WBZ-TV
WBZ-TV is a television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is owned and operated by the CBS television network via its CBS News and Stations division. Under common ownership with independent station WSBK-TV, both stations share studio facilities on Soldiers Field Road in the Allston–Brighton section of Boston; WBZ-TV's transmitter is located on Cedar Street in Needham, Massachusetts, on a tower site that was formerly owned by CBS and is now owned by American Tower Corporation.
History
As an NBC affiliate (1948–1995)
As the only television station that was built from the ground up by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, WBZ-TV began operations at 10 a.m. on June 9, 1948, with test patterns. The station's dedicatory program aired at 6:30 p.m. and featured remarks from the Very Rev. Edwin Van Etten, Archbishop Richard Cushing, Rabbi Joshua L. Liebman, Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, Boston Chamber of Commerce president C. Lawrence Muench, and Governor Robert F. Bradford. Due to the uncertainty surrounding the exact day the station would launch, all of the messages were prerecorded and one of the speakers had died before the program aired. The dedication was followed by the station's first news broadcast, hosted by Arch MacDonald.The station was from its inception associated with the NBC television network, owing to WBZ radio 's longtime affiliation with NBC's radio networks. At its sign-on, WBZ-TV became the first commercial television station to begin operations in the New England region. The station originally operated from inside the Hotel Bradford alongside its radio sister; its current home was not completed at the time, although master control and its self-supporting tower over the building were in use at sign-on. The WBZ stations would not move into what was then known as the Westinghouse Broadcasting Center until June 17, 1948, when the building was opened.
The station was knocked off the air on August 31, 1954, when Hurricane Carol destroyed its transmitter tower. A temporary transmitter was installed using a short, makeshift tower at the studio site and later on the original tower of WEEI-FM in Malden. In 1957, WBZ-TV began broadcasting from a tower in Needham, along with WBZ-FM at 106.7 FM. The tower site is now owned by American Tower Corporation, and is used by several Boston-area television stations, including WGBH-TV and WCVB-TV.
Channel 4 was in danger of losing its NBC affiliation when Westinghouse balked at NBC's initial offer to trade sister stations KYW radio and WPTZ television in Philadelphia, in exchange for WTAM-AM-FM and WNBK television in Cleveland. In response, NBC threatened to pull its programming from both WBZ-TV and WPTZ unless Westinghouse agreed to the trade. The swap was made in February 1956, and Westinghouse immediately complained to the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice about NBC's extortion. The threat reemerged in 1960 after NBC announced it would swap the Philadelphia stations in exchange for a competing Boston outlet, then-CBS affiliate WNAC-TV and its sister radio stations, from RKO General. Approval of the RKO-NBC deal would have potentially made WBZ-TV an ABC affiliate, completing a three-way swap of network affiliations in Boston. However, in 1964, the FCC nullified the NBC-RKO trade and ordered the NBC-Westinghouse swap reversed without NBC realizing any profit on the deal. WBZ-TV retained its NBC affiliation as a result of the canceled sale.
WBZ-TV was a pioneer in Boston television. In 1948, it began live broadcasts of Boston's two Major League Baseball teams, the Red Sox and the Braves, broadcasts that at first were split with WNAC-TV. It was also the first Boston station to have daily newscasts, starting with the station's very first night on the air. On October 12, 1957, WBZ-TV broadcast a half-hour special program on Sputnik 1, featuring a motion picture of the final stage of its rocket crossing the pre-dawn sky of Baltimore, shot by sister station WJZ-TV. The station was the first in the Boston market to employ a female reporter, the first to employ a Black full-time reporter, the first to have an all-female news team, the first to have a Black full-time nightly news anchor, and the first to air a minority affairs program.
Switch to CBS (1995–present)
In 1994, sister station WJZ-TV in Baltimore lost its affiliation with ABC after that network announced a deal with the E.W. Scripps Company to switch three of Scripps' television stations—including its Baltimore outlet, WMAR-TV—to ABC as a condition of retaining its network affiliations with WEWS-TV in Cleveland and WXYZ-TV in Detroit; CBS intended to affiliate with those two stations, as it was about to lose its longtime affiliates in those markets to Fox due to a deal with New World Communications. Westinghouse felt betrayed by ABC's decision, and as a safeguard began shopping for affiliation deals for the entire Group W television unit. Group W eventually struck an agreement to switch WBZ-TV, KYW-TV and WJZ-TV to CBS. The Boston market's third network affiliation switch took place on January 2, 1995. The NBC affiliation went to the former CBS affiliate, WHDH-TV. After a 47-year relationship with NBC, channel 4 became the third station in Boston to align with CBS. The network had originally affiliated with WNAC-TV in 1948, then moved to channel 5 in 1961; it then returned to WNAC-TV in 1972 and remained on channel 7 until the switch.When Westinghouse merged with CBS outright on November 24, 1995, WBZ-TV became a CBS-owned-and-operated station. As a condition of the merger, CBS had to sell WPRI-TV in Providence, Rhode Island, which was acquired by CBS earlier that year. Channel 4 provides at least grade B signal coverage to all of Rhode Island, and city-grade coverage within Providence itself as well as Fall River and New Bedford. At the time, the FCC normally did not allow common ownership of two stations with overlapping signals, and would not even consider a waiver for stations with overlapping city-grade signals. In 1996, WBZ-TV became the first former Group W television station to drop the classic Group W font.
