WHDH (TV)
WHDH is an independent television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is owned by Sunbeam Television alongside Cambridge-licensed CW affiliate WLVI. WHDH and WLVI share studios at Bulfinch Place in downtown Boston; through a channel sharing agreement, the two stations transmit using WHDH's spectrum from the WHDH-TV tower in Newton, Massachusetts.
From 1982 to 1995, WHDH was Boston's CBS affiliate, inheriting the affiliation from its predecessor on channel 7, WNAC-TV. On January 2, 1995, WHDH switched to NBC, after CBS moved to WBZ-TV by virtue of a group-wide affiliation deal with its owner, Westinghouse Broadcasting. On January 1, 2017, after losing NBC's affiliation to a newly formed owned-and-operated station, WBTS-LD, WHDH became a news-intensive independent station.
History
WNAC-TV's fight for survival and transition (1948–1982)
The original occupant of the channel 7 allocation in Boston was WNAC-TV, which commenced operations on June 21, 1948, as Boston's second commercial station. Originally a CBS affiliate, the station switched to ABC in 1961, but rejoined CBS in 1972.By 1965, WNAC-TV's owner, RKO General, faced numerous investigations into its business and financial practices. Though the Federal Communications Commission renewed WNAC-TV's license in 1969, RKO General lost the license in 1981 after its parent company, General Tire, admitted to a litany of corporate misconduct—which among other things, included the admission that General Tire had committed financial fraud over illegal political contributions and bribes—as part of a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. However, in the FCC hearings, RKO General had withheld evidence of General Tire's misconduct, and had also failed to disclose evidence of accounting errors on its own part. In light of RKO's dishonesty, the FCC stripped RKO of the Boston license and the licenses for KHJ-TV in Los Angeles and WOR-TV in New York City. The FCC had previously conditioned renewal of the latter two stations' licenses on WNAC-TV's renewal. An appeals court partially reversed the ruling, finding that RKO's dishonesty alone merited having the WNAC-TV license removed. However, it held that the FCC had overreached in tying the other two license renewals to WNAC-TV's renewal, and ordered new hearings.
Though RKO continued to appeal the decision, in late February 1982 the FCC granted the New England Television Corporation a construction permit to build a new station on channel 7. Two months later in April, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear RKO's appeal, leaving the firm with no further recourse but to accept the Commission's decision and surrender WNAC-TV's license. RKO then sold the station's non-license physical assets, including its studio on Bulfinch Place and transmitter/tower site in suburban Newton, to NETV. RKO General formally surrendered the WNAC-TV license at midnight on May 21, 1982; the station signed off as WNAC-TV for the final time about an hour later.
As WNEV-TV (1982–1990)
NETV took over channel 7 nearly five hours later under a new license, signing on the new WNEV-TV at 5:55 a.m. ET that morning. Behind the imaging theme "There's a New Day Dawning", WNEV-TV dropped WNAC-TV's strip-layered "7" logo in favor of a new stylized "SE7EN" logo. However, the new station inherited WNAC-TV's CBS affiliation and syndicated program contracts, and most of the former WNAC-TV staff—including news reporter and anchor Mike Taibbi, who signed the station on the air in a brief ceremony prior to WNEV-TV's first program, CBS' Summer Semester.NETV's mission from the start was to allocate programming hours to innovative, in-house productions, in much the same way that Boston Broadcasters did when it launched WCVB-TV on channel 5 ten years earlier. Notable productions that premiered early on were Look, which began as a two-hour late afternoon talk and lifestyle show that led into WNEV's 6 p.m. newscast. Despite a powerful effort at an entertaining and informative program, and praise from critics, Look was a ratings failure; for its second year, the show was cut back to an hour and renamed New England Afternoon before being dropped. WNEV continued to produce talk programs, first with Morning/Live, a half-hour weekday morning talk show hosted by Susan Sikora, and later with the similarly structured Talk of the Town, hosted by Matt Lauer. Nancy Merrill, former host of WBZ-TV's People Are Talking, headlined two talk shows on WNEV, the weekend late night entry Merrill at Midnight and the weekday morning program Nancy Merrill.
NETV also made it an immediate purpose to further diversify the station's workforce, both on-air and behind the scenes. Within WNEV's first couple of years, there was an increase of news reporters and anchors of color joining the station. The commitment to diversity extended itself to a series of new public affairs shows that each targeted a specific ethnic group: Urban Update, Revista Hispana, Asian Focus and Jewish Perspective. Other public affairs and newsmagazines launched by WNEV included a Sunday morning religious affairs program, Higher Ground, the weekend talk and advice show Boston Common, the Saturday night newsmagazine Our Times, and Studio 7, which focused on the arts.
In 1987, another of WNEV's ambitious efforts premiered, the hour-long live children's variety show Ready to Go. Featuring Broadway actress/singer Liz Callaway and Scott Reese, who not only hosted but also sang and acted, the program featured an equal mix of entertainment and educational content, along with musical acts and celebrity interviews. The series began as a 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. programming alternative against WBZ and WCVB's morning newscasts, before moving to 7 a.m. in September 1989. On March 24, 1990, after only six months at its new time slot, the station cut the series back to once-a-week Saturday broadcasts only, before canceling the show outright in 1991.
In mid-August 1987, WNEV overhauled its on-air image. The station dropped its "SE7EN" identity in favor of a new logo, which consisted of the number "7" made up of seven white dots inside of a blue circle. The logo was introduced as a part of the new station-wide campaign, "We're All on the Same Team", in which the seven dots represented the heads of team members. The dots also had dual usage, as lottery balls, in promotions for Lottery Live, the Massachusetts State Lottery drawings which were moving to WNEV late that summer. The campaign was primarily launched as a continued attempt to bolster the station's third-place news ratings, and to promote its news-sharing partnership with other TV and radio stations, The New England News Exchange.
