WFTV
WFTV is a television station in Orlando, Florida, United States, affiliated with ABC. It is owned by Cox Media Group alongside WRDQ, an independent station. The two stations share studios on East South Street in downtown Orlando; WFTV's primary transmitter is located near Bithlo, Florida.
Channel 9 began broadcasting as WLOF-TV on February 1, 1958, after a four-year application process; it brought full three-network broadcasting to Central Florida. The call sign changed to WFTV in 1963. It was originally granted to the Mid-Florida Television Corporation, owned by the Brechner family and other investors. However, the same year the station went on the air, it was discovered as part of investigations into corruption at the Federal Communications Commission that an Orlando attorney had made unethical ex parte contact on behalf of Mid-Florida to FCC commissioner Richard A. Mack. The resulting investigation triggered more than two decades of proceedings that swung between the FCC, a federal court of appeals, and the Supreme Court. A wide range of issues came under discussion, including what Mid-Florida knew about the ex parte contact; what preference should be given to minority ownership of broadcast stations; and the character of a lawyer who was partially paralyzed in a murder-suicide and indicted on gambling charges in the same week.
Under a court order, Mid-Florida ceded operational control of WFTV in 1969 to Channel Nine of Orlando, Inc., a consortium of the five companies vying for the full-time broadcast license. After enduring a fatal collapse of its tower in 1973 and returning to full power in 1975, WFTV rode the rising fortunes of the ABC network in the late 1970s to become the top-rated station in Central Florida. The five companies agreed to a settlement, approved in 1981, that gave all of them varying shares of the station and ended what was then the longest proceeding in FCC history, filling 55 volumes. Many of their 67 shareholders became millionaires when SFN Companies purchased WFTV in 1984 as part of its expansion into the broadcasting industry.
SFN made a $60 million profit within a year by selling the station to Cox in 1985. Cox moved the station to newer, larger studios at its present site in 1990. Although it has faced renewed ratings competition since 2000, WFTV continues to lead ratings in the Orlando–Daytona Beach market.
History
Permitting and construction
Channel 9 was assigned to Orlando in 1952, when the Federal Communications Commission lifted a four-year freeze on television station grants. Throughout 1952, several applications were received for channel 9 from local radio stations: WHOO, WORZ, and WLOF. Applications poured in for channel 9, while groups were initially reticent to challenge WDBO for channel 6. However, channel 6 and ultra high frequency channel 18 also gained competing proposals. By April 1953, seven groups were seeking three channels, and Orlando was still without television.In November 1953, WLOF was sold to a group led by Joseph Brechner and John Kluge, and its original application for channel 9 was replaced by one filed by the new ownership under the name Mid-Florida Television Corporation. The new owners also moved the radio station to a new site in Orlo Vista in preparation for eventual television operations. WHOO's owner, Ed Lamb, became caught up in a proceeding questioning his loyalty to the American government and alleged associations with communist groups. His character became a point of discussion in hearings called for the three applicants for channel 9 in July 1954. On November 2, WHOO bowed out of the contest, leaving WLOF and WORZ competing for channel 9. The remaining applicants attended hearings in Washington in December.
FCC hearing examiner Basil Cooper recommended WORZ's application for approval in an initial decision released in August 1955. He noted that WORZ was locally owned and had rendered better service to Orlando than WLOF, whose owners were from the Washington area. Mid-Florida Television appealed the decision. The chair of the FCC's Broadcast Bureau refuted many of Cooper's findings as "erroneous" in a report released in October, and the case came to the full FCC in June 1956. There, both parties questioned the other's conduct. Mid-Florida emphasized the role of Will O. Murrell, a lawyer suspended for a year by the Florida Bar, in the WORZ application, while WORZ noted a letter sent by WLOF principal Hyman Roth on the matter. With a final decision from the FCC pending, in January 1957, Washington businessman Harris H. Thomson moved to buy a controlling interest in WLOF radio but not Mid-Florida Television.
