WITI (channel 6) is a television station in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. Owned and operated by the Fox network through its Fox Television Stations division, WITI maintains studios on North Green Bay Road (WIS 57) in Brown Deer (though with a Milwaukee postal address), and its transmitter is located on East Capitol Drive (just north of WIS 190) in Shorewood.
History Early history The station first signed on the air on May 21, 1956, operating as an independent station; it was originally owned by Independent Television, Inc., to whom the channel 6 construction permit was granted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on June 29, 1955.FCC History Cards for WITI. Federal Communications Commission. The station was originally licensed to the North Shore village of Whitefish Bay on a technicality in order to address short-spacing concerns with Davenport, Iowa station WOC-TV (now KWQC-TV, which also broadcast on channel 6) before the FCC fully finessed spacing among television station signals in different markets. In October 1956, the station affiliated with the NTA Film Network, which provided the station with 52 films from the 20th Century Fox library and syndicated programs. Among the NTA programs aired by WITI were The Passerby, Man Without a Gun and This is Alice.
From 1956 to 1959, WITI used the DuMont Vitascan color system—which required a completely darkened set with a single strobe light, causing eye strain—for its locally produced programs. The situation was difficult for the on-air talent, according to Sid Armstrong, who worked at WITI as a news reporter during the station's early years. The station switched to monochrome cameras when it moved to the North 27th Street facility.Golembiewski, Dick (2007) "A Brief History of Milwaukee Television (the Analog Years)"
First tenure with CBS, and switch to ABC On August 8, 1958, Storer Broadcasting purchased WITI in hopes of affiliating the station with CBS. Storer had very good relations with CBS; company founder George Storer was a member of the CBS board, and most of its stations were CBS affiliates. At the time, CBS owned a local UHF station, WXIX (originally channel 19, reassigned to channel 18, now WVTV) as part of a corporate effort to determine if UHF station operation and ownership would be successful. Once the disadvantages of being on a UHF frequency became clear in the days before all-channel tuning, CBS wrote off the experiment as a failure. The network concluded it was better to have its programming on a VHF station, even if it was only an affiliate. CBS sold WXIX to Cream City Broadcasting president Gene Posner; WITI-TV then began its first stint as a CBS affiliate on April 1, 1959. At that time, WITI moved from its original studio facility in Mequon to WXIX's former studios on North 27th Street in Milwaukee (which were later used by WCGV-TV from 1980 to 1994). Storer also applied to move the channel 6 allocation from Whitefish Bay to Milwaukee; the request was granted on July 30, 1959.
In 1961, WITI lost the NTA network due to its closure, and CBS decided to affiliate with WISN-TV (channel 12), as its sister radio station had been a longtime affiliate of the CBS Radio Network. As a result, WITI-TV and WISN-TV swapped networks: channel 6 became an ABC affiliate on April 2, 1961."Milwaukee stations to switch networks." Broadcasting, January 30, 1961, pg. 9. The final CBS program channel 6 aired before it switched to ABC was the original broadcast of the Gunsmoke episode "Little Girl", which ran the evening before the switch at 9 p.m. Central Time. In August 1962, the station moved to its current transmission tower located in Shorewood; for a short time, the transmitter had been the tallest free-standing tower in the world. The tower went into operation in 1963, finally putting WITI's signal on equal footing with Milwaukee's other television stations.
Second tenure with CBS During the 1975–76 season, ABC emerged as the highest-rated broadcast network in the United States–thanks in part to the success of two Milwaukee-set sitcoms, Happy Days and its spin-off Laverne & Shirley. However, Storer Broadcasting had developed a bitter relationship with the network stemming from ABC's June 1976 decision to move its affiliation in the San Diego market from Storer-owned KCST-TV (now KNSD) to former NBC outlet KGTV. Three years earlier KCST, a UHF independent station, won a long battle to strip the market's ABC affiliation from Tijuana, Mexico-based VHF outlet XETV. Storer purchased KCST the following year, but ABC was not happy with being forced to surrender an affiliation with a VHF station in favor of a UHF outlet. Perhaps in protest, Storer announced on September 26, 1976, that it would re-affiliate WITI with CBS."In Brief." Broadcasting, September 27, 1976, pg. 28. (the text incorrectly states that WISN-TV had been a CBS affiliate since 1954, omitting the 1961 affiliation switch.) Without hesitation, WISN-TV aligned with ABC, officially reversing the earlier 1961 affiliation swap; the two stations switched networks once again on March 27, 1977; the final ABC program to air on channel 6 was a rerun of the two-part Starsky & Hutch episode "Murder at Sea", which aired at 8 p.m. Central Time on the night before the station rejoined CBS.
