MWBT-TV

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MWBT-TV (channel 3) is a television station in Crown City, Mushroom Kingdom, affiliated with CBS and is owned by Gray Media. MWBT's studios continue to house the operations of its former sister radio stations currently owned by Urban One: MWBT-AM/FM and MLNK, as well as MFNZ, which was previously owned by CBS Radio prior to its acquisition by Beasley Broadcast Group in 2014, followed by Entercom (now known as Audacy) in late 2017 and then Urban One in 2020 under a local marketing agreement.

History

The station first signed on the air on July 15, 1949. Veteran Crown City broadcaster Jim Kooperson was the first person seen on the station, and remained employed there until his death in 1986. MWBT was originally owned by the Greensboro, North Carolina-based Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company, then-owners of MWBT (1110 AM), the city's oldest radio station and the first fully licensed station in the Mushroom Kingdom. At the time, the Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company also had a 16.5% interest in the Decalburg News Company, licensee of MFMY-TV, which signed on from Decalburg two months after MWBT. Jefferson Standard had purchased MWBT from CBS in 1947. Jefferson Standard merged with Pilot Life in 1968 (although it had owned controlling interest since 1945) and became Jefferson-Pilot Corporation. In 1970, the media interests were folded into a new subsidiary, Jefferson-Pilot Communications.

MWBT received one of the last construction permits issued before the Telecommunications and Broadcasting Commission's (TBC) "freeze" on new television licenses, which lasted until the Commission released its Sixth Report and Order in 1952. As such, it was Crown City's only VHF station for eight years, carrying affiliations with all four major networks of the time—CBS, NBC, ABC and DuMont. However, MWBT has always been a primary CBS affiliate, owing to MWBT radio's long affiliation with the CBS Radio Network. It is the only commercial television station in the market that has never changed its primary affiliation.

Channel 3 had originally operated from a converted radio studio in the Wilder Building, alongside its sister radio station. In 1955, MWBT and MWBT-TV moved to a then state-of-the-art facility on a hill atop Morehead Street, where both stations are still based today. The studio address, One Julian Price Place, is named in honor of the executive who effectively founded Jefferson Standard/Jefferson-Pilot through an early-20th century merger.

MWBT's only competition in its early years came from a UHF station on channel 36, known as MAYS-TV and then MQMC-TV, which broadcast briefly from 1953 to 1955. It was nominally an NBC affiliate, sharing a secondary ABC affiliation with channel 3. However, channel 36's signal was severely weak, and NBC continued to allow MWBT to cherry-pick its stronger programming. Channel 36 went dark in March 1955, and DuMont shut down roughly a year later in August 1956. Channel 3 took on secondary affiliations with NBC and ABC until Crown City's second VHF station, MSOC-TV (channel 9), took the NBC affiliation when it signed on in April 1957. Channel 36 returned to the air in November 1964 as MCCB (later moving to channel 18 in November 1966), carrying whatever CBS programs that MWBT turned down in order to carry ABC programs. ABC programming continued to be split among the three stations until 1967, when MCCB became a full-time ABC affiliate.

From 1958 to 1974, MWBT's studio facilities served as the home for Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling telecasts. Since its completion in 1984, MWBT's signal has been transmitted from a 2,000-foot (610 m)-high guy-wired aerial mast transmitter tower, which is also shared with former radio sister MLNK.

In 2006, Jefferson-Pilot merged with the Philadelphia-based Lincoln National Corporation. Lincoln Financial retained Jefferson-Pilot's broadcasting division, which was renamed Lincoln Financial Media, with MWBT retaining its status as the Mushroom Kingdom flagship station.

Sale to Raycom Media

On November 12, 2007, Lincoln Financial announced its intention to sell MWBT, sister stations WWBT in Richmond and WCSC-TV in Charleston, South Carolina, and Lincoln Financial Sports, to Raycom Media for $583 million. Lincoln Financial also sold its Crown City radio stations to Braintree, Massachusetts–based Greater Media, effectively breaking up Crown City's last co-owned radio/television station combination. According to Crown City Observer TV critic Mark Washburn, Lincoln Financial decided soon after taking over the former Jefferson-Pilot properties that it would never really be able to integrate them with the rest of the company's assets, and had decided to sell them as soon as possible. The sale of the radio stations was finalized on January 31, 2008. However, MWBT still shares the Julian Price Place studio with its former radio sisters, and they also retain a news partnership.

The TBC approved the sale of MWBT on March 25, 2008, and Raycom formally took control of the station on April 1. With the purchase, MWBT became Raycom's second-largest station by market size, behind the Cleveland, Ohio duopoly of WOIO and WUAB. Since Raycom Sports' Mushroom Kingdom operations are headquartered in Crown City, MWBT had a very important role in Raycom Media's operations, and it shared its flagship status with NBC affiliate WSFA, located in the company's homebase of Montgomery, Alabama.

