WHYY-TV
WHYY-TV is a television station licensed to Wilmington, Delaware, United States, serving as the primary PBS member station for the Philadelphia area. It is owned by WHYY, Inc., alongside NPR member WHYY-FM. WHYY-TV and WHYY-FM share studios and offices on Independence Mall in Center City, Philadelphia, with an additional office in Wilmington; through a channel sharing agreement with WMCN-TV, the two stations transmit using WHYY-TV's spectrum from an antenna in Philadelphia's Roxborough section.
WHYY-TV is one of four PBS member stations serving the Philadelphia market, alongside Philadelphia-licensed WPPT, Allentown-based WLVT-TV, and NJ PBS. In southern Delaware and on the Delmarva Peninsula, WHYY-TV is seen on WDPB, a full-time rebroadcaster in Seaford, Delaware.
WHYY-TV was established in 1957 on channel 35 in Philadelphia as the first educational TV station in the city. Seeking to expand its coverage area, it successfully filed to use channel 12 in Wilmington, which was left vacant after the closing of a commercial station, and moved its primary programming there in 1963. It also opened a Wilmington studio and began producing Delaware-oriented public affairs programming.
History
The channel 35 years
In May 1951, Philadelphia's Board of Education first considered the idea of asking for an educational television channel, either Philadelphia's 35 in the newly created UHF band or the channel 12 allocation at Wilmington, for use by the city schools and other organizations. A $150,000 grant from the Ford Foundation was received in 1953, when the Delaware Valley Educational Television Corporation was chartered and filed for channel 35. A year later, the Philadelphia Educational Radio Corporation, a consortium of schools and colleges, launched WHYY, the city's first noncommercial radio service, on December 15, 1954.With WHYY radio in operation, the focus shifted to giving birth to WHYY television. After the organization changed its name to the Metropolitan Philadelphia Educational Radio and Television Corporation, it received a construction permit in March 1956 for a station on UHF channel 35, the designated educational television channel for the city. That April, WHYY negotiated a five-year lease of the former WCAU-TV studios at 1622 Chestnut Street. Plans called for a weekly output of 25 hours of programming. The station appeared ready to go on November 26, 1956. Twelve city schools were being equipped with UHF-capable sets to receive the programs; a two-page feature entitled "This Is WHYY" ran in a late October edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine; and test patterns were being broadcast. However, an unexpected snag emerged between station management and the school board. It had committed $100,000 to finance the station but instead opted to give only $75,000, diverting the remainder to a management study of the new outlet by a New York firm. The school board wanted control to be based on financial contributions, which would have given it more power in station decision-making, and there were also concerns that the UHF station would suffer from the inability of all television sets to tune that band.
The school board's decision set WHYY-TV back nearly a year; after an agreement was reached to reorganize the board of directors and for the chairman and president of WHYY to present their resignations, the last obstacle was removed in February, with the station finally debuting on September 16, 1957. Six months after start-up, the first nighttime programs were presented by the station to complement daytime instructional output.
The fight for channel 12
WHYY-TV had been on the air in Philadelphia for a year when events further down the Delaware River transpired that would have a major effect on the young station. Channel 12 in Wilmington had been occupied by WVUE, a commercial station. WVUE closed in September 1958, a casualty of ownership complications and financial losses, and within a week of its shutdown, committees involving Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey legislators were formed to study the feasibility of procuring channel 12 for regional educational broadcasting use while maintaining channel 35.WHYY was not the only entity interested in channel 12. Other applicants also filed for authority to build it as a commercial station. As Delaware groups marshaled a demonstration in Washington in support of designating the VHF channel for educational use, the FCC convened hearings with WHYY and four commercial applicants to start in October 1960, then delayed into 1961.
