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.)
Television in the United States
Many of its affiliates in mid-size and small markets outsource news production to Big Three affiliates rather produce their own newscasts, and its flagship stations in New York City and Los Angeles do not include the network's name within their callsigns (Fox's owned-and-operated stations in New York City and Los Angeles instead use the respective callsigns WNYW and KTTV; the WFOX-TV and KFOX-TV calls are respectively used by Fox affiliates in Jacksonville, Florida and El Paso, Texas). Fox's only scheduled news program is "Fox News Sunday", which it airs on Sunday mornings; special news coverage on the network comes from the staff of its sister cable network Fox News Channel (which launched in August 1996, around the same time as its affiliate video service Fox NewsEdge), though not every affiliate carries breaking news bulletins from Fox News outside of prime time presidential addresses, and national and international events of utmost urgency. Most of Fox's affiliates now have local newscasts (only a small number of affiliates, mainly based in larger markets, carried news programming prior to the mid-1990s), often scheduled during the final hour of prime time – an hour earlier than newscasts seen on major network stations – at which time they compete with network dramas, rather than other local newscasts (although some news-producing Fox stations also carry newscasts in the traditional late news time period), and for one to three additional hours in the morning that overlap with morning news programs on ABC, NBC and CBS.
Three new networks launched in the 1990s: within six days of each other in January 1995, The WB (which was originally formed as a venture between Time Warner, Tribune Broadcasting – which made the majority of its independent stations principal charter affiliates of the network – and former Fox executive Jamie Kellner, who served as The WB's original chief executive officer) and UPN (created as a programming partnership between Chris-Craft Industries/United Television and Paramount Television, which had been acquired the year prior by Viacom, which would gain full ownership of UPN five years after the network's launch) were launched primarily to compete against Fox, targeting the same younger demographic (teenagers and young adults 12 to 34) that network had built its success upon during the first half of the decade. In August 1998, Paxson Communications (now Ion Media) launched Pax TV to counterprogram the four larger networks as well as The WB and UPN, with a focus on family-oriented original and acquired programming; due to underperforming viewership in its initial format, Pax relaunched as i: Independent Television (focusing more on reruns and movies aimed at a broader audience) in July 2005 and then as Ion Television in September 2007.