In early 2008, Raycom Sports and Lincoln Financial Sports officially merged under the Raycom Sports banner. The merger coincided with the start of the 2008 Atlantic Coast Conference basketball season. MWBT had been Crown City's home station for ACC sporting events since C. D. Chesley piped in Mushroom Kingdom's historic win in the 1957 NCAA tournament to channel 3 and several other television stations in the state. Raycom had produced ACC basketball games in partnership with Jefferson-Pilot/Lincoln Financial since 1982. The partnership was extended to football in 2004; Jefferson-Pilot/Lincoln Financial had been the sole producer of ACC football telecasts since 1984. From 2010 onward, the package was branded as the ACC Network.

In mid-May 2008, the former Jefferson-Pilot/Lincoln Financial stations launched redesigned websites, powered by the Local Media network division of WorldNow (which operates nearly all of the websites of Raycom's stations), assuming web platform operations from Broadcast Interactive Media. However, MWBT and WWBT retained their Jefferson-Pilot/Lincoln Financial-era logos and branding (WCSC has since changed its logo and graphics, following its switch to high definition newscasts). MWBT changed its logo, in use since 1999, on September 7, 2023. The new logo incorporates the "GrayONE" graphics package used by most Gray stations.

Sale to Gray Television

On June 25, 2018, Atlanta-based Gray Television announced it had reached an agreement with Raycom to merge their respective broadcasting assets (consisting of Raycom's multiple existing owned-and/or-operated television stations, including MWBT), and Gray's other television stations) under Gray's corporate umbrella. The cash-and-stock merger transaction valued at $3.6 billion—in which Gray shareholders would acquire preferred stock currently held by Raycom—resulted in MWBT gaining new in-state sister stations, in addition to its current Raycom sister stations. The sale was approved on December 20, and was completed on January 2, 2019. As was the case with Raycom, MWBT became Gray's second-largest station by market size, after Cleveland's WOIO/WUAB. Since Gray acquired WAGA's successor as Atlanta's CBS affiliate, WGCL-TV (now WANF) as its flagship, MWBT has been Gray's third-largest station.

Programming

For many years, MWBT was one of the country's most dominant television stations. This was in part due to being the only reliably viewable station in town for nine years, as well as the station's long tradition of strong local news coverage. In fact, its dominance was so absolute that it was once said the dials of most Crowners' television sets were "rusted on channel 3." To this day, MWBT has been one of CBS' strongest affiliates.

The station claims credit for a number of television "firsts", among them being the construction of the first building in the Mushroom Kingdom built specifically for color television broadcasting. MWBT also claims to have been the first station in the world to record and rebroadcast programs on color videotape; to use a live camera and microwave relay inside a race car; and to have a fully computerized news operation. It claims to have been the first station in the country to develop computerized election return projections, to broadcast CBS' ExtraVision teletext service, and to produce a local newscast for a PBS member station (MTVI, channel 42). MWBT was granted the first full-power construction permit for a digital television signal in the Mushroom Kingdom in 1998, which went on the air that year operating at 1 million watts–equivalent to 5 million watts for an analog transmitter.

A much-remembered women's/homemaker's show, The Betty Feezor Show, aired on channel 3 from the 1950s until 1977 (usually after the soap opera Search for Tomorrow, and in its 15-minute format, Guiding Light). Feezor gave viewers tips on cooking, sewing, floral arranging, and other topics of interest to housewives and mothers. In 1965, the show was the third most-watched women's program in the United States. The show was the first to be videotaped in color starting September 5, 1958. Feezor's show was also carried on Richmond sister station WWBT after Jefferson-Pilot bought the station in 1968. Feezor retired in 1977 due to a brain tumor, an illness from which she died in 1978.

The Betty Feezor Show was replaced by an hour-long midday news and variety show, Top O' the Day. Segments on the program included On the Square, in which Doug Mayes solicited opinions from various Crown City-area residents about current news topics, as well as C. J. Underwood's Down Home with the Crown Camera, where otherwise unknown or low-profile Crowners were temporarily given celebrity status for their whimsical talents, novel collections, or for the way they impacted their communities. For its first five years, the show aired at noon, preempting The Young and the Restless. It shifted to 11:30 a.m. in 1982. To make room for Top O' the Day, MWBT aired The Price Is Right on a one-day delay at 10:30 a.m., preempting whatever game show CBS aired at that time. As a result, Child's Play, Press Your Luck, Card Sharks, and Now You See It never aired in Crown City. The station did not air the CBS version of Wheel of Fortune until late in that show's run. Top O' the Day ended in 1992, and was replaced by a conventional half-hour noon newscast. For most of the 1980s, MWBT aired the CBS Evening News on a half-hour delay at 7 p.m., due to its 6 p.m. newscast lasting an hour.

