WRDC
WRDC is a television station licensed to Durham, North Carolina, United States, serving the Research Triangle area as an affiliate of MyNetworkTV. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside Raleigh-licensed CW affiliate WLFL. The two stations share studios in the Highwoods Office Park, just outside downtown Raleigh; WRDC's transmitter is located in Auburn, North Carolina.
Channel 28 is the third-oldest television station in the Triangle and was the market's NBC affiliate for its first 27 years of operation. It was perennially the third-rated station in the market and did not produce local newscasts for significant portions of its tenure with NBC, which contributed to the network moving to another station.
Prior use of channel 28 in Raleigh
Channel 28 in Raleigh was initially occupied by WNAO-TV, the first television station in the Raleigh–Durham market and North Carolina's first UHF station. Owned by the Sir Walter Television Company, WNAO-TV broadcast from July 12, 1953, to December 31, 1957, primarily as a CBS affiliate with secondary affiliations with other networks. The station was co-owned with WNAO radio ), which Sir Walter had bought from The News & Observer newspaper after obtaining the television construction permit. After the Raleigh–Durham market received two VHF television stations in 1954 and 1956, WNAO-TV found the going increasingly difficult, as did many early UHF stations. The station signed off December 31, 1957, and its owner entered into a joint venture with another dark UHF outlet that was successful in obtaining channel 8 in High Point.History
WRDU-TV/Triangle Telecasters
In 1966, a major overhaul of the UHF allocation table moved the market's channel 28 allotment from Raleigh to Durham. On November 18 of that year, Triangle Telecasters, Inc., a group led by law professor Robinson O. Everett, applied to the Federal Communications Commission for a construction permit to build a new channel 28 station in Durham. The Everett group competed with a very similarly named company, Durham–Raleigh Telecasters, which also applied for the channel. Triangle Telecasters won out on April 29, 1968. Everett sold a minority stake to Charles Woods, owner of WTVY-TV in Dothan, Alabama. Other minority partners included then-mayor of Chapel Hill and WCHL founder Roland "Sandy" McClamroch, former Durham mayor E. J. Evans and former Raleigh mayor Jim Reid.The new channel 28 began broadcasting on the afternoon of November 4, 1968, as WRDU-TV. The station had no single full affiliation: its first programs were an episode of the CBS soap opera Love is a Many Splendored Thing followed by the NBC soaps The Doctors and Another World. The new station's studios were on North Carolina Highway 54 in southern Durham, with a transmitter near Terrells Mountain in Chatham County.
The station's first broadcast day reflected the unusual situation in Raleigh–Durham television and which would ultimately have an impact on federal regulations. By then, the Triangle was one of the largest markets in the country with only two commercial television stations. WRAL-TV aired ABC full-time, while CBS and NBC were shoehorned on WTVD. In 1966, a columnist for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, opined that WTVD let NBC programs play a "poor second fiddle" to its primary affiliation with CBS. The area had not been allocated a third commercial VHF station; the nearest NBC affiliates were WITN-TV in Washington and WSJS-TV in Winston-Salem. Even though the All-Channel Receiver Act had only taken effect in 1964, WRDU-TV had one form of compensation the old channel 28 lacked: cable TV. After four years of deliberation by the Raleigh city council, Cablevision came to the city the same year the station launched, and WRDU was picked up by the Raleigh and Burlington cable systems almost as soon as it went on the air.
Even with a third station on the air, NBC allowed WTVD to retain right of first refusal for NBC programming. This situation allowed WTVD to continue its established practice of selecting the higher-rated NBC and CBS programs, leaving WRDU to carry the lower-rated shows from those networks as well as NBC's news programming. By November 1969, this situation prompted Triangle Telecasters to petition the FCC for recourse against WTVD taking shows back from them that they had previously rejected. In 1971, the FCC ruled in favor of Triangle Telecasters, setting a precedent for similar cases elsewhere. The ruling forced WTVD to choose one network; it ultimately chose CBS, forcing NBC to sign with WRDU-TV by default ahead of the 1971–1972 television season.
NBC's affiliation with WRDU meant that Triangle television viewers, for the first time, finally saw the full schedules of all three networks on separate stations. However, it consigned NBC to a weaker UHF station in terms of personnel, programming, and signal. Channel 28's transmitter was located on the Orange–Chatham County line on the market's western fringe, providing only a Grade B signal to Raleigh proper and rendering it practically unviewable over the air in southern and eastern Wake County. In May 1969, WRDU set up a translator on channel 70 to improve its coverage in eastern Wake County; in 1972, that translator moved to channel 22 and from the top of the BB&T Building in downtown Raleigh to the top of a newly constructed retirement home nearby. Even then, one writer once called the signal "weak as a Carrie Nation cocktail".
