The E.W. Scripps Company (SSP) Income Statement

The revenue trajectory maps almost perfectly onto the U.S. political advertising cycle: 2024 quarters grew as much as 18.3% and peaked at $728.4M in Q4, while every 2025 and 2026 quarter has printed a year-over-year decline. Critically, the contraction is not purely a base-effect story — even adjusting for the political wipe-off, 2026Q2's $490.4M sits materially below 2024Q1's $561.5M non-political baseline, suggesting underlying secular erosion in the linear broadcasting franchise. Investors should treat the durability of the ex-political revenue base as the central question for any recovery thesis.

The 2025Q4 print is the tell: $560.3M of revenue against $483.2M of COGS crushed gross profit to $77.1M, a level inconsistent with a variable-cost model and indicative of programming and transmission costs that do not scale down with falling ad loads. The recovery to 40.0% gross margin in 2026Q2 on a smaller revenue base suggests management has taken some cost action, but the structural margin range appears wide — roughly 33% to 52% — which makes single-quarter margin extrapolation hazardous. Relative to Nexstar's 39.0% peer gross margin, SSP is not obviously inferior on efficiency, but it lacks the scale diversification that would dampen the swing.

The arithmetic is stark: gross profit less SG&A in 2026Q2 would have produced roughly $49M of positive operating income, so the $1.2B operating loss points to a massive impairment or similar write-down charge that management's reported data flags but does not itemize. Combined with the loss of $1.2B at the net line, this appears to be a balance-sheet reset acknowledging that prior acquisitions or goodwill tied to the broadcasting segment no longer carry their carrying value. The lasting impact is that the capital base has been marked down, which may actually improve future return-on-capital optics but signals that the market-clearing value of SSP's assets is far below management's prior assumptions.