The year in local sports media began with Chicago Sports Network and Comcast embroiled in a carriage dispute and Dan Bernstein hosting middays on The Score. It’s ending with CHSN firmly in place on Xfinity cable and Bernstein hosting podcasts for Hubbard Radio.
It was that kind of year. Change was everywhere, from the channels we watch to the prices we pay to the habits we keep.
When CHSN, the new home of the White Sox, Bulls and Blackhawks, finally aired on Xfinity in June, it came with a higher price tag than that of its predecessor, NBC Sports Chicago. And its streaming service charges more to watch all three teams than it does two.
After The Score fired Bernstein in March, he didn’t reappear on another terrestrial radio station. He moved to a digital operation, an audio/video podcast. It’s free, but whether tuning in is more or less convenient for longtime listeners, it’s habit-changing.
CHSN and Bernstein represent two of the most coveted commodities in media: games and opinions. Live sports are the last communal events on TV. If you watched the series finale of “M*A*S*H” in 1983, you were a part of history. With almost 106 million U.S. viewers, it remains the most-watched non-sports TV broadcast of all time. Only Super Bowls have surpassed it.
Streaming has fragmented episodic TV so much that it seems impossible for another show to ever challenge “M*A*S*H.” People can watch what they want when they want and where they want. But sports viewing is the last appointment viewing. People aren’t likely to watch a recording of the Super Bowl. And guaranteed audiences bring in guaranteed ad dollars.
That’s why networks pay exorbitant prices for games. To be sure, sports viewing has become fragmented, too. Streaming services such as Prime, which airs “Thursday Night Football,” and Peacock, which carries the NBA, want a piece of the action. But that drives up the price for fans, who need to pay for more services to watch the games.
CHSN is coming in awfully late, so it’s picking up the last scraps from cable’s RSN era, when regional sports networks didn’t have to contend with cord-cutting. Comcast immediately put it on the most expensive tier, which comes with a monthly $20 increase, for which sports fans foot the bill. Non-sports fans no longer are required to subsidize sports fans’ viewing habits.
Opinions come from the influencer ecosystem, and though you might not equate a sports-talk show host with an influencer, they are one in the same. They share what they think and hawk for their advertisers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but some are more articulate than others. Bernstein lands in that group.
Though it’s hard to know exactly how well his show, “Dan Bernstein: Unfiltered,” is faring — it recently ranked No. 196 among sports shows on Apple Podcasts out of lord knows how many — he has a following. Some listeners have even left The Score behind, unhappy with what they’ve heard since Bernstein’s departure.
While The Score’s brand has remained strong, Bernstein’s brand might be at its strongest in this influencer era. Remember, the station didn’t fire him for poor performance. He did himself in with an online tirade against an X user who questioned his ethics as a fisherman.
Bernstein brought listeners. In The Score’s last quarterly ratings book with Bernstein, covering January to March, his midday show drew a market-leading 7.7 share in the key demographic of men ages 25-54. In February alone, it drew an astonishing 9.1. The station will be hard-pressed to match those numbers without him.
More changes in sports media are coming in 2026. Comcast has bumped up the Cubs’ Marquee Sports Network alongside CHSN, making next season Marquee’s first on Xfinity’s Ultimate tier. MLB is adding NBC and Netflix to its array of broadcast partners. And TNT Sports, which has baseball, hockey and college football and basketball, could have a new owner.
This year has been defined by change, and in an era of evolving media, change figures to be a constant.