WUPA
WUPA, branded CBS Atlanta, is a television station in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. The station is owned and operated by the CBS television network through its CBS News and Stations division, and maintains studios on Northeast Expressway in unincorporated DeKalb County; its transmitter is located in northeastern Atlanta, near North Druid Hills.
Channel 69 in Atlanta first began broadcasting in 1981 as independent station WVEU. Years of technical issues provoked by interference to mobile radio users and consequent limitations on the station's operating hours and signal strength contributed to the failure of subscription television and a music video service that operated the station. WVEU's local founders sold the station to CBS in 1994 at a time when CBS needed to find a new affiliate in Atlanta, but the network was able to negotiate to affiliate with another, more built-up station instead. WVEU became an affiliate of UPN and was then sold to the Paramount Stations Group. Under the new WUPA call sign, Paramount substantially improved the station's programming and ratings in the years that followed before UPN was replaced with The CW in 2006. After successive owner Paramount Global sold the majority of its stake in The CW to Nexstar Media Group in 2022, WUPA disaffiliated from the network on September 1, 2023, reverting to independent status. Less than two years later, WUPA assumed the CBS affiliation for Atlanta as a network-owned station.
WVEU
Construction, land mobile dispute, and STV years (1981–1984)
In 1978, the Federal Communications Commission received two applications for new television stations to use channel 69 in Atlanta; on August 19, 1980, the final decision was given to award it to a consortium of Atlanta-based investors known as Broadcast Corporation of Georgia, which proposed a hybrid operation consisting of conventional ad-supported programming in the daytime and a subscription television service in evening hours. BCG's majority owner, Atlanta attorney David Harris, was approached by backers of a California STV company whom he thought were merely seeking advice on how to build the station. The antenna atop the Peachtree Plaza Hotel from which channel 69 would radiate had been hoisted into place in mid-August, days before the license decision was publicized. The subscription programming would be supplied under the Superstar TV name by Subscription Television of Greater Atlanta, a consortium originally reported to be co-owned by Clint Murchison—who had subscription television holdings in other cities, including the Super TV service in the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore markets—and Atlanta electronics manufacturer Dynacom, which would produce the decoders subscribers would need to view Superstar programming. In actuality, the owner was not Clint Murchison but Clyde A. Murchison, whom a 1982 article in The Atlanta Constitution described as Clint's great-nephew.WVEU began broadcasting on August 22, 1981. However, a planned full launch on October 1 had to be scuttled because the station's broadcasts on channel 69—at the top of the TV band, 800 to 806 MHz—were interfering with two-way land mobile radio transmissions. Further, the station had planned to fill daytime hours with programming from a business news service known as The Market Report, which ran into financial difficulties and was unable to start on time. Superstar TV was able to begin operating before the end of the year, with an official kickoff held on January 8, 1982. The FCC continued to curtail WVEU's operating hours; WVEU was only allowed to sign on after 7 p.m. on weekdays and after 3 p.m. on Saturdays, though it was allowed to operate all day on Sundays. It only offered commercial, non-STV programming on Sundays from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., running Superstar TV at all other times it was on the air.
The two-way radio dispute continued to loom large over every facet of WVEU's operations for several years, as the station subsisted on production contracts. In June 1983, the FCC ruled that the station could begin operating at 50 percent power before 7 p.m. if it paid an estimated $250,000 to relocate all of the land mobile users affected by interference. However, these users protested the decision and filed for reconsideration with the commission. In February 1984, the FCC ordered the station to engage the users or pay them to relocate on penalty of losing the provisional program test authority under which WVEU had operated since 1981. While the dispute was resolved by July 1984, when the FCC granted a full license to BCG, the issue had doomed Superstar TV, which filed for bankruptcy in April 1983 and made its last broadcasts on the morning of July 23 with fewer than 3,000 subscribers.
