WMAR-TV
WMAR-TV is a television station in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, affiliated with ABC and owned by the E. W. Scripps Company. The station's studios and offices are located on York Road in Towson north of the Baltimore City–Baltimore County border. Its transmitter and antenna, which is on a landmark three-pronged candelabra broadcast tower, is located on Television Hill in the Woodberry neighborhood of Baltimore.
WMAR-TV's fifth subchannel broadcasts Scripps-owned Ion Television. It is sister to WPXW-TV in Manassas, Virginia, which serves the Washington, D.C., area, and satellite station WWPX-TV in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
History
Early years
WMAR first began broadcasting on October 30, 1947. It was the first television station in Maryland, and was the fourteenth commercial television station to sign on in the United States. WMAR was founded by the A. S. Abell Company, publisher of the Sunpapers and was the first completed phase of the Sunpapers expansion into broadcasting; the newspapers also held construction permits for WMAR-FM, which signed-on at 97.9 MHz in January 1948 and a proposed WMAR, which never made it to air. Channel 2's first broadcast was a pair of horse races emanating from Pimlico Race Course.WMAR-TV's studios, offices, transmitter and tower were initially located at the present-day Bank of America Building in downtown Baltimore; the studios were later shifted into a larger space adjacent to the building. WMAR-TV moved into its present facility, known originally as "Television Park" on York Road, in May 1963.
Channel 2 was an independent station at its launch, largely because at the time it was not clear whether Baltimore would be part of the Washington, D.C. market. In 1948, however, the Federal Communications Commission made Baltimore a separate media market. On March 29, 1948, WMAR-TV was announced as CBS' third full-time television affiliate, after WCBS-TV in New York City and WCAU-TV in Philadelphia. It also had secondary affiliations with ABC and DuMont for its early days, but it later lost both affiliations to upstart WAAM-TV when the station signed on in November.
One of WMAR's early local personalities was Jim McKay, who was the first voice heard when the station began its test broadcasts, and called the horse race program that inaugurated the station's official launch. McKay later moved over to CBS briefly before achieving greater fame on ABC as host of Wide World of Sports and Olympic coverage. Another was Helen Delich Bentley, a maritime editor for the Baltimore Sun who hosted The Port That Built a City, a weekly review presenting maritime, shipping and transportation-related news.
In 1959, WMAR-TV teamed up with WBAL-TV and WJZ-TV to build the world's first three-antenna candelabra tower. The new tower was built on the newly named "Television Hill" in the Woodberry neighborhood of Baltimore, which significantly expanded the station's signal coverage well beyond Central Maryland. During the 1970s, the FCC tightened its cross-ownership rules, eventually barring common ownership between a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city without a waiver. However, the combination of the Sunpapers and WMAR-TV was one of several that were "grandfathered" under these rules.
Switch to NBC
On March 3, 1981, CBS announced that it would be moving its affiliation to WBAL-TV, Baltimore's NBC station. Among its reasons for making the switch, CBS cited WMAR-TV's poor newscast ratings and frequent preemptions of network shows for syndicated programs, local specials, and sports coverage. While the station briefly considered becoming independent once again, channel 2 quickly cut a deal with NBC that May to take over that network's affiliation from channel 11. Baltimore's first affiliation switch took place on August 30, 1981. The final CBS program to air on channel 2 before the switch was an NFL preseason game between the Houston Oilers and the Dallas Cowboys, airing live at 9 p.m. Eastern Time on the night before the affiliation switch.Strike
On March 1, 1982, after negotiations between WMAR-TV management and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists failed, all of the station's on-air talent, except one, went on strike. AFTRA members, joined by the Teamsters, the Communication Workers of America and other local unions, picketed the station's offices on York Road and Abell's offices at North Calvert and East Centre Streets. When color announcer Brooks Robinson refused to cross the picket line at the start of the baseball season, the strike ended. The following day, both news anchors, Tom Sweeney and Curt Anderson, were fired.Ownership changes
On May 28, 1986, the A. S. Abell Company was purchased by the Los Angeles-based Times Mirror Company, the then-publisher of the Los Angeles Times. With the loss of the grandfathered protection between the former Abell media properties, Times-Mirror opted to keep The Sunpapers and sold WMAR-TV to Gillett Communications in July 1986. After filing for bankruptcy sometime later, Gillett restructured its television holdings into SCI Television, and in the early 1990s, SCI put WMAR-TV back on the market.The Cincinnati-based E. W. Scripps Company announced its purchase of the station in the summer of 1990, but in February 1991 the transfer was canceled after Scripps accused Gillett of misreporting WMAR's financial statements. Gillett then took legal action against Scripps, but both sides settled and the sale went forward. Scripps took control of the station in the spring of 1991.
