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WRDC, channel 28, is an affiliate station of MyNetworkTV in the Raleigh-Durham-Fayetteville, North Carolina television market. The station is licensed to Durham, but its studios are in the Highwoods office park just outside downtown Raleigh. It is co-owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group along with CW affiliate WLFL-TV (channel 22).
WRDC appears on analog cable channel 12 in Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Fayetteville and most of their suburbs, and channel 10 in Cary, Garner, Clayton, Smithfield, and Carrboro. On Time Warner Cable, WRDC is shown on digital channel 128 in standard definition and 1128 in high definition.
History
WNAO-TV
On July 12, 1953 at 5:25 p.m., WNAO-TV began broadcasting on channel 28 as the Triangle's first television station (14 months before WTVD) and the state's first-ever UHF station. It was owned by The News & Observer along with WNAO radio (850 AM, now WPTK; and 96.1 FM, now WBBB), which the paper had begun only six years earlier. However, television manufacturers weren't required to include UHF tuning capability on their sets at the time. Until the Federal Communications Commission required all-channel tuning in 1964, UHF stations were unviewable without a converter. Even with one, the picture was barely viewable.
With WRAL-TV (channel 5) signing on that year with an NBC affiliation, WNAO-TV was dealt another blow. The station had struggled for viewership for much of its brief existence, and the presence of a new station simply made the situation worse. Channel 28 shut down at the end of 1957; WNAO radio was sold off the following year, as the fiscal loss for the News & Observer was so great that it decided to get out of broadcasting entirely.
As an NBC affiliate
Channel 28 stayed dark until November 4, 1968, when WRDU-TV, licensed to Durham and unrelated to the earlier station, began operations. The new station had studios located on NC Highway 54 in southern Durham, with a transmitter located near Terrell's Mountain in Chatham County. The station was owned by Triangle Telecasters, headed by the Everett family of Durham: Reuben Everett, his wife Katherine and their son Robinson.
Officially, WRDU took over as the Triangle's NBC affiliate. NBC had not had a full-time affiliate in the Triangle since 1962, when WRAL-TV dropped NBC in favor of ABC, leaving CBS affiliate WTVD to shoehorn NBC programming onto its schedule. Although the Triangle had long been large enough to support three full network affiliates, there were no commercial VHF allotments available, and prospective station owners found it difficult to build a UHF station that was strong enough to cover a market which stretched from Chapel Hill in the west to Goldsboro in the east. UHF stations did not cover large amounts of territory very well at the time.
Even after channel 28's sign-on, NBC continued to allow WTVD right of first refusal for its programming. WTVD chose to cherry-pick higher-rated programs from NBC and CBS, leaving WRDU to carry the lower-rated shows plus NBC's news programming. In 1971, the FCC intervened on behalf of Triangle Telecasters (in part due to the Commission's policy aims of protecting the development of UHF stations), forcing WTVD to choose one network; ultimately WTVD chose CBS. Still, the damage had been done, in terms of station identity and loyalty, making things vastly more difficult in the years to come.
Additionally, WRDU's main competitors, WTVD and 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. Also, WRDU had to deal with longer-established NBC affiliates in nearby Winston-Salem (WSJS-TV, now WXII), Washington (WITN-TV) and Wilmington (WECT) being available over the air with strong VHF signals in much of the surrounding area. Channel 28's transmitter was located on the Orange-Chatham County line, providing only grade B coverage of Raleigh itself and rendering it practically unviewable over-the-air in southern and eastern Wake County.
However, one problem that could not be blamed on outside factors was Triangle Telecasters' frequent preemption of network shows for syndicated ones, presumably because it believed it could get more revenue from local advertising than from network airtime payments. As NBC's popularity declined precipitously through the 1970s, WRDU only increased the number of preemptions.
The Durham Life Insurance Company, which owned the Triangle's oldest radio station, WPTF (680 AM), bought WRDU-TV from the Everetts in May 1977 and changed its callsign to WPTF-TV on August 14 of the following year. This was Durham Life's second attempt to get into television; it had previously bid for the channel 5 allotment in 1956 before the FCC awarded the license to the much smaller Capitol Broadcasting as WRAL-TV. Durham Life invested a large amount of money into its new purchase, building a new 1,300-foot (400 m) tower near Apex which gave the station a coverage area comparable to those of WTVD and WRAL-TV. It also poured significant resources into the news department, which had never been competitive against WRAL-TV and WTVD, and added a kids' show entitled Barney's Army., which ran from 1978 to 1983. However, channel 28 was still reeling from the audience-loyalty problems it inherited from Triangle Telecasters. It did not help that this came at a time when NBC was experiencing a precipitous ratings slump. The news department, even with the power boost and increased resources, made little headway in the ratings. This was in marked contrast to its radio sister, one of the most respected radio news operations in North Carolina.
