lesmikesell Cable providers do have a government mandate to carry local channels
It is somewhat more complicated. The FCC rules require carriage by any (except for the tiniest) operators of any local OTA station that requests carriage (under must carry) in their base. Those stations that request carriage under re-transmission consent (and all but a few stations do) only get to compel a negotiation of carriage fees. There is no requirement that the operator and the station actually come to an agreement (there have been “blackouts” for many many months in some locations). An operator could choose to offer $0/mo/customer for carriage, although none of the re-transmission consent stations would accept that (the FCC also requires negotiation in good faith, but the good faith rules have a lot of wiggle room). But since at least some of the locals carry network programming, the local subscribers end up not being happy if they can’t get their weekly 60 minutes or Grey’s fix.
As the carriage fees increased to real values, and could change with every station renegotiation (which might happen throughout the years), the operators choose not to include those carriage fees in their package prices but break them out separately (which also allowed them to recover increases of those fees as they occurred (and the fees never go down), even if the base package had a fixed price term).
Note that some local franchises may have differing requirements as to carriage.
The operators could (and most are moving towards doing do so to address the “junk fee” regulations) include the broadcast fee in the base advertised package rate, but with the caveat that it would not be a fixed term rate for that fee, but subject to adjustments. Which is where some people are unhappy with the fee (some people are also unhappy they have to pay the fee at all, but that is on copyright law, and the FCC, and not the operator).
It should be noted that the streaming services that include the local network OTAs negotiate not with the station owners, but the networks (the station owners agreed to that at one point in the past). This results in carriage fees that tend to be lower than the local cable operator (in at least some markets), which, as people move to streaming services, results in a station’s revenue going down. The station owners have been petitioning to require the streamers to negotiate directly with the streamers for each market (using the distraction that it is about local news, but it is really all about money; it should be noted a lot of stations already stream local news on the Internet for free).
For the station owners, another potential threat to their existence is if the network associated streamers (Hulu, Paramount+, Fox One, Peacock) start to offer live viewing of network programming rather than next day access (so you may not care about your local OTA station at all). I have little doubt the network CFOs are running the numbers to consider what that would mean to have that option in their next content contracts with the stations (probably lose some revenue from the stations who would lose exclusivity, but perhaps gain additional revenue from the cord-cutters and cord-nevers).
Interesting times ahead for OTA TV and carriage.