The $48 Million Television Settlement: Ford, Kelly and Morrison

The local TV advertising antitrust settlement is a $48 million class action resolution paid by Cox, Fox, and CBS to advertisers who bought broadcast spot commercials between 2014 and 2018, with checks mailed on March 31, 2025. The underlying case, In re Local TV Advertising Antitrust Litigation (MDL No. 2867) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, is not over: several major broadcasters, including Sinclair and Nexstar, have not settled, and the litigation against them continues into 2026.¹²

What the Advertisers Alleged

Advertisers and ad agencies sued a group of broadcast television station owners for conspiring to “fix, raise, maintain, or stabilize” prices for local TV spot advertising. According to the complaint, sales representative firms Cox Reps and Katz Media Group, together with data-analytics company ShareBuilders, acted as conduits that passed competitively sensitive information between rival broadcasters.³

The private case followed a Department of Justice investigation that surfaced during DOJ’s review of the failed Sinclair–Tribune merger in 2018. DOJ found that broadcasters had been sharing “revenue pacing” data and other non-public sales information with competitors in real time, and alleged the practice “distorted the normal price-setting mechanism in the spot advertising market and harmed the competitive process.”⁴

Who Settled and for How Much

Three defendant groups agreed to pay a combined $48 million:

The Cox entities (Cox Media Group, Cox Enterprises, CMG Media Corporation, and Cox Reps): $37 million
Fox Corporation: $6 million
CBS: $5 million

ShareBuilders, dismissed from the case by the court in 2022, agreed to cooperate with the plaintiffs against the remaining defendants. All settling defendants denied wrongdoing.¹

Judge Virginia M. Kendall granted preliminary approval on June 15, 2023, and final approval on December 7, 2023. The deadline to file a claim, opt out, or object was October 26, 2023, and settlement checks were mailed on March 31, 2025.³¹

Who Was Eligible to Collect

The settlement class covered any person or business in the United States that purchased broadcast television spot advertising directly from one or more of the broadcaster defendants between January 1, 2014, and December 31, 2018, in a designated market area where at least two defendants sold ads. Eligible purchasers included advertising agencies, local businesses, and creative brand agencies. Covered markets spanned 47 states and the District of Columbia, from New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago down to smaller regional markets.¹⁵

The named broadcaster defendants in the private case included CBS Corporation (now Paramount Global), Cox Media Group, Dreamcatcher Broadcasting, Fox Corporation, Griffin Communications, Meredith Corporation, Nexstar Media Group, Raycom Media (later acquired by Gray Television), E.W. Scripps, Sinclair Broadcast Group, TEGNA, Tribune Broadcasting, and Tribune Media.³

How Payments Were Calculated

Each eligible claimant received a proportional share based on how much they had paid for ads during the class period. Before distribution, the fund was reduced by administration costs, taxes, class representative incentive awards, attorneys’ fees (capped at one-third of the total), and litigation-expense reimbursement (capped at $6 million). Claims that came out to $5.00 or less were deemed too small to pay.³

JND Legal Administration is the claims administrator. Class members with questions about their check or eligibility can reach JND at 1-844-717-0648 or info@TVAdsSettlement.com.⁶

The Broadcasters Still Fighting

The remaining defendants — Sinclair, Nexstar, Meredith, Gray Television, TEGNA, and others — have not settled as of mid-2026, and the case against them has produced a run of contentious rulings.²

In October 2025, Judge Kendall rejected efforts by Meredith, Nexstar, Sinclair, and others to withhold 6,893 documents on privilege grounds, saying she needed “to level set with defendants” about their failure to justify the withholdings and criticizing what she called a “privilege dramatization.”⁷

Sinclair has drawn the sharpest attention. In November 2025, the court found Sinclair had a duty as of at least February 2018 to preserve text messages from company-issued phones and failed to take reasonable steps to do so. An investigation showed that 81 of 160 relevant custodians had company phones during the period, but Sinclair fully preserved data from only 26; the lost messages could not be recovered. Judge Kendall called Sinclair’s preservation efforts “disorganized, careless, and inadequate” but found insufficient evidence of bad-faith intent to deprive plaintiffs of evidence. She declined to impose an adverse-inference jury instruction and instead ordered Sinclair to pay plaintiffs’ costs for the 19-month investigation into the missing texts.⁸ In February 2026, the court approved a stipulation requiring Sinclair to pay $175,000 in connection with that failure.²

As of April 2026, Sinclair was challenging a separate order requiring it to produce more than 6,000 additional documents, arguing the ruling rested on a “manifest error of law.” A month later, plaintiffs were pushing to depose the CEO of Nexstar Media Group about the company’s role in the alleged price-fixing, arguing in filings that the executive “can’t skip out on being deposed.”²

What to Watch For Next

Because claims against the non-settling broadcasters remain live, further settlements or a trial verdict could produce additional payouts to the same class of advertisers. The official settlement website recommends class members check back for updates, since any resolution against the remaining defendants would likely trigger new notices and a second distribution.¹

1
TV Ads Settlement. Local TV Advertising Antitrust Litigation Settlement
2
Law360. In Re: Local TV Advertising Antitrust Litigation
3
TV Ads Settlement. Frequently Asked Questions
4
Antitrust Alert. The Latest: DOJ Reaches Settlement With Six Broadcast Television Companies
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MCAG Inc. Local TV Advertising Antitrust Litigation
6
TV Ads Settlement. File a Claim
7
Law360. Privilege ‘Dramatization’ Won’t Shield 7K Docs in Ads MDL
8
Justia. In re Local TV Advertising Antitrust Litigation, No. 1:18-cv-06785