On June 18, 2013, the company announced its purchase of Dielectric Communications, a key supplier of television broadcasting antennas, from SPX. Dielectric had been scheduled to shut down by the end of July, which threatened to throw the FCC-proposed incentive auction and subsequent repacking of television broadcast spectrum into disarray. On July 29, 2013, Sinclair agreed to acquire seven television stations owned by Allbritton Communications for $985 million. Allbritton sold the stations in order to refocus on its "Politico" website and newspaper. In addition to the television stations (all of which are affiliated with ABC) including Washington, D.C. flagship station WJLA-TV, the deal included a regional cable news channel in Washington, D.C., NewsChannel 8, which Sinclair has indicated may be the base for a larger expansion in cable news. Concurrent with the deal, Sinclair was to have sold the license assets for WABM and WTTO in Birmingham, Alabama, and WHP-TV in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to Deerfield Media and for WMMP in Charleston, South Carolina, to Howard Stirk Holdings, a company owned by conservative talk show host Armstrong Williams (these four stations are in markets also served by an Allbritton station); Sinclair would have continued to operate them through joint sales and shared services agreements. However, on March 21, 2014, in advance of an FCC vote that barred joint sales agreements, Sinclair announced that it would instead sell WABM, WHP-TV and WMMP to independent third parties that would not enter into any operational agreements with Sinclair, assign the grandfathered time brokerage agreement for WLYH-TV in Lancaster to the new owner of WHP-TV and terminate the local marketing agreement for WTAT-TV in Charleston (Sinclair would retain ownership of WTTO and the grandfathered time brokerage agreement for WDBB in the revised deal).