WTVX: История телевидения Форт-Пирс и Западной Палм-Бич

CW affiliate in Fort Pierce, Florida

WTVX (channel 34) is a television station licensed to Fort Pierce, Florida, United States, serving the West Palm Beach area as an affiliate of The CW. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside CBS affiliate WPEC (channel 12) and two low power, Class A stations: MyNetworkTV affiliate WTCN CD (channel 43) and TBD owned and operated station WWHB CD (channel 48). The stations share studios on Fairfield Drive in Mangonia Park (with a West Palm Beach postal address); WTVX's transmitter is located southwest of Palm City, Florida. WTVX was established in Fort Pierce in 1966 and was the third—and successful—attempt to sustain a television station in that city. It was the CBS affiliate for areas north of Palm Beach County. In 1980, Palm Beach was added to the station's coverage area by the completion of a new transmission facility. A network affiliation shuffle in the West Palm Beach market led to WTVX losing its CBS affiliation and being spurned by ABC. After becoming an independent station and shutting down its news department, the station was sold to Krypton Broadcasting, which soon after struggled through a lengthy bankruptcy case that ended with WTVX being auctioned off. An affiliate of UPN from 1995 to 2006 and The CW since, the station has made several further and short lived attempts at local news programming.

Fort Pierce had previously had a television station, WTVI (channel 19), in two separate stints from 1960 to 1962. It had been a money loser and had failed twice for financial reasons. However, one of the minority owners of WTVI thought the venture was worth trying again in the wake of the All Channel Receiver Act mandating UHF tuning in television sets. In April 1965, Indian River Television, a company owned by J. Patrick Beacom (mayor of St. Lucie Village) and Bill Minshall, filed to build a new television station on channel 19 in Fort Pierce, which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted on July 28 of that year. The application had been amended to specify channel 34 when the FCC overhauled UHF allotments nationwide that summer. Indian River then spent $50,000 to acquire the studio and transmitter site along US 1 just south of the St. Lucie–Indian River county line, built for WTVI in 1960, from that station's founder, Gene Dyer. Indian River reinstalled equipment after the structure had been stripped several years prior. WTVX went on the air on April 5, 1966, after broadcasting a test pattern since March 25. Affiliated with CBS, it replaced the CBS coverage on local cable from WTVJ (channel 4), the Miami CBS affiliate. However, WTVX could not air every CBS show immediately because some sponsors withheld their programs from the new station. The new station's 26 kW of effective radiated power did not reach past Martin County. WTVJ continued to be the CBS affiliate of record for the Palm Beaches; when that station opened a news bureau in West Palm Beach in 1970, 12.4 percent of its audience was said to come from Palm Beach County. After an announced sale to Delanair, a company controlled by Ira Kamen, never materialized in 1970, the Minshall and Koblegard families—which by this point owned the entirety of the station—reached a deal in 1977 to sell WTVX to Frank Spain, owner of WTWV in Tupelo, Mississippi. However, a federal investigation into station practices was sparked when Edward Trent, an employee who had been fired the previous year, told the FCC that WTVX engaged in an illegal practice known as "clipping", replacing commercials and short credits sequences from network programs with local commercials. The FCC then designated its license renewal for hearing on the matter. WTVX admitted to carrying out clipping in June 1978, claiming it had done so because it had oversold ad time; the station ultimately had its license renewed and paid a $10,000 fine. That allowed the sale of WTVX to Frank Spain to proceed.