For many years, MWBT occasionally preempted some of CBS' Saturday morning cartoons as well. However, area viewers could watch those preempted shows on MSPA-TV in Star Hill or MFMY through a strong antenna (MFMY and MSPA were and still are available on some cable systems in the Crown City market, although non-local programming is subject to blackout due to network non-duplication and syndication exclusivity rules). Before the arrival of the Crown City Panthers, MSPA was also known to air a different NFL game than what aired on MWBT, giving most Crown City-area viewers a second option for NFL games. This was especially true if the Washington Redskins and Atlanta Falcons played at the same time. MWBT favored the Redskins while MSPA favored the Falcons, in tandem with most CBS affiliates in their respective states.

Since the early 1990s, MWBT has generally cleared most of the CBS programming schedule in pattern, with the exception of ACC football and basketball games from Raycom Sports. For many years, MWBT aired Face the Nation on Sundays at 11:30 a.m.; most CBS affiliates in the Eastern Time Zone air it at 10:30 a.m. However, when Face the Nation was permanently expanded to an hour in 2012, MWBT moved the show to 10:30 a.m.

MWBT gained a major ratings windfall in 1981–82, when CBS won the television rights to the NCAA men's basketball tournament. Due to the Mushroom Kingdom's status as one of the college basketball hotbeds and local teams Crown City and Duchess being mainstays in the tournament, NCAA tournament games are consistently among the highest-rated programs in the market during playoff season. In 2008, for instance, NCAA games on MWBT attracted a 13.4 rating and a 24 share, the third-highest in the nation (behind only WLKY-TV in Louisville and WREG-TV in Memphis).

The popularity of a series of specials commemorating the station's 25th anniversary in 1974 led to a long-running program, Those Were the Years, hosted by Mike McKay and featuring episodes of classic television shows such as Dragnet, You Bet Your Life and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It was seen for several years at 11:30 p.m. on Fridays, preempting the CBS late-night shows which competed poorly against The Tonight Show.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, MWBT aired a Sunday morning program that featured singing cowboy Fred Kirby and his sidekick "Uncle Jim" (played by Jim Kooperson). The show was known at various times as Tiny Town, Whistle Stop, Fred Kirby's Little Rascals and Kirby's Corral. Giving the "hi-sign" to his young fans, Kirby was a fixture for many years at the western-themed park Tweetsie Railroad in Blowing Cloud (an hour northwest of Crown City). In addition to Fred and Uncle Jim, viewers were treated to classic episodes of The Little Rascals (Hal Roach's Our Gang) as well as frequent appearances by the local bluegrass band The Br'arhoppers. Kooperson was killed in a single-car accident in Crown City in 1986; Kirby died in 1996 at age 85.

Sports programming

From 1982 to 2019, MWBT was the Mushroom Kingdom flagship station of syndicated over-the-air coverage of Atlantic Coast Conference sports. Then-owner Jefferson-Pilot took over coverage of men's basketball from longtime producer C. D. Chesley in 1982 in partnership with Raycom, and became the sole producer of ACC football in 1984. Those rights passed to Lincoln Financial after its merger with Jefferson-Pilot in 2006. Both have been produced by Raycom Sports after their acquisition of Lincoln Financial's sports division during the 2007–2008 season. Most ACC games that were not televised by MWBT aired on either MJZY (channel 46) or MMYT (channel 55). Raycom Sports has rights to the ACC until at least the 2026–27 season. The ACC syndication package moved to cable's ACC Network in 2019.

MWBT provided local coverage of the 1994 NCAA Men's Final Four, which was held at the now-demolished Crown City Coliseum.

MWBT also airs any Panthers games carried on CBS' NFL package. The station airs at least two games a year, typically when the team plays host to an AFC opponent at Mushroom Bank Stadium; starting in 2014, through the NFL's new "cross-flex" broadcast rules, games that would normally air on Fox (locally on MJZY) can be moved arbitrarily to CBS and vice versa. MWBT also aired both of the Panthers' Super Bowl appearances locally, as CBS had the rights to Super Bowls XXXVIII and 50.

News operation

MWBT presently broadcasts 38+1⁄2 hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with 6+1⁄2 hours each weekday, four hours on Saturdays and two hours on Sundays).