On June 7, 1957, the FCC voted to grant channel 9 to Mid-Florida Television, the WLOF group, reversing the 1955 Cooper initial decision in favor of WORZ. It cited Murrell's involvement in ownership. Mid-Florida announced it would begin negotiating for an affiliation with the NBC network "immediately" and constructing the television station. WORZ appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, believing the FCC to have overemphasized positive aspects of WLOF's application. In August, WLOF-TV filed for a maximum-power and maximum-height tower facility and initiated talks with ABC for network affiliation instead of NBC. Despite WORZ's protest, the FCC approved the technical changes in November.
WLOF-TV began broadcasting on February 1, 1958, as the second station in Orlando itself. Between Daytona Beach station WESH moving its tower closer to Orlando, making it the NBC affiliate for both cities, and the launch of WLOF-TV, Central Florida at last had three stations airing the programming of the three major networks; ABC programs migrated from Orlando's WDBO-TV and WESH in the weeks that followed.
''Ex parte'' influence scandal
As WLOF-TV was getting on the air, a scandal involving the FCC's decisions in several contested television station cases exploded into view. In January 1958, syndicated columnist Drew Pearson published a column alleging that FCC commissioner Richard Mack, a Florida native, had been influenced to switch the approval of channel 10 in Miami to a company affiliated with National Airlines. The resulting congressional investigation uncovered other cases of ex parte communications between attorneys and FCC commissioners on matters before the commission. Among the proceedings the committee investigated was that of channel 9 in Orlando. Stephen J. Angland, an investigator for the committee, testified that William H. Dial, an attorney working for Mid-Florida Television, had contacted Mack; Dial noted they had gone to dinner several times, though not while he was engaged with Mid-Florida. As a result, in early October 1958, the FCC began a staff investigation into any irregularities in the channel 9 award. At the time, the Court of Appeals had affirmed Mid-Florida's 1957 grant, and WORZ was appealing to the Supreme Court of the United States. The House committee's findings led the court, on a 7–2 vote, to remand the case to the appeals court for further hearings in late October.WORZ objected to the FCC's decision to conduct a staff investigation and requested a formal inquiry before a hearing examiner; the FCC showed openness to this request in February 1959 and announced it would do so in March, pending the appeals court proceedings. At the end of that year, Kluge sold his interest in the television station to Brechner. After the appeals court remanded the matter to the FCC, the commission named chief hearing examiner James D. Cunningham to hear the case in February 1961 and set hearing dates in May. Cunningham's initial decision, released in September, recommended that Mid-Florida be stripped of the right to broadcast on channel 9 due to what he called "improper influences" by Dial on Mack. He also suggested that Mid-Florida be disqualified and not allowed to apply for the channel. Mid-Florida objected, noting that Cunningham found that Dial had acted without the knowledge or consent of company officials, though he had said that the company could not have been unaware of his actions.
Mid-Florida asked for an appeal by the full FCC and blasted Cunningham's decision as based "on suppositions and conjecture", a move WORZ characterized as a "fantastic and frantic" stall tactic. The commission heard oral argument in May 1962, at which time Mid-Florida tried to differentiate its case from other ex parte actions as not being abetted by the station applicant, where WORZ asked for a four-month grant to get on the air, as the FCC had done in the WPST-TV case and another, for channel 7 in Miami. Mid-Florida appeared successful; in January 1963, the FCC filed a report with the Court of Appeals noting that the grant should be reconsidered though there was no wrongdoing by Mid-Florida officials because they were unaware of what Dial had done until the congressional investigation in 1958. The vote by commissioners to clear Mid-Florida was 4–1, with commissioner Newton N. Minow the only dissenter. Minow contended that Mid-Florida officials knew of Dial's advances.
In celebration of its fifth anniversary of signing on the air, WLOF-TV changed its call letters to WFTV on February 3, 1963.
