Mission Broadcasting
American television broadcast company
Mission Broadcasting, Inc. is a television station group that owns 29 full-power television stations in 26 markets in the United States. The group's chair is Nancie Smith, the widow of David S. Smith, who founded the company in 1996 and died in 2011. All but one of Mission's stations are located in markets where Nexstar Media Group also owns a station, and all of Mission's stations (including its lone stand-alone station) are managed by Nexstar through shared services and local marketing agreements—effectively creating duopolies between the top two stations in a market or in markets with too few stations or unique station owners to legally allow duopolies. The company moved its headquarters from Westlake, Ohio, to Wichita Falls, Texas, in 2018. The company's stations are based in markets as large as New York City and as small as Grand Junction, Colorado.
History
In 1996, Mission Broadcasting was started with its first stations were WUPN in Greensboro and WUXP in Nashville. Both of these were owned by ABRY shareholders, and operated through an SSA by Sullivan Broadcasting, a company affiliated with ABRY Broadcast Partners, which was absorbed into Sinclair Broadcast Group in 1998. In 2001, Sinclair bought these two stations outright. Another related ABRY-affiliated company Bastet Broadcasting, was absorbed into Mission Broadcasting by 2002.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Mission Broadcasting” is american television broadcast company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mission, Broadcasting and American, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “american television broadcast company” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17113870. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996, 2011, 2018 and 1998.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
- Identifying works and editions
- Tracing reception history
- Finding collection records
The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Mission Broadcasting”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Mission Broadcasting primary sources, Mission Broadcasting archive and Mission research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Mission Broadcasting”?
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- Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Mission Broadcasting” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.