Another problem of WRDU's early years was Triangle Telecasters' frequent preemption of network shows for syndicated programs. The Everetts believed they could get more revenue from local advertising than from network airtime payments, due to WRDU's low ratings keeping compensation rates very low in turn. The preemptions only increased during NBC's 1970s ratings struggles. At the time, NBC was considerably less tolerant of its stations substituting alternative programming for its feed than ABC or CBS. However, when NBC demanded that Triangle Telecasters clear the entire network schedule with no preemptions, the Everetts turned them down. NBC was in no position to do anything about it because of the lack of competition in the market. One time WRDU chose not to preempt a network program, it still faced criticism for different reasons; local religious leaders objected to the airing of Franco Zeffirelli's mini-series Jesus of Nazareth, arguing it would offend their beliefs. This was even though WRDU not only held the local rights to The PTL Club, but frequently preempted NBC programming in order to air Billy Graham crusades. The station was also the Triangle's home for the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon until 1979, when it moved to WTVD.
WPTF-TV/Durham Life era
By 1975, though it had outlived the original channel 28, the Everetts were running out of money and wanted out. Realizing that the station was on the verge of shutting down, the family began to look for a new owner. Despite WRDU's ratings struggles, at least three large media groups saw enough promise in the station to consider buying it, among them Scripps–Howard Broadcasting. After two years of negotiations, the Durham Life Insurance Company—which owned WPTF, the Triangle's oldest radio station, and WQDR-FM—bought WRDU-TV from the Everetts in May 1977 and changed its call sign to WPTF-TV on August 14, 1978.This was Durham Life's second attempt to get into television. It was one of two applicants for channel 5 in the 1950s and had gone as far as buying cameras and rehearsing announcers. However, the FCC shocked Durham Life when it awarded the license to the much smaller Capitol Broadcasting, owner of WRAL-AM-FM radio, as WRAL-TV. Before buying channel 28, Durham Life had been interested in building a new station on channel 22, a Raleigh assignment that had been proposed for a station in the 1960s.
Durham Life had far more financial resources than Triangle Telecasters could have ever managed and invested a considerable amount of money into its new purchase. It built a new transmitter tower near Apex that gave the renamed WPTF-TV a coverage area comparable to those of WRAL-TV and WTVD. It also started a full news department—Woody Durham, the play-by-play voice of North Carolina Tar Heels sports, served as sports director—and purchased $500,000 in new equipment. It also added a weekday children's show entitled Barney's Army, which was hosted by the namesake Aniforms puppet and ran from 1979 to 1983, long after the genre had disappeared from most other American stations. The show consisted of short interstitials between cartoons and other children's shows, a viewer call-in game called TV Powww along with local musical acts and educational segments. This youth-centered daytime schedule came at the expense of the NBC soap opera Another World, which did not air on the station during its 90-minute expansion from 1979 to 1980; a station representative argued the syndicated shows were more profitable. The preemption of Another World came amid vehement opposition from the network and angry calls and letters from viewers who had actually watched the show on WPTF. Meanwhile, the next closest stations still playing the show in its regular time slot were WECT in Wilmington, WITN-TV in Greenville, and WAVY-TV in Portsmouth, Virginia, all of which were VHF stations. Likewise, the station's removal of Texas prompted viewer outrage; less than a year later, the station added the show back when the network moved it to a mid-morning time slot, NBC canceled it along with The Doctors: WPTF was the only NBC affiliate in North Carolina that still aired the latter show.
Amid indications that Durham Life was as willing to preempt NBC programming as the Everetts had been despite a more powerful signal, Channel 28 still faced the audience-loyalty problems it had under Triangle Telecasters. As NBC's ratings slump worsened, WPTF's already frosty relationship with NBC became even chillier. Even the network's few hits at the time, such as Diff'rent Strokes and The Rockford Files, performed poorly for the station, a problem compounded when NBC programming head Fred Silverman's theory of a "living schedule" did not generate the same success as it did at ABC. Channel 28's stronger signal did not result in a boost for its news ratings; in November 1979, WRAL's 6 p.m. newscast attracted a 30 rating, WTVD's a 16, and WPTF-TV's a measly 1. In 1981, Durham Life reorganized as a holding company, Durham Corporation; the reorganized company fended off two hostile takeover attempts later in the decade. While the radio stations continued to make money, the broadcasting division posted losses because of channel 28. Durham Life also continued to preempt NBC programming, albeit less often than the 1970s. Citing a scheduling problem with a syndicated special, WPTF-TV preempted Maya Angelou's TV movie Sister, Sister when NBC aired it, despite its being set in North Carolina and despite Angelou teaching at Wake Forest University. The station defended its programming philosophy by pointing to its most acclaimed and popular examples of first-run syndicated programs, such as The Muppet Show, and TV movies from Operation Prime Time.
