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WRDC-TV (UPN 28) is the UPN (and beginning in the Fall of 2006, My Network TV) affiliate in the Triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Fayetteville, North Carolina) television market. It is licensed to Durham, but its studios are in the Highwoods office park just outside downtown Raleigh.
History
In 1953, WNAO-TV signed on channel 28 as the Triangle's first television station and the state's first UHF station. It was owned by The News & Observer, which had only gotten into broadcasting six years earlier, when it began WNAO-AM and FM (now WRBZ-AM and WBBB-FM). However, television manufacturers weren't required to include UHF tuning capability on their sets at the time (this didn't occur until 1964, when the FCC handed down that regulation). That meant UHF stations weren't viewable without a converter, and often, the picture was barely viewable even with one. WNAO-TV struggled for viewership, but its fate was sealed when WRAL-TV signed on in 1956. Channel 28 went dark in 1959, and the fiscal loss for the N&O was so great that it got out of broadcasting entirely.
Channel 28 stayed dark until 1968, when WRDU-TV signed on as an NBC affiliate, bringing back programming from a network that had not been available to local viewers for the previous six years, a situation that should have provided the new station with a pent-up audience clamoring to see network shows they had been missing out on. However, for the next quarter-century, channel 28 not only did not take advantage of that opportunity, but it overall proved to be little but a textbook example of many things a network affiliate should not do.
For one thing, it suffered under the handicap (admittedly created by the network's long absence in the Triangle) of having longer-established NBC affiliates in nearby Winston-Salem and Greenville being available over the air with strong signals (both in VHF) in much of the surrounding area. Also, WRDU's main competitors, CBS affiliate WTVD-TV and ABC affiliate WRAL, were two of the strongest performers for their respective networks, having built up followings over the previous dozen years or so on VHF channels--the same problem that derailed WNAO-TV essentially remained unchanged. Even taking those impediments into consideration, its worst fault was of its own making: WRDU also frequently pre-empted NBC programming in favor of local or syndicated shows, probably disappointing many viewers who had high hopes that channel 28 would show all or most of the network's schedule. The low ratings, perversely enough, fed a cycle of further reliance on non-network offerings, rather than rectifying the problem.
The Durham Life Insurance Company, which owned the Triangle's oldest radio station, WPTF-AM, bought WRDU-TV in 1978 and changed its callsign to WPTF-TV, to match its new siblings. It was Durham Life's second attempt to get into television; DL had previously lost an FCC fight with the much smaller Capitol Broadcasting for what became WRAL. Durham Life brought in a full-scale news operation, but largely because of the network and audience-loyalty problems it inherited from channel 28's previous owners, experienced little success over time. WRAL and WTVD switched affiliations in 1985 after WTVD's owner, Capital Cities Communications, bought ABC, but WPTF saw little windfall from the switch. At one point in the 1980s, channel 28 was dead last in the Triangle television ratings behind WRAL, WTVD and even WLFL-TV, a station that had only been on the air since 1981.
Understandably enough, by 1991, Durham Life wanted out of broadcasting entirely. DL broke up its entire broadcasting unit and sold off individual stations to various owners. WPTF-TV went to the Communications Corporation of America, who changed the callsign to WRDC (for Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill). Channel 28's new owners made the station profitable almost immediately. However, the station suffered a major loss in credibility by firing the entire news department. One disgruntled ex-employee, in a bitter joke, suggested that the station's new callsign really stood for "We Really Don't Care."
In 1995, NBC merged with Outlet Communications, which owned independent WNCN-TV, a Goldsboro-licensed station that had recently expanded its signal to cover just about the entire Triangle. By this time, NBC officials, obviously embarrassed and angry about its poor performance in one of the fastest-growing markets in the U.S., had finally had enough with channel 28 and was looking to move its programming to another station. WRDC began to air some UPN programs in January, and took on the UPN affiliation full-time in September, when NBC programming moved to WNCN-TV, and, as such, WRDC no longer had a decent amount of programming to pre-empt, with UPN providing far fewer hours of network fare per week than any of the major networks.
Glencairn Ltd. bought WRDC in 1995, and the station entered into a local marketing agreement with WLFL. Glencairn was owned by Edwin Edwards, a former executive with WLFL's owner, Sinclair Broadcast Group. The Smith family, founders and owners of Sinclair, held 97% of Glencairn's stock, so in effect Sinclair owned both stations. Sinclair had LMAs with the other eight Glencairn stations, leading to allegations that Glencairn was really a corporate shell that Sinclair used to make an end-run around the FCC's regulations of that time prohibiting ownership of more than one station in a market. The FCC eventually fined Sinclair $40,000 for its illegal control of Glencairn. The station briefly dropped its UPN affiliation in the spring of 1998, as a result of a dispute between UPN and Sinclair (which had been controlling the station's programming by this point), before reinstating the affiliation several months later. Sinclair purchased WRDC outright in 2001.
In January 2006, The WB and UPN announced that they would merge into a new network, The CW. The news of the merger resulted in Sinclair announcing the following March that WRDC would join My Network TV, a new upstart formed by News Corporation, who by the way, own the Fox Network. The move could pave the way for sister station WLFL to be the new affiliate for The CW, which will be decided in the Spring of 2006.
TV Tower
In 1986, WPTF erected a 2,000 foot tower near Garner, North Carolina, in an attempt to increase its signal coverage to include Fayetteville and other cities located south and east of Raleigh. Three years later, the same tower collapsed in an early morning winter ice storm that also claimed the nearby tower of WRAL-TV. WPTF later began broadcasting from its old tower near Apex, North Carolina, which it had used from 1978 to 1986. That same tower was dismantled several years later after being donated to classical radio station WCPE-FM and moved to a new spot near its studios in Wake Forest, North Carolina sometime in the mid-1990s. WPTF would eventually return to the newly-built broadcast tower completed in early 1991 near Garner, which also included the transmission signal for WRAL-TV, as well as WRAL-FM, WQDR-FM, and a couple of low-power TV stations in the area.
External links
- WRDC - UPN 28 Website
- Raleigh Tower Disaster - includes pictures of the WRAL and WPTF-TV towers, which were destroyed in a December 1989 ice storm
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