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, even with NBC's powerful primetime lineup, WPTF-TV was dead last in the Triangle television ratings. It even trailed WLFL-TV, an independent station (and later, a Fox affiliate) that had only been on the air since 1981. The station also continued to preempt NBC programming, albeit at a reduced rate compared to the 1970s. This did not sit very well with NBC, which has historically been far less tolerant of preemptions than the other networks.
Understandably enough, by the summer of 1991, Durham Life wanted out of broadcasting entirely. Durham Life broke up its entire broadcasting unit and sold off individual stations to various owners. WPTF-TV was sold to Paul Brissette, who changed the callsign to WRDC, after the three major cities in the Triangle—Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. It also rebranded the station as "TRI-28". The new owners made the station profitable almost immediately. However, in a cost-cutting move, on July 31, 1991, Brissette fired the entire news department (save for one anchor/reporter who was kept for newsbreaks) and most of the production crew. One disgruntled ex-employee, in a bitter joke, suggested that the station's new callsign really stood for "We Really Don't Care." WRDC lost a good deal of credibility as a result and never recovered.
Recent history
By the mid-1990s, NBC, obviously embarrassed and angry about its poor performance in one of the country's fastest-growing markets, had finally had enough with WRDC and was looking to move its programming to another station. It got its chance in 1995 after WNCN (channel 17, formerly WYED-TV), licensed to Goldsboro but located just outside of Raleigh in Clayton, boosted its signal to 5 million watts to provide greater coverage to the Triangle market. WNCN's owner, Outlet Communications, also owned WJAR-TV in Providence, Rhode Island and WCMH-TV in Columbus, Ohio, which were two of NBC's strongest and longest-standing affiliates. Although WNCN had just affiliated with the WB Television Network, NBC quickly cut a deal with Outlet to move its Triangle affiliation to WNCN.
However, NBC's contract with WRDC didn't run out until September 3, 1995. Starting in January 1995, WNCN began airing all of the NBC programming that WRDC turned down. When NBC's contract with WRDC ran out in September, WRDC became a UPN affiliate. It had already been airing UPN programming during the late-night hours since January. As such, WRDC no longer had a decent amount of programming to preempt, with UPN providing far fewer hours of network fare per week than any of the major networks. WRDC also picked up several syndicated shows that WNCN no longer had time to air.
Brissette began sinking under the weight of massive financial problems, and merged his group with Benedek Broadcasting later in 1995 (a year earlier, a sale to the Communications Corporation of America was approved by the FCC but never consummated). However, since the merger left Benedek one station over FCC limits of the time, WRDC was sold to Glencairn Ltd. Glencairn was owned by Edwin Edwards, a former executive with WLFL's owner, Sinclair. The Smith family, founders and owners of Sinclair, held 97 percent of Glencairn's stock, leading to allegations that Sinclair was using Glencairn to do an end run around FCC rules forbidding duopolies. Sinclair and Glencairn allegedly further circumvented the rules by merging WRDC's operations with those of WLFL's under a local marketing agreement. Although WLFL was the senior partner, the two stations' operations were based at WRDC's former studios in the Highwoods complex. Similar arrangements were in place at Glencairn's other eight stations. The FCC eventually fined Sinclair $40,000 for its illegal control of Glencairn.
Channel 28 briefly dropped its UPN affiliation in the spring of 1998 and became an independent, as did most of the UPN stations Sinclair either owned or controlled, due to a dispute between UPN and Sinclair. However, UPN and Sinclair patched up their dispute, and UPN programming returned to WRDC in the summer. Sinclair purchased WRDC outright in 2001. This was possible because WNCN had by this time passed WRDC as the fourth-rated station in the Triangle. The FCC's duopoly rules do not allow one person to own two of the four largest stations in a single market.
As a MyNetworkTV affiliate (2006-present)
In January 2006, The WB and UPN (which has only used its initials as its official name since 2000) announced that they would merge into a new network, The CW. The news of the merger resulted in Sinclair announcing, two months later, that most of its UPN and WB affiliates, including WRDC, would join MyNetworkTV, a new service formed by the News Corporation, who also owns the Fox network. Sister station WLFL, which had been a WB affiliate since 1998, took the CW affiliation a few months later. This gave North Carolina two CW/MyNetworkTV duopolies, the other being WJZY/WMYT-TV in Charlotte. In both cases, the MyNetworkTV affiliate is the junior partner.