Channel 28 also justified its reliance on syndicated programs by pointing out how they got higher ratings than its nightly news broadcasts. WPTF-TV dropped its 11:00 p.m. newscast in 1982, moving its early-evening newscast to 5:30 and delaying the NBC Nightly News to 7:00 p.m. so it could air Star Trek instead. It also dropped NBC News Overnight, arguing to a local newspaper that the station would lose money on the show compared to just showing nothing at all and signing off after Late Night with David Letterman. The following year, longform evening newscasts were dropped altogether, replaced with brief cut-ins throughout the day. The closest thing to a newscast on the station was a half-hour weekday newsmagazine, North Carolina Today.
WRAL and WTVD switched affiliations in 1985 after WTVD's owner, Capital Cities Communications, bought ABC. Despite an ad campaign designed to poke fun at the change, saying "you know where to find us" to point out that NBC was still in the same place, WPTF-TV saw practically no windfall from the switch. By the mid-to-late 1980s, even with NBC's powerful prime time lineup leading the network to first place only two years after finishing last, WPTF-TV remained stubbornly last in the Triangle television ratings. It even trailed WLFL, an independent station that had only been on the air since 1981. Meanwhile, preemptions of NBC shows continued unabated. The station even preempted the popular prime time dramas Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere, prompting over 400 angry calls and letters to the station. One short-lived NBC daytime show called Fantasy went to UNC–Chapel Hill to hold auditions for guests despite the fact that WPTF-TV refused to air it. The show was canceled after only one season. By this time, NBC was running out of patience with WPTF-TV. According to Electronic Media magazine, the network had begun "continuing courtship" of WRAL-TV, a station that rejected the network's overtures out of a desire to avoid a second affiliation switch in three years, going as far as to sweetening the deal by offering the NBC affiliation in Charlotte to Capitol's newly-built WJZY with WRAL, which would in turn resolve NBC's continued issues with WPCQ-TV in that market.
Durham Corporation was able to make progress and begin making money again in its broadcasting unit in the 1980s. Full-length evening newscasts returned in 1986, and a year later the company moved WPTF-AM-TV and WQDR to new quarters in the Highwoods office complex costing $1 million. However, it still made very little difference in the ratings. The 6 p.m. edition of Newsbeat 28 not only saw no improvement on the same low ratings it garnered in the previous decade, but it trailed reruns on WLFL of the former NBC sitcom Gimme a Break!, with WTVD and WRAL maintaining their leads. The next year, WPTF-TV appeared on the cable system in Fayetteville for the first time, a move cited as key in increasing station circulation and giving it more parity with WRAL and WTVD. During this decade, the station broke new ground by broadcasting in 3D and stereo sound before other stations while also being the first station in the area to accept condom ads.
In August 1989, Durham Corporation opted to focus on its core insurance business and announced it was placing WPTF-TV up for sale. Durham Life sought as much as $45 million for the station. Nature, however, derailed the station's attempts to turn its fortunes around. On December 10, 1989, WPTF-TV's three-year-old tower near Auburn collapsed in an ice storm that also brought down the nearby tower of WRAL-TV. The next day, Durham Corporation took WPTF-TV off the market due to the collapse; it had received lesser offers than it had expected. The first signs of trouble came earlier that year when a less severe ice storm still proved strong enough to knock the station off the air for 10 hours so maintenance workers could replace parts of a damaged transmission line. After temporarily broadcasting some programs over WYED-TV from Goldsboro and WFCT in Fayetteville, WPTF reactivated its old transmission facility near Apex, which it had used from 1978 to 1986, allowing the station to resume its broadcasts on channel 28 as usual. That same tower was dismantled several years later and then donated to classical radio station WCPE-FM, who reassembled it at a spot near its studios in Wake Forest in 1993. In 1991, WPTF-TV joined WRAL-TV on a newly built broadcast tower at the latter's previous site, which also housed the signals for WRAL-FM, WQDR-FM, and several local low-power television stations.
Even when WPTF-TV began broadcasting on its own signal again, its nightly newscasts remained in the ratings basement, frequently being trounced by the newscasts on WRAL-TV and WTVD and reruns on WLFL. The station had also lost some ratings momentum with the tower collapse. In September 1990, channel 28 tried moving the 6 p.m. newscast to 7 p.m., displacing Hard Copy and airing after NBC Nightly News instead of before it, with Cheers reruns taking its old time slot. By this time, lead anchor and producer Terry Thill had been replaced by Ben Garrett. Moving the early newscast failed to improve ratings, as it now had to compete with Jeopardy! on WTVD and Entertainment Tonight on WRAL. By this time, their higher-rated competitors were also airing pre-6 p.m. newscasts. The firing of Terry Thill ultimately proved to be a grim harbinger of things to come for the news division. On top of that, the whole of Durham Life Broadcasting was suffering bad publicity due to Laurel Smith, general manager of WQDR-FM, facing accusations of sexual harassment by male employees while she was also involved in a child custody case with her ex-husband; a memo by company president Felton P. Coley told employees of the company's radio and TV stations, WPTF-TV included, not to talk about it publicly, a point made moot when she resigned.