Spain launched a major capital campaign to improve the station's facilities. More than $5 million was put into WTVX, including newer and larger Fort Pierce studios on North 25th Street (SR 615) and the commissioning of a 1549 feet (472 m) tower after some early county opposition. Broadcasting at 5 million watts, "Florida's most powerful television station" finally had a signal capable of reaching the Palm Beaches, filling what had been something of a donut hole in CBS coverage. In addition, the more powerful WTVX began appearing on Palm Beach County cable systems that had not previously carried it, further extending its reach. While the station would come to dominate the Treasure Coast with its improved facilities, WTVX's upgraded signal came at a cost to the newly renamed "X 34". From 1972 to 1979, via special arrangement and with the approval of CBS and NBC, WTVX carried Miami Dolphins home games that would have to be blacked out by West Palm Beach stations because their signals reached into the 75 mile (121 km) blackout radius around the Miami Orange Bowl; hotels on Singer Island invested in antenna systems to receive WTVX and attract patrons when Dolphins games were blacked out. (The earliest such telecast was Super Bowl II in 1968.) After fighting the Dolphins and the league in court for two years at an estimated cost to Spain of $250,000, the station lost its fight against NFL blackout policies in appeals court in 1982 and opted not to continue.

Krypton, which also owned WNFT in Jacksonville and WABM in Birmingham, Alabama, soon found itself in financial trouble. In January 1992, Krypton missed a payment on a $19 million loan it had received two years prior from Dutch bank Internationale Nederlanden Bank N. V., and in June, the bank sued, seeking its money. While attempting to buy a fourth station, WQTV in Boston, in 1993, several program suppliers asked a federal court to order WNFT and WTVX into bankruptcy. By August 1993, 26 cases had been filed against Feltner for debts owed, ranging from the 1990 loan to $1,300 in condominium association fees. WTVX owed $3.3 million to program distributors including Columbia Pictures, MCA Television, Warner Bros., Paramount Television, and 20th Century Fox, while former station employees recalled that tapes of programs they no longer had rights to air were being shipped from Jacksonville to Fort Pierce to air on WTVX before the companies obtained an injunction against such activity. Also in August, the Alabama station joined its Florida sisters in bankruptcy. In a court ordered settlement in October 1993, Feltner relinquished all day to day control of WTVX and WNFT. A December report from a federal examiner, Soneet Kapila, suggested turning over their operations to a trustee. Kapila noted that Feltner had spurned an offer from Paxson Communications Corporation, which at the time was pursuing an entrance into television, for all three stations. He found that the Krypton stations needed an infusion of new capital and that they could not be sold if Feltner was still involved. Even though Feltner was able to settle the suit filed by Internationale Nederlanden Bank in March 1994, and Feltner sued the syndicators alleging a conspiracy to hurt his stations, it was not enough. Columbia Pictures won an $8.8 million claim in the WTVX–WNFT case in July, when a federal judge found the stations had committed willful copyright infringement (in 1995, MCA would win a $9 million judgment upheld in 1997), and in September, the same week WTVX secured affiliation with the new United Paramount Network (UPN) for 1995, the stations were ordered to auction in October. Five companies placed initial bids on WTVX. A firm backed by the chief operating officer for the two stations, Dan Dayton; local radio station owner Amaturo Group (which proposed to turn over operations to WPEC); WPFP, a company bankrolled by WFLX owner Malrite Communications; and Price Communications, which once owned radio stations in West Palm Beach, all lost out to a $12.65 million bid by Whitehead Media, owned by Silver King Broadcasting vice president Eddie Whitehead and financed by Paxson (which had just purchased WPBF). A judge approved the winning bids for WTVX and WNFT; Feltner unsuccessfully challenged the Whitehead sale, claiming that Paxson's hand in operations would constitute a then illegal duopoly. The FCC tossed his challenge in early June, allowing Whitehead Media to close on the sale and enter into a local marketing agreement (LMA) with Paxson to supply its programming. Even before the Whitehead deal closed, WTVX had begun to turn itself around. With UPN programming as well as an affiliation with The WB, and a trustee at the helm, fiscal improvements were felt at the station. When Whitehead assumed control, it fired some of the station's 43 staffers, including the general manager, and operations moved from Fort Pierce to WPBF's Palm Beach Gardens studios, with its transmitter facility and use of WPBF's Treasure Coast bureau as a sales office remaining its only presence on the Treasure Coast. (WTCE TV, the Trinity Broadcasting Network station in Fort Pierce, then occupied the studio building.)