Then, in September, Sinclair Broadcast Group, the owner of WBFF, took the bold step of challenging WMAR-TV's pending license renewal and filing its own competing application for a new station on channel 2. Sinclair argued that out-of-town ownership could not effectively serve the city's public interest, especially with such a valuable channel allocation; the channel 2 analog signal traveled a very long distance under normal conditions. Sinclair argued that as an established local broadcaster, it should receive the allocation instead. The gambit did not work, and WMAR-TV remained on channel 2.
ABC affiliation
In June 1994, Scripps and ABC announced a long-term affiliation deal, which resulted in three Scripps-owned stations switching to ABC. WMAR-TV was included in the deal, and Channel 2 would displace Baltimore's longtime ABC affiliate, Westinghouse Broadcasting-owned WJZ-TV. ABC agreed to the deal as a condition of keeping its affiliation on Scripps' two biggest stations, WXYZ-TV in Detroit and WEWS in Cleveland; both of those outlets had been heavily wooed by CBS, which was about to lose its longtime Detroit and Cleveland affiliates to Fox as part of that network's affiliation deal with New World Communications. Locally, it triggered Baltimore's second network affiliation swap, which saw WMAR-TV switch to ABC, CBS move to WJZ-TV after concluding a groupwide affiliation deal with Westinghouse, and NBC return to WBAL-TV. NBC first approached WJZ about negotiating an affiliation deal, ultimately to be turned down by its then-owner Westinghouse Broadcasting. All ABC programs turned down by WJZ-TV would air on WMAR-TV instead, forcing all preempted NBC programs to air on WBAL-TV, and preempted CBS shows would air on WJZ-TV instead, as the contracts did not expire until January 1995. The second switch occurred on January 2, 1995, with the FedEx Orange Bowl between the Miami Hurricanes and the Nebraska Cornhuskers being the final NBC program to air on channel 2. As a result, channel 2 became one of the few stations in the country to have been a primary affiliate with each of the "Big Three" networks.ABC had been reluctant to drop its affiliation with WJZ-TV, which had been the highest-rated station in Baltimore for over a quarter-century and was one of the strongest ABC affiliates in the nation. In contrast, WMAR-TV had been a ratings also-ran for three decades. Indeed, ABC's ratings in Baltimore went into a steep decline after the switch, with a number of programs falling from first to third in the Baltimore ratings in one stroke.
In 1996, a year after the affiliation change, station management opted not to renew channel 2's carriage of The Oprah Winfrey Show, deciding instead to take a chance on the new Rosie O'Donnell Show. The move proved costly in the long term, as market leader WBAL-TV picked up Oprah until its 2011 end, and Rosie lasted only seven years, ending in 2002. The switch resulted in a change of fortune between the two stations, with WBAL's 5–6:30 p.m. news block sustaining strong ratings, while WMAR suffered a steady decline in the same timeslot.
On May 13, 2014, after a station security guard denied him entry into WMAR-TV's studio/offices, 28-year-old Vladimir Baptiste crashed into the building in a pickup truck, which had been stolen around noon from a Maryland State Highway Administration subcontractor. All of the station's approximately 120 employees were evacuated and the building was placed on lockdown as Baltimore County Police officers searched for the suspect. Channel 2 ran an automated feed of ABC programming for four hours, before going dark for about 1 hour and 20 minutes; a satellite relay with Phoenix sister station KNXV-TV was then established late that afternoon until WMAR master control operators were able to resume broadcasting from the studio. Police captured the man just after 4:30 p.m. that afternoon, as he was watching news coverage of the incident in one of the facility's offices. Officers found weapons in the truck, but there were no reports of gunshots being fired. No staffers inside the building were injured. Baptiste was taken to a hospital for a mental evaluation, and was later charged with three counts of attempted second degree murder.
On April 16, 2018, WMAR changed its branding to "WMAR 2" to trade on the station's heritage as Maryland's first television station, and emphasize its "long-standing focus on Maryland and its people." It also adopted a modernized version of the stylized "2" logo it used in one form or another from 1975 to 1998.