Rehearing, new applicants, and interim operator
WORZ moved in February 1963 to challenge the FCC report to the Court of Appeals, claiming that the commission could not reverse some of the findings in the 1961 Cunningham report concerning the credibility of witnesses. In July, the appeals court sent the case back to the FCC, in its ruling adopting elements of Minow's dissent. It ordered the commission to hold oral argument to determine whether the grant should be continued for WFTV, go to WORZ, or possibly be reopened for new applicants for the channel. WORZ also attempted to have the Supreme Court overturn the FCC's decision and was rebuffed in 1964.The suggestion of reopening the channel 9 file was taken up by the FCC's Broadcast Bureau, which urged the commission to take new applications; commission members were said to be unenthusiastic about the idea. Pat Valicenti, attorney for the bureau, noted that the record had "grown stale" because of changes in ownership of Mid-Florida in the intervening years, particularly as the expertise of the original principals had been a major factor in the 1957 grant. The commission did not take up the Broadcast Bureau's call, disagreeing that the record was so stale as to not be useful, and in June 1964, it affirmed the grant and awarded a three-year full-term license to Mid-Florida Television Corporation for WFTV, allowing the station to stop operating under program test authority as it had for more than six years.
WORZ appealed to the Court of Appeals yet again; the court agreed with the Broadcast Bureau and the losing applicant that the record was stale. In March 1965, the case was returned to the FCC for a third time, this time with orders to allow new applicants to seek channel 9. The unsigned decision stated:
After the Supreme Court denied review of this decision on a petition from Mid-Florida, new applicants began filing for channel 9 in late 1965 and early 1966. These included:
- Central Nine Corporation, a consortium of investors with the largest share held by Richard G. Danner, a Washington attorney. Other stockholders included former Orlando mayor J. Rolfe Davis and Benjamin Smathers, who resigned as director of WDBO parent Outlet Company to participate;
- Comint Corporation;
- Florida 9 Broadcasting Company;
- Florida Heartland Television, a consortium of investors including the Gay–Bell group that owned WLEX-TV in Lexington, Kentucky, and WCOV-TV in Montgomery, Alabama;
- Howard Weiss, an attorney from Chicago, in representation of a group from that city;
- Mid-Florida Television Corporation;
- Orange Nine, Inc., a successor to WORZ, Inc., owned by the Murrell family;
- TV-9, Inc., headed by Rollins College president Hugh McKean.
In September 1968, the Court of Appeals ordered the FCC to consider the interim operating authority requests from competing applicants for channel 9 and channel 12 in Jacksonville, which also was embroiled in a similar case. After the issuance of that order, in lieu of appealing, Mid-Florida offered to cooperate with the other five applicants—Weiss no longer in the running. Under the arrangement proposed, Joseph Brechner and his wife would resign; all station staff would remain; Mid-Florida would lease the facilities to the operator at a fair rate; and station profits would be donated to charity or cultural institutions. While rejecting some of the proposed conditions, the FCC awarded interim operating authority to Consolidated Nine on January 10, 1969. Orange Nine, having previously withdrawn its bid for the permanent channel 9 license, withdrew from seeking interim authority in late January. Meanwhile, the comparative hearing to determine the full-time owner of the channel began in March. Brechner later told a reporter, "I was on the witness stand for days, with four lawyers quizzing me. I came back to Orlando and had a heart attack."
On April 1, 1969, Mid-Florida turned over operating control of WFTV to the new interim operator, which had changed its name to Channel Nine of Orlando, Inc.; after Orange Nine's exit, Comint had joined the consortium. A representative of each of the five firms—Central Nine, Comint, Florida Heartland, Mid-Florida, and TV-9—sat on the governing board that controlled the station's affairs. Brechner's exit was more definitive: Mid-Florida took out a full-page ad in the Orlando Evening Star the next day, titled "Until We Meet Again", with photos of Brechner and other station executives and a list of awards WFTV had received in its more than 11 years under the company's ownership. It also expressed hope that Mid-Florida would become the permanent operator again, promising a "vigorous presentation of its qualifications" in the FCC proceedings.