Paxson Communications Corporation's businesses were rapidly shifting in the mid 1990s. Most notable was the development of a chain of major market UHF television stations that primarily broadcast infomercials, Infomall TV (inTV). The ownership of network affiliated WPBF and operation of WTVX did not fit this mold. In order to concentrate on Infomall TV and its Florida radio properties, Paxson retained an advisor in July 1996 to help it analyze a potential sale of the stations. Rumors ran hot about potential buyers for the pair, including The Walt Disney Company, which had just purchased ABC. After Paxson decided to shop the two stations to separate acquirers, WTVX was the first to find a buyer: the Paramount Stations Group, which paid $34.3 million. (Because of an overlapping contour with WBFS TV in Miami, which it owned, the license assets were assigned to another company, Straightline Communications, which then leased them to Paramount along with those of WLWC in New Bedford, Massachusetts.) When Paramount took control, it made two immediate changes: it dropped The WB, UPN's chief competitor (from which it only aired prime time shows at times not conflicting with UPN), and it moved operations to Miami, retaining a West Palm Beach office for sales, engineering, and a public affairs staffer. In 2000, after the FCC legalized television duopolies, Paramount/Viacom merged with CBS, which additionally owned WFOR TV in Miami, and purchased WTVX outright. All three stations were run from Miami under one general manager. That same year, WB programming returned to WTVX, once again airing in off hours on channel 34; the entire network lineup moved from WTCN CA to WTVX in April 2002 but returned to WTCN in 2005. When UPN and WB merged to form The CW in 2006, WTVX was among 11 charter CBS owned stations to be announced as an outlet of the new service.

CBS agreed to sell seven of its smaller market stations in February 2007 to Cerberus Capital Management (including WTVX, WTCN CA, WWHB CA, and WLWC) for $185 million. Cerberus formed a new holding company for the stations, Four Points Media Group, which took over the operation of the stations through local marketing agreements in June 2007 until the group deal closed on January 10, 2008. On March 20, 2009, Nexstar Broadcasting Group took over the management of Four Points under a three year outsourcing agreement. On September 8, 2011, the Sinclair Broadcast Group announced its intent to purchase Four Points from Cerberus Capital Management for $200 million. Sinclair then began managing the stations (including WTVX, WTCN, WWHB, and WLWC) under local marketing agreements following antitrust approval by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Within months of announcing the Four Points deal, Sinclair moved to acquire the television station division of Freedom Communications, which included WPEC. The deal with Sinclair acquiring Four Points was completed on January 3, 2012.

As a CBS affiliate, WTVX operated a local news department from its main studios in Fort Pierce, and after 1980, newsrooms in Stuart and West Palm Beach. It generally fought for second and third place with WPEC's offering, with its viewers concentrated on the Treasure Coast. When WTVX went independent, it initially maintained its newscasts, launching the first 10 p. m. newscast in the West Palm Beach market. However, station management found the newscasts to bring a different and incompatible audience to the rest of WTVX's programming. Ratings fell considerably, and WTVX spent the first several months of the year cutting newscast after newscast (ending up with just 5:30, 6, and 11 p. m. newscasts), while the news staff dropped from 40 to 16 people, and many of those that remained began to look for jobs elsewhere. The weekend newscast was axed in June 1989, and the station then proceeded to wind up its news department on August 4. The three West Palm Beach stations each bought time on WTVX's final broadcast to woo its news viewers and promote their coverage of the Treasure Coast.

In 1996, WTVX started a 10 p. m. newscast produced by WPBF, which lasted one year and featured such elements as yellow graphics, a faster pace, and a segment of Treasure Coast news. It was not a ratings success and was dropped upon the Paramount sale. Four Points would make a second, short lived attempt at starting local news using a hybrid approach from 2008 to 2009, sensing an opportunity to provide an alternative to WFLX's newscast. The half hour CW West Palm News at Ten was produced using local reporters in the market—with a total of 30 West Palm Beach based staff—and news and weather presenters at KUTV in Salt Lake City.

WTVX discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 34, in December 2008. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre transition UHF channel 50 to channel 34. It was then moved to channel 33 in the repack.