satellite-TV duopoly of Dish Network and DirecTV might someday combine, too.

NBC Universal is poised to sell its Miami station, WTVJ-TV, to Post-Newsweek Stations, which already owns the ABC affiliate in the same market. The unusual combination of two major market affiliates would seem to be possible because of the unusually large Spanish-speaking population in southern Florida.

NBC Universal has two jobs once it completes its buyout of The Weather Channel: raising anemic carriage fees received by TWC’s flagship basic-cable network and untangling a web of conflicting corporate allegiances.

NBC Universal and two financial partners reached an agreement Sunday to buy The Weather Channel for an undisclosed price around $3.5 billion. The buyers include private-equity outfits Bain Capital and Blackstone Group, which will help to pay for the deal and presumably will be bought out later by lead partner NBCU.

A consortium led by NBC Universal said late Friday that it started exclusive negotiations to buy The Weather Channel, shortly after Time Warner pulled out of the auction because pricing concerns.

Cable TV news networks were able to parlay the election-induced ratings bump into a 10% year-over-year revenue jump since October 2007, according to research firm SQAD. Buoyed by the long and high-profile race for the Democratic nomination between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the ad dollar increases for CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC significantly outperformed the 3% average ad revenue hike across all basic cable networks for the same period.