After the 2000 acquisition of CBS by its former subsidiary, Viacom, which effectively made the station locally owned because Viacom's parent National Amusements is based in the suburbs of Boston, WBZ-TV's operations were merged with that of Boston's UPN affiliate, WSBK-TV; concurrently, WBZ-TV also took over the operations of WLWC, the UPN affiliate in nearby Providence, which had been run out of WSBK-TV. Today, the operations of WBZ-TV and WSBK-TV are co-located at WBZ's studios in Brighton. WLWC was sold in 2006 to the Four Points Media Group, a holding company owned by private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management; it, along with the other Four Points stations, has since been acquired by Sinclair Broadcast Group.
On February 2, 2017, CBS agreed to sell CBS Radio to Entercom, then the fourth-largest radio broadcaster in the United States, the sale was conducted using a Reverse Morris Trust so that it would be tax-free. While CBS shareholders retained a 72% ownership stake in the combined company, Entercom was the surviving entity, separating WBZ and its sister radio stations from WBZ-TV. The sale was completed on November 17, 2017; under the terms of a settlement with the Justice Department, WBZ was then divested to iHeartMedia.
Logos and imaging
In the early 1960s, WBZ unveiled a new stylized "4" logo, using a distinctive font that had been designed especially for Group W. The logo became italicized in 1987, but remained the same font. It kept this logo for over 30 years until it unveiled its first "News 4 New England" logo in September 1996, a year and a half after the switch from NBC to CBS. The old logo was the longest-used numeric logo in New England television history until WCVB's stylized "5" crossed the 31-year mark in 2003.The "Circle 4" logo that replaced the original "News 4" logo in 1998 was often referred to on-air by WBZ sports anchor Bob Lobel as "The Circle 4 Ranch". In 2004, WBZ began using CBS's standardized branding, becoming "CBS 4". In 2007, it dropped the standardized logo and reverted to being known as just "WBZ", using a new logo with WBZ lettering and the CBS eye contained within a series of squares. CBS would extend the logo design to then-sister radio station WBZ in 2010. Alongside the introduction of a new set and the CBS O&O graphics package in 2011, WBZ introduced a logo combining the 2004 "CBS 4" logo with the squared WBZ lettering below it. However, the "squares" logo continued to be used as a secondary logo during the early 2010s, including certain promotions and on monitors in the station's news set.
On March 31, 2023, WBZ debuted the "CBS News" graphics and music package, following other CBS owned and operated stations. The morning newscast was the last time the "CBS 4/WBZ" logo was used to identify the station; for the afternoon newscasts, the "CBS News" graphics debuted, with WBZ call letters in a black box and the "CBS News Boston" logo beside it.
Programming
Past programming preemptions and deferrals
As an NBC affiliate, the station was known to preempt several hours of network programming per day—a common practice among Group W television stations affiliated with NBC and CBS. This was significant, since WBZ-TV was NBC's third-largest affiliate, and second-largest in the Eastern Time Zone. It primarily preempted several of the network's morning programs, with most preempted programs appearing on independent stations in the area, including future sister station WSBK-TV and WQTV. In addition, programs preempted by WBZ-TV could be seen on NBC's Providence affiliate WJAR, which provides a city-grade signal to the Boston area. In January 1983, when People Are Talking expanded to one hour, WBZ-TV dropped the NBC soap opera Another World, which moved first to WQTV, then to Worcester-based WHLL-TV, and finally, in the early 1990s, Lawrence-licensed WMFP. The station also dropped some Saturday morning cartoons in 1990, two years before NBC abandoned such programming in favor of a Saturday edition of the morning news show Today and live-action series aimed at teenagers such as Saved by the Bell.NBC has traditionally been less tolerant of preemptions than the other networks and had to find alternate independent stations to air the various programs that WBZ-TV did not air. Despite this, NBC was generally satisfied with WBZ-TV, which was one of NBC's strongest affiliates. As a sidebar, Philadelphia sister station KYW-TV also heavily preempted NBC programming, but it spent most of the 1980s and 1990s as NBC's weakest major-market affiliate.