The station currently runs a two-minute segment called Brand Newz hosted by Christopher Martin, one half of 1980s hip-hop comedy duo Kid 'n Play. In recent years, WRDC has been carried on cable in multiple areas within the Greensboro and Greenville media markets in North Carolina.
On May 15, 2012, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Fox agreed to a five-year affiliation agreement extension for Sinclair's 19 Fox-affiliated stations until 2017. This includes an option, exercisable between July 1, 2012 and March 31, 2013, for Fox parent News Corporation to buy a combination of six Sinclair-owned stations (two CW/MyNetworkTV duopolies and two standalone MyNetworkTV affiliates) in three out of four markets; WLFL and WRDC are included in the Fox purchase option, along with stations in Cincinatti (WSTR-TV), Norfolk (WTVZ) and Las Vegas (KVCW and KVMY).
Digital television
WRDC's digital signal is multiplexed.
| Channel | Aspect | Format | Programming |
|---|---|---|---|
| 28.1 | 16:9 | 720p | Main WRDC programming / MyNetworkTV |
| 28.2 | 4:3 | 480i | TheCoolTV |
On the original DTV transition date of February 17 2009 WRDC turned off its analog channel 28 transmitter. It is one of three stations in the Triangle area, along with WLFL and WRAY-TV, who agreed to make the switch on that date, even though the DTV transition date had been changed to June 12, 2009. On June 12, 2009 at 12:00 PM WRDC switched its digital channel from 27 to 28.
As of June 2011, TheCoolTV is offered on Time Warner, digital cable channel 129.
TV Tower
In 1986, WPTF erected a 2,000-foot (610 m) tower near Auburn, North Carolina, in an attempt to increase its signal coverage to include Fayetteville and other cities located south and east of Raleigh. That same tower collapsed in December 1989 during an early morning winter ice storm that also claimed the nearby tower of WRAL-TV. WPTF managed to get back on the air several hours later by rebroadcasting its signal on both WYED-TV (now WNCN) for the Raleigh-Durham area and WFCT-TV (channel 62, now WFPX) for the Fayetteville area.
A month following the WYED/WFCT simulcast, WPTF reactivated its old tower 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, North Carolina in 1993. 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 and WRAZ-TV, as well as WRAL-FM, WQDR-FM, and a couple of low-power TV stations in the area. In the early 2000s, the digital signals of WRAL-TV, WRAZ-TV, and WRDC-TV signed on from an adjacent 2,000-foot candleabra tower, which also includes the antennae for WLFL-TV and WNCN-TV.
Newscasts
 | This section needs expansion with: information on WRDC's newscasts prior to disaffiliating with NBC. You can help by adding to it. (May 2012) |
Newscast titles
- Triangle News (1970s)
- NewsCenter 28 (late 1970s-1980s)
- Newsbeat 28 (1986–1990)
- WPTF-TV 28 News (1990-1991)
- TV-28 Newsbreak (Newsbriefs, 1991-1992)
- TRY 28 Newsbreak (Newsbriefs, 1992-1993)
References
- "Flipping the switch..." Broadcasting - Telecasting, July 20, 1953, pg. 62.
- "WNAO-TV to go black, joins WTOB-TV in Ch. 8 shift plea." Broadcasting - Telecasting, December 30, 1957, pg. 10.
- "UHF's bright outlook cited at dedications." Broadcasting, February 10, 1969, pg. 60.
- "Economics blamed for UHF ills." Broadcasting, December 29, 1969, pg. 56.
- "Networks, V's balk at aid for UHF's." Broadcasting, September 21, 1970, pg. 40.
- "One (network) to a customer." Broadcasting, March 29, 1971, pg. 67.
- "In brief." Broadcasting, December 6, 1976, pg. 22.
- "Under new management." Broadcasting, July 25, 1977, pg. 80.
- "Name change obvious". The News and Observer. 8 November 1991. Retrieved 27 July 2011.
- http://svtvstations.webs.com/svtvstations.htm
- Sinclair Reups With Fox, Gets WUTB Option, TVNewsCheck, May 15, 2012.
External links
- My RDC Website
- Raleigh Tower Disaster - includes pictures of the WRAL and WPTF-TV towers, which were destroyed in a December 1989 ice storm
- Template:TVQ
- Template:BIA
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