WHDH radio (1990–1992)
Throughout the 1980s, WNEV-TV frequently partnered with WHDH radio for public events such as Project Bread and the Walk For Hunger, as well as for other initiatives. NETV would eventually purchase WHDH on August 7, 1989. In January 1990, Mugar announced that on March 12 of that year, WNEV would change its call letters to WHDH-TV, in order to correspond with its sister radio operation. The WHDH-TV call sign was previously used by the original occupant of channel 5, under the ownership of the Boston Herald-Traveler, from 1957 to 1972. It was Mugar's plan to create, once again, a second major television/radio duopoly, primarily in news, to compete with the long-standing combo of WBZ radio and WBZ-TV. Boston Mayor Ray Flynn declared March 12, 1990, as "WHDH Day" in Boston, celebrating the joining of the radio and television stations. On that day, personalities from WHDH-TV spoke as guests on WHDH radio.The dual operation, which began with much fanfare and leverage, proved to be too costly for Mugar and company. NETV gradually slid into a deficit, prompting cutbacks on in-house programming as well as in the television station's news department; the most notable effect being the elimination of WHDH-TV's 5 p.m. newscast for two years beginning in 1991. With channel 7's news ratings in third place, minimal help from CBS and declining profits, Mugar was eventually prompted to sell the WHDH stations. The radio station was sold to Atlantic Ventures in 1992.
Sale to Sunbeam
By 1991, the relationship between majority owner David Mugar and minority owner Robert Kraft had become strained. Kraft, who became owner of the New England Patriots in 1994, exercised an option that forced Mugar to purchase his shares for an estimated $25 million. This, along with the nearly $100 million debt he held from the 1986 buyout and falling advertising revenues left Mugar strapped for cash. On April 22, 1993, David Mugar entered into an agreement to sell WHDH to Miami-based Sunbeam Television, a company led by Worcester native Edmund Ansin. The purchase was completed in late July.Shortly afterward, Ansin brought in news director Joel Cheatwood from his Miami flagship station WSVN. Cheatwood had become infamous in Miami for his changes to WSVN's news operation, which focused on visually intensive, fast-paced newscasts with heavy emphasis on tabloid journalism, particularly covering crime. Cheatwood planned to perform similar changes at WHDH. Cheatwood ultimately adopted a considerably watered-down version of WSVN's format, but still retained many of WSVN's features, including a faster-paced format, increased use of graphics and visuals, and more on-the-scene reporting. It even adopted WSVN's version of the Circle 7 logo. While critics were concerned that WHDH would lose even more viewers if it were to adopt WSVN's format entirely, WHDH quickly rebounded to become the number one newscast in Boston for a period.
As an NBC affiliate (1995–2017)
In 1994, WBZ-TV's owner, Westinghouse Broadcasting entered into a groupwide affiliation deal with CBS, which resulted in three Group W stations that were affiliated with networks other than CBS—NBC affiliates WBZ-TV, and KYW-TV in Philadelphia, and ABC affiliate WJZ-TV in Baltimore—switching to the network. Fox, already associated with Sunbeam through its affiliation with WSVN, considered an affiliation deal with WHDH ; however, on August 2, 1994, WHDH-TV announced that it had agreed to affiliate with NBC instead of Fox, in part citing NBC's stronger news and sports programming. Fox ultimately chose to acquire its existing affiliate, WFXT. WHDH became Boston's NBC affiliate on January 2, 1995, replacing WBZ-TV. The final CBS program to air on channel 7 was the made-for-TV movie A Father for Charlie at 9 p.m. Eastern Time on January 1, 1995.During its time with NBC, channel 7 cleared the network's entire programming schedule. Between 1996 and 1997, WHDH produced a mid-morning weekday newsmagazine for the NBC network called Real Life. After the switch to NBC, WHDH became one of the few stations in the country to have had a primary affiliation with all of the Big Three networks. On September 14, 2006, Tribune Broadcasting sold CW affiliate WLVI-TV to Sunbeam Television for $117.3 million. The sale was approved by the FCC in late November of that year, creating Boston's second television duopoly. WLVI moved its operations from its Dorchester studios to WHDH's facilities in downtown Boston.
On April 2, 2009, WHDH announced that it would not air The Jay Leno Show, when it debuted on NBC in September 2009, electing to replace it with a simulcast of the 10 p.m. newscast that WHDH began producing for WLVI in order to better compete with Fox affiliate WFXT. The network quickly dismissed any move of Leno to any time slot other than 10 p.m., stating that WHDH's plan was a "flagrant" violation of the station's contract with the network and that it would consider moving the NBC affiliation to another Boston area station, either by creating an owned-and-operated station through an "existing broadcast license" in the market owned by NBC or by seeking inquiries from other stations in the market to acquire the affiliation. WHDH began removing all references to the proposed 10 p.m. newscast from its website the next day, and on April 13, 2009, the station announced that it had decided to comply and air The Jay Leno Show instead.
The fears of possible ratings issues with the prime time talk show as the lead-in for its late newscast would become well-realized, as viewership for WHDH's 11 p.m. news plunged to third place during the November 2009 sweeps period. Other 'first-to-last' drops among NBC affiliates' newscasts in the 11 p.m. slot and overall affiliate pressure forced the network on January 10, 2010, to pull Leno from 10 p.m. starting after the 2010 Winter Olympics and move him back to The Tonight Show in a controversial shake-up of its late night schedule. Although the radio station had dropped the WHDH callsign in 1994, channel 7 retained the "-TV" suffix in its call letters until July 8, 2010.