WEWS-TV
WEWS-TV is a television station in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, affiliated with ABC. It has been owned by the E. W. Scripps Company since its inception in 1946, making it one of three stations that have been built and signed on by Scripps. WEWS-TV's studios are located on Euclid Avenue in Downtown Cleveland, and its transmitter is located in suburban Parma.
History
The station first signed on the air on December 17, 1947, as the first television station in Ohio, and the 16th overall in the United States. The call letters denote the initials of the parent company's founder, Edward Willis Scripps. The station is the oldest in Cleveland to maintain the same channel position, ownership and call letters since its sign-on. A few weeks before WEWS-TV's sign-on, Scripps launched WEWS-FM 102.1 as an outlet for WEWS-TV personalities to gain on-air experience before the launch of the television station. Channel 5's first broadcast was of a Christmas pageant direct from Public Hall hosted by actor Jimmy Stewart and staged by the station's corporate cousin, The Cleveland Press. Its staff included capable producers Jim Breslin and Betty Cope, who would later become president of WVIZ.WEWS originally operated as a CBS affiliate, with secondary ABC and DuMont affiliations; it shared the secondary ABC affiliation with WXEL-TV. WEWS lost the CBS affiliation to WJW-TV in 1955 after that station's then-owner, Storer Broadcasting, used its influence with CBS to land the affiliation; ABC then became channel 5's primary network. The station later lost the DuMont affiliation when that network ceased operations in 1956. WEWS was also an affiliate of the short-lived Paramount Television Network; the station was one of the network's strongest affiliates, airing such Paramount programs as Time For Beany, Hollywood Reel, and Frosty Frolics. WEWS also aired two NBC programs, both of which had been preempted by Westinghouse-owned NBC affiliate KYW-TV : the network's evening newscast The Huntley-Brinkley Report, during the 1959–1960 season; and The Tonight Show, with hosts Jack Paar and later Johnny Carson, from October 1957 to February 1966.
In 1977, WEWS-TV went before the U.S. Supreme Court for recording and broadcasting the entire human cannonball act of Hugo Zacchini. He performed his circus routine at the Geauga County Fair in Burton, Ohio, and the station did not compensate him, as was required by Ohio law. In Zacchini v. Scripps-Howard Broadcasting Co., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not shield WEWS from liability from common law copyright claims.
On May 23, 1994, as part of an overall deal in which network parent News Corporation also purchased a 20% equity interest in the group, New World Communications signed a long-term affiliation agreement with Fox to switch thirteen television stations that New World owned or was acquiring from a Big Three network, including WJW-TV, to Fox. The deal was motivated by the National Football League 's awarding of the rights to the National Football Conference television package to Fox on December 18, 1993, in which the conference's broadcast television rights moved to the network effective with the 1994 NFL season, ending a 38-year relationship with CBS. As Fox was seen at the time on lower-profile UHF station WOIO, CBS immediately targeted WEWS, as well as sister station WXYZ-TV in Detroit as its new affiliates in those markets. On June 16, however, Scripps signed a long-term deal with ABC that would keep WEWS-TV and WXYZ-TV as affiliates of the network; Scripps also agreed to affiliate WMAR-TV in Baltimore, KNXV-TV in Phoenix, and WFTS-TV in Tampa with ABC in the deal.
Dual network affiliates
From 1955 until December 31, 1996, WEWS held a distinction of being one of two primary ABC affiliates for the Cleveland market. WAKR-TV began operations on June 7, 1953, as a primary ABC affiliate, two years prior to WEWS joining the network. WAKR-TV's ties to ABC dated back to when radio adjunct WAKR signed on in 1940 as an NBC Blue/Blue Network affiliate and were incentivized by ABC's merger with United Paramount Theaters. For the network's part, they were engaged in a push to sign up as many affiliates as possible to compensate for NBC, CBS and Dumont having stronger affiliate bases.WAKR-TV's launch was delayed for several years: originally intended as a VHF license on a channel 11 allocation assigned to Akron, that allocation was removed as a result of the FCC's 1952 Sixth Report and Order in favor of two UHF allocations, one of which was not considered operable at the time. The station largely lost money in its early years and relied on profits from WAKR to remain solvent even after it moved from channel 49 to channel 23 in 1967. The ABC-TV schedule began to be carried in pattern by WAKR-TV with minimal deviations starting with the 1963–64 television season and carried Good Morning America in its entirety for the market as WEWS opted out for The Morning Exchange at 8 am, a distinction that ended in September 1994. When founding owner Summit Radio/Group One Broadcasting sold off their radio assets in 1986, the TV station was renamed WAKC.
