Lee Shubert has another TV station on the shelf as he tries to dispose of the portfolio of Multicultural Television Broadcasting LLC. Multicultural remains in the radio business, but its ill-timed foray into television did not go well. WSAH-TV is the latest station to head Shubert’s way.
The station is in the expansive New York City DMA, and is licensed to Bridgeport CT. Shubert’s holding company is officially known as the Multicultural Capital Trust.
Multicultural bought WSAH along with four other stations from E.W. Scripps back in 2006 for $170M. The other four have already gone to Shubert, and two of them have been resold.
WOAC-TV, licensed to Canton OH and serving the Cleveland-Akron DMA, went to Garth W. Koonce’s Radiant Life Ministries for $7M in a deal filed 4/20/09. Later the same year, on 10/30/09, the same buyer filed to acquire WRAY-TV Wilson NC, serving the Raleigh-Durham DMA, for $4.5M.
The other stations still on the shelf include WMFP-TV Lawrence MA, serving Boston, and KCNS-TV San Francisco.
Multicultural, headed by Arthur and Yvonne Liu, remains at the controls of an extensive radio group, many of which serve the multilingual niche in large urban markets, including New York and Los Angeles. It also has one last television station, KHIZ-TV, on the outskirts of Los Angeles in Barstow CA.
RBR-TVBR observation: What’s amazing about the collapse of the station trading market a few years back is that it wasn’t identified by NASA as a black hole where investment dollars were sucked in, never to be seen again. Yesterday’s beachfront property has turned into today’s handyman fixer-upper, and that goes quadruple for niche operations such as those Multicultural bought.