The independent years (1984–1995)
To replace Superstar TV, WVEU signed an operating agreement with VideoMusic Channel, which had broadcast music videos on Atlanta-area cable systems, to program nearly all of channel 69's airtime. The station brought the programming in-house in August 1984 before eventually canceling it altogether and replacing it with syndicated shows and reruns because, it learned, music videos were not very "salable" to advertisers. That same year, negotiations were held and an initial agreement reached to sell the station to the RBP Corporation of Massachusetts, but no transaction was consummated.The station also made its first entry into the television sports market, airing what was to be a package of 30 Atlanta Hawks NBA games in the 1984–85 season, with John Sterling as the play-by-play announcer. This package was whittled down to 19 games because of insufficient advertiser interest. A new 20-game package was carried in the following season, this time with the Hawks selling the advertising time; the Hawks later added a game at The Omni that sold out, their first home telecast in two years.
Through the mid-1990s, WVEU became Atlanta's television station of last resort while a stabilizing WATL and a growing WGNX became the city's primary local independents. In a 1991 article by Prentis Rogers in The Atlanta Constitution, it was described as the city's "quicker picker-upper", constantly airing shows that the local network affiliates passed on. These included CBS's morning news program from 1986 through 1994 and its late night programming, as well as numerous preempted network sports telecasts that the local affiliates could not air due to scheduling conflicts. Beyond displaced network programs, WVEU featured an eclectic mix, a function of being what Business Atlanta writer Russell Shaw called the "poor cousin" of Atlanta independent television. There were telecasts of martial arts movies under the banner Black Belt Theater and later hosted by Morgus the Magnificent, a character first introduced decades prior in Detroit and New Orleans; professional wrestling; a weekday public access show, Community; The Auto Doctor, a locally produced weekly magazine show about cars; and jazz music video show Jazz Beat. After another proposed sale, this one to the Home Shopping Network in 1989, fell through, the station added Japanese-language programming under the title 600 Station to its morning lineup.
Almost a CBS affiliate
On May 23, 1994, New World Communications announced an affiliation deal with Fox to switch the affiliations of most of New World's stations to the network. One of the stations involved was WAGA-TV, which would replace Fox-owned WATL as that network's Atlanta outlet. This left CBS in the position of seeking a new Atlanta-area affiliate. This occurred after Fox won the rights to air NFC football games beginning that year.In July, BCG approached CBS and proposed to sell WVEU to the network. Two months later, CBS had still not lined up a new affiliate in Atlanta, even though WAGA was due to join Fox at year's end. Unable to find a higher-profile station, CBS agreed to buy WVEU for $22 million and relaunch it as a CBS owned-and-operated station. Bill Carter of The New York Times called CBS's purchases of WVEU and WGPR-TV in Detroit "little more than acquisitions of broadcasting licenses" because the stations lacked the facilities and staff typical of network affiliates. For this reason, a CBS move to WVEU would have meant an unprecedented campaign to build up the station, including major expenses in promotion and starting a local news department. One consultant interviewed by The Atlanta Journal and Constitution estimated that CBS would have to spend as much as $100 million over several years to build out WVEU. Those expenses potentially included replacing channel 69's facilities off I-85, which were of inadequate size for a full-service, news-producing station. In return, while CBS was guaranteed to have an affiliate, it faced the prospect of steep ratings declines for the CBS Evening News and had a much weaker signal than the outgoing WAGA. For the outgoing Broadcast Corporation of Georgia, and particularly for majority owner David Harris, the sale to CBS was an unexpected windfall. WVEU had never turned a profit in its 13-year history; in 1993, it became cash flow–positive for the first time in its history.
As 1994 continued, CBS took only minimal steps to close on the purchase and continued to campaign for a better partner. The network continued to negotiate with Fox and with Tribune Broadcasting, then-owner of WGNX. By mid-November, CBS had not filed paperwork for the deal at the FCC, even though WAGA was scheduled to join Fox within a month. CBS executives refused to confirm that they were still moving forward with the deal. On November 16, it was announced that CBS would not be moving to WVEU but instead to WGNX. CBS had preferred to move to a station that already aired local news, even if it was only an affiliate; WGNX was the only independent station in the market that already had a functioning news department. CBS, which only regarded WVEU as a "safety net" per Phil Kloer of The Journal and Constitution, committed to buy the station and immediately resell it.