The four commercial applicants each had configurations of television experience and political backing. Metropolitan Broadcasting, owner of independent television stations in Washington and New York City as well as Philadelphia's WIP radio, had taken an option on a $185,000 parcel of land in Wilmington for potential facilities. National Telefilm Associates, another owner of a New York City-area station ; locally based Rollins Broadcasting, owned by former lieutenant governor John W. Rollins and his brother O. Wayne Rollins and owner of Wilmington radio station WAMS ; and Wilmington Television, a private firm owned by primarily Midwest backers led by Egmont Sonderling, were also in the running. National Telefilm and Wilmington Television bowed out in February 1961, leaving Metropolitan, Rollins, and WHYY. Just as oral hearings finally commenced in October, Metromedia unexpectedly withdrew despite having prepared voluminous exhibits and materials in support of its case; no reason was given.
With the fight having been winnowed to two, oral hearing centered around program proposals and Rollins's record as a broadcaster with WAMS, which WHYY charged to be poor. Rollins attacked WHYY for leading a letter-writing campaign to the FCC that constituted illegal ex parte communications to the commission. WHYY contended Wilmington had enough commercial service from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Salisbury, Maryland, stations; Rollins believed Delaware could support a commercial station with a strong public service component, claiming WHYY was dominated by Philadelphia interests.
It took months for FCC hearing examiner Walther Guenther to render an initial decision, which Delaware's U.S. representative, Harris McDowell, criticized as a product of a slow comparative hearing process. The decision, handed down in late September, awarded the channel to WHYY. Guenther found that, although WAMS operated in the public interest, there was a "distinctly greater need" for a VHF educational TV channel than for another commercial service; he favored WHYY on diversity of media ownership over Rollins's nine radio and three television stations but Rollins on its ability to air paid political programming and its familiarity with the area. Instead of appealing, Rollins withdrew on November 13, 1962, paving the way for WHYY to win a channel 12 construction permit on December 26.
Expanding to Wilmington and growth in Philadelphia
After Rollins dropped out, WHYY began planning for the needed physical plant to activate the channel. It announced it would be a two-city operation with studios in Wilmington and Philadelphia, having already obtained an option on land for a transmitter site at Glassboro, New Jersey, from where WVUE had broadcast. The move in total would cost $1.1 million. Wilmington studios were built in the former Frederick Douglass Elementary School at Fifth and Scott streets, which closed in the 1950s when Wilmington desegregated.The WHYY-TV call letters moved to the channel 12 construction permit in March 1963. That necessitated the UHF station—which would be retained to provide secondary and specialized service—to adopt a new call sign, WUHY-TV, and because the FCC did not permit at that time that broadcast stations with different cities of license could share a base call sign, the Philadelphia radio station also changed to WUHY.
After five years of silence, channel 12 from Wilmington came alive with WHYY-TV on September 12, 1963, expanding its reach to viewers without UHF converters in the Delaware Valley. The in-school programming that had been used for years in Philadelphia schools made its way into 23 school districts in Delaware. In January 1964, the WHYY Philadelphia studios relocated to the former WFIL radio and television facilities at 46th and Market streets after Triangle Publications, the owner of WFIL radio and television, gifted the building and equipment to WHYY as the commercial stations moved to a site on City Line Avenue. National Educational Television, the original public television network to which WHYY had belonged since the late 1950s, was replaced with PBS in October 1970.
In 1971, WHYY-TV relocated its transmitter from Glassboro to the Roxborough tower farm where other Philadelphia stations are located. WUHY-TV remained in service providing alternate programming—including the only on-air preview of Sesame Street before its national debut, a week-long run starting on July 21, 1969—until August 1976, when WHYY surrendered its license. Despite this, the station had a low profile on the network relative to the market it served. Its ties to cultural institutions in the city were weak, and its contributions to the network were poor. In a 1976 feature article in The Philadelphia Inquirer magazine that declared WHYY-TV "an experiment in mediocrity", one PBS executive, H. David Lacey, noted that "WHYY's credibility is about as high as a gnat's behind". The station was slow to attract underwriters; took a passive role in broadcasting local cultural programming, often at the suggestion of other groups; and lacked recognized output.
The city of Philadelphia turned over the $13 million Living History Center, a museum opened for the bicentennial in 1976, to WHYY in 1978, and the stations' operations moved there in phases from 1979 to 1981: administration in February 1979, radio in August 1980, and television production and transmission in late 1981. The facility is still used by WHYY radio and television today; it was renovated in 1999, with a new glass façade and open-plan studio.