WIAT
WIAT is a television station in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, affiliated with CBS and owned by Nexstar Media Group. The station's studios are on Golden Crest Drive atop Red Mountain, where its tower is also located.
Channel 42 in Birmingham went on the air as WBMG on October 17, 1965, nearly nine years after its construction was approved. It was the city's third commercial station after channels 6 and 13, whose very high frequency signals carried further than WBMG's ultra high frequency signal; the Birmingham Television Corporation, which built channel 42, had been unsuccessful in efforts to allocate a third VHF TV channel to Birmingham. The station initially aired the CBS and NBC programs not aired by channel 13 until the two stations each took full-time network affiliations in 1970. It was hemmed in by its weaker signal, the existence of CBS affiliates in Tuscaloosa and Anniston, and the dominance of the VHF stations in the ratings. Roy H. Park Broadcasting acquired WBMG in 1973, but WBMG never moved above third in the market. In response to low ratings, the station dropped local news in 1982 and restored it in 1987; the newscasts, titled Action News Birmingham, became known for a combative style and emphasis on metro-area news, but they were never highly viewed. By 1997, syndicated reruns of Sanford and Son attracted more viewers than WBMG's evening news, and a new Birmingham TV station pushed channel 42 into fourth place in news.
When Media General acquired the Park group in 1997, it planned a major overhaul of the long-struggling station. General manager Eric Land fired all of WBMG's on-air presenters as well as other news employees in December 1997. For a month, channel 42 aired a countdown clock at 5 and 10p.m. while the news department was rebuilt from scratch, a tactic that attracted national attention. On February 5, 1998, the station changed its call letters to WIAT—for its new slogan, "It's About Time"—and relaunched its newscasts as 42 Daily News. The news programs featured short stories, no on-camera reporters, and a high story count; while still in fourth place, they were a marked improvement in quality and ratings over their predecessors. After ratings plateaued in the early 2000s, the station moved to a more conventional format and brought in veteran Birmingham news personalities, which made channel 42 more competitive in the market.
Media General acquired WVTM-TV in 2006 and sold WIAT to New Vision Television to make the purchase. LIN Media acquired New Vision in 2012, and Media General acquired LIN in 2014—this time, keeping WIAT and selling WVTM. Nexstar purchased Media General in 2017.
Pre-launch
In March 1956, the Birmingham Television Corporation—formed by Harry and Elmer Balaban—was incorporated in Alabama and proceeded to file for Birmingham's unused ultra high frequency channel 42. That same month, Birmingham radio station WSGN filed for channel 42 as well. It was the second application for television made by WSGN, which had previously sought channel 48 and was an ABC affiliate in radio. The fact that two applicants were seeking a UHF channel was of note given that UHF television had proved mostly an economic failure due to lack of transmitter power and the inability of many sets to tune UHF stations.WSGN's owners, the Winston-Salem Broadcasting Company, withdrew their application for channel 42 on November 28, 1956. The withdrawal was part of a consolidation with the Balaban application, which was approved. Of the prospects for a new station, which would likely have been an ABC affiliate at that point in time, Roger Thames of The Birmingham News wrote,
The Birmingham Television Corporation spent years trying to move a third commercial channel in the more established very high frequency band to Birmingham. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the FCC considered adding such a channel to Birmingham on multiple occasions. In 1959, it considered moving channel 8 into Birmingham; WBMG favored a proposal to relocate channel 4 from Columbus, Mississippi, which was also denied. In 1963, it opted to deny the addition of channel 3. The pending proceedings spared the unbuilt station, with the call sign WBMG, from deletion. In 1960, the FCC sent letters to the permittees of 54 unused or unbuilt UHF stations, including WBMG, ordering them to resume or lose the permit. WBMG and a permit in Grand Rapids, Michigan, were spared due to the pending proposals. In 1963, Winston-Salem Broadcasting became the sole owner of the Birmingham Television Corporation when it bought out the Balabans' stake.
Construction and early years
In November 1964, Winston-Salem Broadcasting filed to sell a two-thirds stake to four investors: William P. Dubois, Enterprise Funds Inc., Northwest Growth Fund Inc., and Exchange Capitol Corporation. The FCC approved this transaction in March 1965. With the new ownership, plans were set in motion to construct WBMG, with Dubois as general manager. Even at this juncture, the station attempted to improve its position by filing for the lower channel 21.WBMG began broadcasting on October 17, 1965. The quarters it occupied on Red Mountain had belonged to radio station WJLD and were designed to accommodate a television operation. WBMG did not hold a primary network affiliation at launch. WAPI-TV held the primary affiliations with CBS and NBC in central Alabama, and not all of their programming was seen in Birmingham as a result; channel 42 filled this gap by airing the network shows not aired on channel 13. This was illustrated in its first day of programming: the inaugural program was an NBC News special, but later in the evening the station aired The Ed Sullivan Show from CBS. Likewise, WBMG aired the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on weeknights. Carson had gone unseen in Birmingham in several years. Because WAPI-TV had first-call rights on the networks' programs, series moved between the stations, sometimes in the middle of the television season.
