When I first saw the news of yet another former colleague and, I’d like to believe, friend meeting an untimely professional demise, my first reaction once again defaulted to Jay Leno’s opening salvo at Hugh Grant after we learned he chose to drive around Hollywood in search of a hooker rather than go home to Elizabeth Hurley. (For those too young to know, Leno memorably exclaimed WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!!! and changed the trajectory of late night television for years a result). Here’s how THE DESK’s Matthew Keys reported it late yesterday:
Sinclair, Inc. has reportedly fired the chief executive of its international sports network Tennis Channel, according to a report. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal said Ken Solomon was informed his last day with the company will be Monday, September 9.
In addition to his duties as chairman and CEO of the Tennis Channel, Solomon is a board member and an advisor to Dr. Phil McGraw’s upstart television network Merit Street Media. According to the Journal, executives at Sinclair were frustrated by the amount of time Solomon was spending at Merit Street, which led to his firing. Prior to the dismissal, Sinclair sought a commitment from Solomon that he would spend most of his time at the company’s Santa Monica offices, the Journal said. Solomon recently bought property in Texas; McGraw’s media outlet is based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
If the story were simply that cut-and-dried, you might come away with some sort of empathy for Sinclair, especially since they weren’t asking Solomon to spend most of this time in THEIR headquarters outside Baltimore. Even on oppressive days like this, I’ll take 28th and Ocean Park over the backdrop for THE WIRE any day,
But since I do know Ken Solomon–indeed, I’ve known him virtually his entire career, and once did an extended consultancy for him–I can assure any of you reading this that with the exception of what another long-time associate of his, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL’s Joe Flint reported, much like many of Sinclair’s biased newscasts, there’s sides to this story that are being conveniently glossed over.
Here’s the balance that only Flint seems to have had the decency to report:
People close to Solomon said he has held similar outside roles during his tenure with the Tennis Channel without objection from Sinclair and received approval from the company for his role with McGraw’s company, which officially started in late 2023. People familiar with Sinclair’s thinking countered that Solomon’s role with McGraw had become more active and time-consuming than they had anticipated.
Solomon indeed has spent his career as a multitasker. When I first crossed paths with him he was a tenacious, fast-rising syndication sales executive with training in research from folks I’ve known for decades. Tenacious enough that he would regularly close markets with atypical speed; his true loyalists nicknamed him “The Blur” because of his laser-focused approach to getting results. Tenacious enough that he doggedly pursued my colleagues during the funeral services for their beloved general manager in order to meet a self-imposed deadline to get his largest open market for LIVE! WITH REGIS AND KATHIE LEE closed. Yes, I gave him a dose of Jay Leno-esque consternation that day, but we eventually did make a deal.
And when I consulted for Solomon while he was in the midst of what he believed was an existential crisis for TTC as he pursued legal action against 800-pound gorilla Comcast, he was simultaneously serving as chairman of a smaller arts-centric called Ovation. Here’s how MULTICHANNEL NEWS’ Linda Moss reported it 18 summers ago:
Hubbard Media Group and a cadre of investors that include indie-film impresarios Harvey and Bob Weinstein acquired Ovation: The Arts Network, officials said Tuesday. The announcement didn’t include Ovation’s purchase price.
Ken Solomon will also join Ovation, an independent cable network, as chairman, as well as retaining his duties as chairman and CEO of The Tennis Channel.
Ovation grew from an obscure afterthought reaching just over 5 million homes to a worthy successor to the more refined spaces eschewed when NBC took over Bravo and gave it the Andy Cohen treatment that reached a peak penetration of 54 million homes in 2015, mostly due to Solomon’s stewardship of numerous deals and partnerships with local arts societies and preservational councils. All this while he was battling Comcast, and as the NEW YORK TIMES’ Richard Sandomir reported when that battle came to an end, he was also deeply involved in some other outside pursuits.
Ken Solomon, the chief executive of Tennis Channel, thought until late last month that he was on his way to winning a big and lengthy legal battle — one that would greatly enhance the channel’s business. He believed that Comcast would soon make Tennis Channel as widely available on its cable systems as Golf Channel and NBC Sports Network, which it owns.
But last month, a three-judge panel of a federal appellate court ruled that Comcast had not discriminated against Tennis Channel by giving it far less distribution than Golf Channel and NBC Sports Network, and was not obliged to expand its availability.
Solomon was in Paris for the French Open when the decision was handed down. Hours later, frustrated at the dramatic reversal in the case, he sent his staff an angry, meandering e-mail that was punctuated with the language of sexual assault.
