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WRDC-TV (UPN 28) is the UPN 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 opened WNAO AM-FM (now WRBZ-AM and WBBB-FM). However, television manufacturers weren't required to include UHF tuning capability at the time. UHF stations weren't viewable without a converter, and 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. It 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. For the next quarter-century, it was a textbook example of how not to be a network affiliate. It suffered from having longer-established NBC affiliates in Winston-Salem and Greenville being available over the air in much of the area. Also, its main competitors, CBS affiliate WTVD-TV and ABC affiliate WRAL, were two of the strongest performers for their respective networks. It also frequently pre-empted NBC programming in favor of local shows.
The Durham Life Insurance Company, which owned the Triangle's oldest radio station, WPTF-AM, bought WRDU-TV in 1978 and changed the calls to WPTF-TV. It was Durham Life's second attempt to get into television; it had previously lost a licensing war with the much smaller Capitol Broadcasting for what became WRAL. Durham Life brought in a full-scale news operation, but had 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, it 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.
By 1991, Durham Life wanted out of broadcasting entirely. Its entire broadcasting unit was broken up and sold off to various owners. WPTF-TV went to the Communications Corporation of America, who changed the calls to WRDC (for Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill). The new owners made the station profitable almost immediately. However, it suffered a major loss in credibility by firing the entire news department. One disgruntled ex-employee suggested that the station's new calls 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 had finally had enough with channel 28 and was looking to move its programming elsewhere. 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.
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 do an end run around the FCC's regulations of the time against owning 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 could change the course of programming for either WRDC or sister station WLFL, 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 a nearby tower for 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-1990's. WPTF would eventually return to 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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