After nearly 40 years of continuous ownership by Summit/Group One, WAKC was sold to ValueVision in late 1993; ABC immediately renewed their affiliation after the sale closed, forcing the home shopping programmer into operating the station as a conventional network affiliate. Following consummation of a subsequent sale to Paxson Communications, the station's entire news department was fired outright on February 28, 1996, and all ABC programming was dropped that December 31. Paxson ultimately used the renamed WVPX-TV as a charter affiliate for the Pax TV network—a direct antecedent of Ion Television—which launched on August 31, 1998. Due to Scripps' purchase of Paxson's successor company Ion Media in September 2020, WVPX was divested to Inyo Broadcast Holdings but has retained affiliations with Ion and other digital subchannel networks operated by Scripps subsidiary Katz Broadcasting.
Among WAKR-TV/WAKC's most notable alumni are two long-tenured WEWS staffers: Ted Henry, who began his career at WAKR-AM-TV as a reporter, and Mark Johnson, who worked at WAKC as a weatherman prior to joining WEWS in 1993 as a meteorologist.
Programming
Syndicated and network
WEWS carried the 90-minute ABC premiere of The Edge of Night on December 1, 1975. On December 3, it started Edge at 10 a.m. on a one-day delay, and then later pushed up to 10:30 to make way for the national syndication of the talk show Donahue. Edge was dropped in April 1977 when ABC expanded All My Children to one hour and revised the daytime lineup.In 1969, the station gained some national attention for airing only the first half of Turn-On, because they stated it did not return to the show after the first commercial break, which guest host Tim Conway said was after "15 minutes" but the station claimed had happened after 10 minutes. The rest of the time slot was the emergency procedure, a black screen with live organ music that had not been used in over 20 years. The station's spokesman claimed that the station's switchboard was "lit up" with protest calls, and general manager Donald Perris derided Turn-On as being "in excessive poor taste." Perris sent to ABC president Elton Rule an angry telegram: "If your naughty little boys have to write dirty words on the walls, please don't use our walls. Turn-On is turned off, as far as WEWS is concerned. You tried too hard." Perris told The Cleveland Press that neither he nor program director Ernest Sindelar had previewed the program prior to it being broadcast, remarking:
In 2004, all the Scripps-owned ABC stations preempted a showing of Saving Private Ryan.
On May 23, 2010, WEWS-TV's broadcast of the series finale of Lost was almost completely interrupted and rendered unwatchable by a number of technical difficulties with the station's digital signal. This caused numerous viewer complaints, leading the station to issue numerous apologies both on-air and on its website.
From the mid-1980s until 2011, WEWS was the Cleveland outlet for popular syndicated programs such as The Oprah Winfrey Show, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, and Live with Regis and Kathie Lee/Kelly, and throughout that time frame, there was little change in the daytime lineup, as those programs consistently drew good ratings.
In 2011, Oprah Winfrey ended her show after a successful 25-year run. To fill the void, WEWS put The Dr. Oz Show, which was airing at 10 am, in the 4 p.m. time slot., and in subsequent years aired various other programs in that slot until settling in with a 4 p.m. newscast in fall 2018.
On September 14, 2012, the station dropped both Wheel and Jeopardy! after airing both shows for almost three decades, replacing them with The List and Let's Ask America, two more internally produced shows from Scripps. The reason behind the removal of the two hit game shows was because Scripps was looking to stray away from shows that carried a high cost to air on their stations, and instead air shows where Scripps was able to control advertisement, and as a result, are much cheaper to air on their stations. Both game shows ended up moving to WOIO.
Let's Ask America would eventually be canceled in 2015, and WEWS would replace it with the long running celebrity gossip program Access Hollywood. The station also acquired Katie Couric's new talk show and placed it at 3 p.m. following General Hospitals shift to 2 pm, a move that many other ABC affiliates also made. Couric's show would be canceled two years later, and WEWS has aired various other syndicated programs in that time slot ever since. At present, only the program now known as Live with Kelly and Mark continues to air on channel 5 from the original stable of hit syndicated shows.