Solomon likened the judges’ decision — and, apparently the difficulty of dealing with Comcast — to “being raped by a brutal captor, finally winning in a long and painful public court trial,” and, “on appeal years later from a pre-decided Mad Hatter of a court asking you, the victim, to produce video to prove that it ever happened.” The e-mail was published by Deadspin.
Solomon has raised millions of dollars for President Obama’s presidential campaigns as one of his top bundlers of contributions and has reportedly been considered for an ambassadorship. He was not available for an interview on Wednesday.
And if you know anything about the management and leanings of Sinclair, you’d know why that last particular fact is significant. Sinclair stations carried nightly “commentaries” from Boris Epshteyn, a one-time special assistant to President Donald Trump, by corporate mandate during two of the four years of Trump’s (first?) term. Owner David Smith purchased his hometown BALTIMORE SUN earlier this year and has shifted a great deal of that paper’s focus and bias towards conservative viewpoints via a more public-facing avatar in Armstrong Williams, once billed during a failed syndication effort as a “black Rush Limbaugh”. Merit Street Media and McGraw have leaned heavily into that kind of narrative, have given Trump several town hall opportunties in its brief existence and receive considerable support from broadcast clearances and affiliate sales support from the evangenically focused Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN).
Given the fact he’s worked with and for the likes of the Weinsteins, I have little doubt Solomon was more than capable of putting any political mindsets aside in the pursuit of a business goal in any circumstance. I’m not all that sure about the likes of Smith and his aide-de-camp Chris Ripley.
You do recall Ripley being the face of the many missteps of Sinclair’s ill-advised purchase of the onetime FOX regional sports networks, starting from a branding alliance with a casino that turned it into Bally’s and subsequent parings of its underperforming markets and teams to its current roster of 27, down from a high of 42 when the deal went down five years ago.
So I’m not buying for a second any narrative that Solomon was overworked or distracted, particularly by an entity that seems to be sympatico with Smith and Ripley’s personal values. As for where he chooses to have a residence, Flint reminded his readers that (t)he people close to Solomon said that it is a horse ranch for his wife and that he still maintains a residence in Los Angeles.
I do think there’s a simpler explanation that transcends politics, not to mention the reality check that startups require more attention than mature entities (as somehow once responsible for work with nine different networks at once, I know that to be all too true). As Flint expounded:
Earlier this year Sinclair retained investment bank Moelis to shop the Tennis Channel along with a significant chunk of the company’s local television stations. Solomon has been very involved in the sales process, working closely with Moelis on presentations and meeting with potential suitors, the people familiar with the situation said. Sinclair valued the network at about $750 million in 2022. Solomon and some senior executives on his team have stakes in the channel and stand to profit from a sale. People close to the sales process said it is continuing and a deadline for final bids will be set in the coming weeks.
As currently constructed, The Tennis Channel is an odd fit with any established business in the sports space. Single-sport cable channels have deteriorated in value at an even more accelerated pace than the category as a whole, and the majority of the sport’s significant event rights are held elsewhere. Just this week, the U.S. Open announced an extension of its multiplatform ESPN deal until 2037, and earlier this year Solomon’s premiere event which he regularly entertained buyers with all expenses paid trips to, the French Open, took the siren’s song from TNT Sports in the wake of its desperate attempt to maintain a sports presence in the wake of losing the NBA to Amazon. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where the current business model, and its staff –many of whom have personal ties to Solomon going back decades–stays intact.
I strongly suspect Chris Ripley and David Smith don’t give a rat’s patatootie about any of that. I believe they wanted and expected Solomon to “blur” his way into a deal come hell or high water and they had their own self-imposed clock on him. And I don’t think they felt all that good about sharing their potential gains with someone who might have attended a different Midwest convention this summer than they may have.
As a friend of mine who also knows Solomon well confessed privately, “no one will need to run a synogauge bazaar for him”. He’s more than comfortable and more than well-liked enough that, should he choose, he’ll be able to be involved with just about anything he might desire to be involved with going forward–Merit Street Media, for one. If nothing else, the fact that McGraw’s network is available on multiple platforms to nearly 80 million U.S. households at a time when network coverages are in massive decline points out exactly how much “blur” is still left in him.
Mind you, it’s not like Solomon has returned any of my many phone calls of late. I confess to being grateful for past support, but I do kinda wish he might have found the time to at least give me the courtesy of a reply to one of the many I and mutual friends have urged him to make over the past five years. At least now I know exactly how busy he’s been.
What I like far less than that is when companies try and construct narratives for an unsuspecting public that make someone out to be something else other than what they are, especially when they are hardly transparent or without, apropos to a tennis narrative, “fault”. Would you agree that that’s “Fake news” in its own right?
Happy trails and good luck, “Blur”. And if you do decide this is another battle worth fighting that you might want some help crafting a narrative for again, you know where to reach me.
Until next time…