The station broadcast with an effective radiated power of 479,000 watts until 1969, when it activated a new, tower and increased its power to over a million watts. The new tower was boasted to increase the station's signal in areas from Anniston and Gadsden in the east to Tuscaloosa in the west. By this time, Tuscaloosa and Anniston each had their own stations: Tuscaloosa's WCFT debuted in October 1965, while Anniston's WHMA-TV started in October 1969. This situation persisted until May 31, 1970, when WAPI-TV became the sole NBC affiliate under a new agreement with NBC and WBMG the sole CBS affiliate. Likewise, WCFT and WHMA-TV became full-time CBS affiliates.
In 1971, WBMG moved into larger studios on Red Mountain.
Park Broadcasting ownership
Park Broadcasting, the radio and television enterprise of Roy H. Park, acquired WBMG in 1973, bringing its station group up to the then-limit of seven outlets. Park continued to make capital investments in channel 42 in spite of its reduced coverage area, including new video tape equipment, electronic news gathering, and a new antenna. However, these changes did not fully help WBMG, whose signal could not fully penetrate the hilly Central Alabama terrain.The station produced a number of local programs; these included a public affairs series, live studio wrestling, a weekly church service, and annual coverage of Birmingham's Veterans Day parade. In the late 1960s and 1970s, channel 42 offered Sgt. Jack, a children's show hosted by Birmingham disc jockey Neal Miller. Its studios were the home to the first programs produced by Mother Angelica, founder of the Eternal Word Television Network ; she severed her relationship with WBMG in 1981 when it aired a CBS miniseries based on the 1972 novel The Word, which she believed presented Jesus as a fake.
While WBMG debuted a local newscast when it signed on in 1965, its news efforts were generally minimal. One of its first employees was Bill Bolen, who had worked at WSGN radio and later left to spend 41 years at WBRC; he recalled channel 42 as "primitive". By 1977, the news staff numbered four people, while WBRC and WAPI-TV each had 20 or more employees in their news departments. Few people watched. In 1981, WBMG's 6p.m. newscast attracted six percent of the audience at that hour to 49 percent for WBRC and 33 percent for the recently renamed WVTM-TV, and the station had no newscast at 10p.m. General manager Hoyle Broome touted the straightforward format of his newscast as an alternative. The newscast, known as Metro News, was then moved to 5p.m. in hopes of attracting an audience as the first newscast of the evening; WVTM dashed those hopes by debuting a 5p.m. newscast of its own, prompting station officials to reevaluate. In March 1982, the newscast was replaced with short news updates during daytime and evening programming, and the news staff was reduced from five employees to two. The station did not air local newscasts for the next several years; Park instead invested in a new, taller tower and higher-power transmitter facility for WBMG, which were activated in 1983 and 1984, respectively.
''Action News Birmingham''
In late 1986, WBMG began readying a return to local news production, prompting Tuscaloosa-based WDBB to cancel its low-rated 9p.m. local newscast. Park invested $1.5 million to start WBMG Action News Birmingham, which debuted on January 12, 1987. The news department, with weeknight 5 and 10p.m. newscasts as well as weekend editions, focused on news in the five-county Birmingham metro area, rather than the much larger news coverage areas of WBRC and WVTM; the goal was not to be number one but merely to occupy a niche. News director Frank Morock believed the expanding focuses of the other stations left Birmingham and its environs relatively underserved. News viewership for Action News Birmingham hovered between five and nine percent of the audience, a far cry from the shares of 30 percent or above commanded by each of WBRC and WVTM. The newscasts were losing in the ratings to syndicated reruns on Birmingham's independent station, WTTO, though station management contended and a coincidental telephone survey found that viewership was higher than reflected in ratings diaries.John Herrod left KTXS-TV in Sweetwater, Texas, to become WBMG's news director in 1990. He sought to give the station a defined news image by airing longer, more in-depth stories. Channel 42 also became known for aggressive reporting. When WBRC anchor Janet Hall became a spokeswoman for the Birmingham Zoo, WBMG produced a news special openly asking whether WBRC could be considered a reliable source for reporting on the troubled facility. Doors being slammed in WBMG reporters' faces became a common sight on channel 42's newscasts, and the station did a series of reports on why Birmingham city officials were not talking to WBMG. Even though WBMG's news audience consisted of one to two percent of the market, a study by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham found that WBMG's Action News aired more local news stories and longer stories than its higher-rated competitors in one week in April 1994, concluding, "Channel 42 was guilty of some editorializing but clearly offered more substance than the other two stations."