WXIN
On December 6, 2017, reports stated that Sinclair and Fox were working on a deal that would see most of the Fox-affiliated stations whose affiliation contracts were set to expire at the end of the year renew said agreements, in exchange for Sinclair selling some Fox affiliates involved in the Tribune deal or already under the group's ownership directly to Fox Television Stations. The deal would see between six and ten Fox affiliates owned by Sinclair and Tribune in markets with an NFL franchise become Fox owned-and-operated stations. It is not known if WXIN will be one of the stations sold nor how the deal could be brokered with regards to its duopoly with WTTV/WTTK, although the stations being sold to Fox are expected to largely come from Tribune Media (notably KCPQ and its MyNetworkTV-affiliated sister KZJO in Seattle, where Sinclair already owns ABC affiliate KOMO-TV and Univision affiliate KUNS-TV), many of which were previously owned by Fox. (Sinclair may sell additional Fox affiliates to other groups not associated with the company to both address the aforementioned issues and the ownership conflicts that Sinclair and Tribune have in ten markets that largely would be excluded from the side deal with Fox.)
Repercussions of the 1994 United States broadcast TV realignment
The repercussions of this realignment were gradual but swift, with nearly 70 stations in 30 media markets throughout the United States changing affiliations between September 1994 and September 1996. Fox ascended to the status of a major television network, comparable in influence to the Big Three television networks (CBS, NBC and ABC), while CBS was dealt the major blows of losing both its partial broadcast rights to the National Football League (NFL) and key affiliates in several major markets to Fox. All three major networks also wound up affiliating with stations that broadcast on the UHF band in a few cases, the vast majority of which operated as either Fox affiliates or independent stations prior to the switches; most of the new Big Three affiliates also created news departments from scratch or expanded their existing ones.