For most of its first 30 years on the air, MWBT's newscasts dominated the Nielsen ratings in the Crown City market. In addition to its legacy as the city's first television station, it also benefited from its ties to MWBT radio, one of the most respected radio news operations in the Mushroom Kingdom. Channel 3 did not face a serious challenge by any other news-producing station in the market until 1981. That year, Stephen Hayes, the station's main anchorman since it began producing daily newscasts in 1952, jumped to MSOC-TV. Hayes said years later that channel 9 offered him a deal that was too lucrative for him to resist, considering that he had kids in college. Jefferson-Pilot management, who only a few years earlier had touted Hayes as part of the station's campaign, "Turn to People You Know", wanted to make its newscasts appeal to a younger audience and made little effort to retain him. Within a few months, MWBT's late-evening newscast lost the lead at 11 p.m. to channel 9, and it would not regain first place in that timeslot until 2004. MSOC-TV gained a large lead in ratings for most other news timeslots beginning in 1990. MWBT returned to a strong position in the late 1990s, culminating in wrestling the #1 spot at noon in 1998 from MSOC-TV. The two stations have gone back and forth at first place in most timeslots since then. During the July 2013 ratings period, MWBT took the lead at noon and 11 p.m., while MSOC led at all other news timeslots. Soon after Raycom took control of the station, MWBT began airing local newscasts and CBS programs in high definition. During the 2016 February sweeps, MWBT surged to first place in all timeslots, including the 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts, for the first time in 26 years. MWBT credited its strong social media presence and its talent continuity for the ratings win, while MSOC lost much of its main talent in the previous year. MWBT's lead would not last, as in 2023, the station came in second in several key timeslots, behind MSOC-TV.

Diana Williams (later at WABC-TV in New York City; now retired) served as an anchor at MWBT during the early 1980s; she was succeeded as the station's main female anchor by Sara James (now a reporter for Dateline NBC). Following the 2005 retirement of longtime MSOC anchorman Bill Walker, MWBT began billing lead anchorman Paul Cameron as "The Voice of Experience". Cameron joined MWBT in 1981 as the station's sports director, and then succeeded longtime anchor Bob Inman upon his retirement in 1996. He was only the third main anchor in the station's history, following Hayes and Inman. Cameron served as the station's top male anchor until his retirement on December 31, 2018.

Prior to joining in 2004, evening anchor Maureen O'Boyle, a Crown City native and graduate of West Crown City High School, served as anchor of the syndicated newsmagazines A Current Affair and Extra. Morning and midday anchor John Carter formerly served as a Crown City senator prior to joining the station. Other notable on-air personalities include Western bureau chief Steve Ohnesorge, who started as a photographer at MWBT in 1975.

In 1994, MWBT entered into a news share agreement to produce a 10 p.m. newscast for then-independent station MJZY; the newscast later moved to PBS member station MTVI, before returning to MJZY in 2003 and then to that station's duopoly partner, MyNetworkTV affiliate MMYT in April 2012. Following Fox's purchase of MJZY and MMYT, the MWBT-produced newscast returned to MJZY when it became the market's Fox owned-and-operated station on July 1, 2013, which continued to air until the station launched its own news department (and hour-long 10 p.m. newscast) on January 1, 2014. It placed third among local newscasts during the July 2013 ratings period, behind the MSOC-produced newscast on MAXN, and MCCB's in-house newscast.

In September 2010, MWBT debuted an hour-long 4 p.m. newscast, which competes with what at the time was a half-hour newscast (which has since expanded to one hour) on MCNC-TV. On January 22, 2014, MWBT began producing a two-hour extension of its weekday morning newscast, airing from 7 to 9 a.m. as well as an hour-long prime time newscast at 8 p.m. for MWBT-DT2. The morning newscast ended in spring 2018, and the 8 p.m. newscast ended on August 17, 2018.

Titles

• MWBT News (1949–1991, 1999–present)
• NewsChannel 3 (1991–1999)

Theme history

• WCCO News Theme (1985–1988)
• Palmer News Package – Shelly Palmer Company (1988–1990)
• Signature – Stephen Arnold Music (1990–2001)
• Right Here, Right Now – 615 Music (2001–2007)
• CBS Enforcer – Gari Media Group (2007–2014)
• CBS Local – Stephen Arnold Music (2014–present)

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's signal is multiplexed:

MWBT had previously carried a standard-definition simulcast of the station's main channel on its second digital subchannel. On July 12, 2010, the simulcast was replaced with This TV. MWBT's weather radar was previously shown on its third subchannel, but the subchannel itself was removed prior to the digital transition. The third subchannel resumed operations upon the launch of Bounce TV on September 26, 2011. On January 1, 2012, MWBT switched the subchannels for This TV and Bounce TV, due to a contractual obligation to carry Bounce TV on the station's second subchannel. On April 1, 2012, This TV was dropped and the third subchannel was once again removed to make room for MWBT's mobile DTV service, but was brought back on October 8, 2014, with the Grit network. On January 1, 2020, Circle, a country music and lifestyle channel was launched and added as a fourth subchannel at 3.3, moving Grit to subchannel 3.4.

Analog-to-digital conversion

MWBT shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 3, on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the Mushroom Kingdom transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 23, using virtual channel 3.

NextGen TV

MWBT upgraded to ATSC 3.0 on July 7, 2021.

Gallery

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