ESPN is not the only NFL rightsholder that will be partially owned by the league.
The NFL has acquired a stake in CBS through its existing content partnership with Skydance, which officially merge with CBS owner Paramount this week, Joe Flint and Isabella Simonetti of The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Additional details were not known.
The news, which does not appear to have been previously reported, would give the NFL part-ownership of two of its broadcast partners. The league is set to take a ten percent stake in ESPN once the sides’ deal is approved by the owners, and eventually the federal government.
It is not unusual for networks to own a portion — or the entirety — the leagues they cover, and Fox Sports just recently purchased a one-third stake in IndyCar. But the reverse is rare, and opens up questions about how much freedom these partners will have to cover the leagues objectively.
For CBS, the NFL owning a stake in the network would presumably shadow any and all reporting CBS does about the league, including on those rare occasions when its news division turns its attention to sports. Doubts already existed; when “60 Minutes” profiled Roger Goodell a decade ago, HBO host Bryant Gumbel described the piece as a “a big wet kiss.”
No network has held NFL rights for as long as CBS, which has carried the league for all-but-four years since 1956. But at no point along the way could it have been conceivable that the league would ever own a piece of one of television’s most venerable networks.
The Paramount-Skydance merger is expected to go through on Thursday.
