Key Points
- The FCC dismissed Cincinnati Bell’s complaint alleging Nexstar failed to negotiate retransmission consent in good faith over WDTN and NewsNation.
- Regulators said Nexstar’s bundling of NewsNation with WDTN carriage reflected generally accepted market practices.
- The Media Bureau ruled the dispute was a routine rate disagreement and did not meet the high bar for bad-faith conduct.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has dismissed a complaint filed by Cincinnati Bell that alleged Nexstar Media Group violated the agency’s rules that require good-faith negotiations during retransmission consent discussions.
The complaint was filed with the agency in June, about two weeks after Cincinnati Bell’s pay television system Altafiber was forced to pull WDTN (Channel 2) from its systems.
Cincinnati Bell and Nexstar were at odds over fees paid to distribute WDTN and the cable news channel NewsNation in the Dayton and Cincinnati areas where the station operates as the local NBC affiliate.
Talks began in April 2025 and broke down at the end of May, resulting in WDTN being dropped from Altafiber’s systems when the prior agreements expired, according to documents filed with the FCC.
Cincinnati Bell and Nexstar reached an agreement to restore WDTN and NewsNation to Altafiber’s systems in the two markets on June 15, two days after the pay TV distributor filed a complaint with the FCC that Nexstar failed to negotiate in good faith as required under the law.
The FCC’s rules require both sides to negotiate on reasonable terms, but doesn’t require an actual agreement to be reached. The agency’s two-prong test to determine whether broadcasters negotiate in good faith generally favors local TV station owners by setting an extremely high bar that cable systems like Altafiber often cannot clear.
In this instance, Cincinnati Bell complained that Nexstar was unwilling to accept a term that would have allowed it to restore WDTN in Dayton only. The cable operator also said Nexstar was unwilling to bundle NewsNation from its proposal, effectively forcing Altafiber to carry the cable news channel, which has lower viewership compared to CNN, Fox News and MS NOW (then MSNBC).
But the FCC sided against Cincinnati Bell, saying Nexstar made numerous proposals before and during the programming dispute, and that its requirement to carry NewsNation as a condition of offering WDTN to subscribers was in line with generally-acceptable market practices today.
“The fact that Nexstar may have been unwilling to reach agreement on the terms Cincinnati Bell desired does not violate the prohibition on making a single, unilateral proposal,” the FCC’s Media Bureau wrote in an order reviewed by The Desk. The FCC has previously held that tying carriage of a broadcast signal to affiliated cable programming, even in different markets, generally does not violate good faith requirements.
The Media Bureau also rejected Cincinnati Bell’s arguments under the totality of the circumstances test, which allows the FCC to find bad faith where conduct is deemed “sufficiently outrageous.” The decision characterized the dispute as a conventional disagreement over rates and contractual terms, noting longstanding FCC precedent that even fundamental disagreements do not, by themselves, demonstrate a lack of good faith.
With Cincinnati Bell unable to prove that Nexstar acted in bad faith, the FCC dismissed the complaint in full. The decision was issued under delegated authority by Media Bureau Acting Chief Erin Boone.