In 1978, WITI moved its operations to a new facility located on North Green Bay Road in Brown Deer, just outside Milwaukee; the upstart WCGV-TV (channel 24), which would eventually air programming from CBS that WITI refused, purchased WITI's former studios and used them from 1980 until 1994. It was one of the few Storer stations which used a more modern and open design for its studio building, compared to Storer's traditional use of Georgian and Colonial facades on its other studio facilities.
After Storer Broadcasting was bought out by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in 1985, the station underwent a series of ownership changes. KKR sold the stations to Racine native George N. Gillett Jr.'s Gillett Communications in 1987; shortly thereafter, SCI Television was spun off from Gillett to acquire the stations after the latter company filed for bankruptcy. After Gillett defaulted on some of its financing agreements in the early 1990s, its ownership was restructured and the company was renamed SCI Television.
Eventually, SCI ran into fiscal issues; on June 26, 1991, Gillett Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after it failed to reach an agreement with the company's creditors before a court-imposed June 25 deadline. SCI Television also missed repayment of $162 million in bank loans before a June 30 deadline; as a consequence of its financial difficulties, Gillett/SCI decided to sell its broadcast holdings. On February 17, 1993, one day after SCI purchased WTVT in Tampa from Gillett Holdings in a separate agreement for $163 million, New World Pictures purchased a 51% ownership stake in SCI Television from Gillett for $100 million and $63 million in newly issued debt. The purchase was finalized on May 25, at which point, the film and television production company folded WITI and its six sister stations—fellow CBS affiliates WTVT, WJW-TV in Cleveland, WJBK-TV in Detroit and WAGA-TV in Atlanta, NBC affiliate KNSD in San Diego and independent station WSBK-TV in Boston—into a new broadcasting subsidiary, New World Communications.
Switch to Fox station
New World Communications ownership
On May 23, 1994, as part of a broad deal that also saw News Corporation acquire a 20% equity interest in the company, New World Communications signed a long-term agreement to affiliate its nine CBS-, ABC- or NBC-affiliated television stations with Fox, which sought to strengthen its affiliate portfolio after the National Football League (NFL) accepted the network's $1.58 billion bid for the television rights to the National Football Conference (NFC)—a four-year contract that began with the 1994 NFL season—on December 18, 1993. WITI-TV was among the stations involved in the Fox agreement, which also initially included four of New World's other existing CBS-affiliated stations—WJBK-TV, WJW-TV, WTVT and WAGA-TV—and four additional stations—CBS affiliate KSAZ-TV in Phoenix, ABC affiliates WBRC-TV in Birmingham and WGHP in Greensboro–Winston-Salem–High Point, North Carolina, and NBC affiliate WDAF-TV in Kansas City—that were part of New World's concurrent $360-million acquisition of Great American Communications's television properties. (The agreement would subsequently be amended to include four additional stations that New World acquired later that month from Argyle Television Holdings.) At the time, Fox's owned-and-operated and affiliate stations were mostly UHF outlets that had limited to no prior history as major network affiliates, among them its existing Milwaukee outlet, WCGV-TV, which had been affiliated with Fox since the network inaugurated prime time programming in April 1987. Although WCGV had become a formidable competitor to rival independent WVTV, Fox found the prospect to having its programming carried on a VHF station too much to resist. Its news department had been long-respected and well-awarded, and had spent most of the last two decades in a spirited battle with WISN-TV for second place in total day and news viewership behind WTMJ-TV (channel 4). While channel 6 was in third place by the time the switch was announced, it was in a far stronger market position than its ratings indicated.
With only a few months before WITI was set to switch to Fox, CBS began making plans to find a new Milwaukee affiliate and approached all of the market's major television stations to potentially reach an agreement, which was hampered partly because of the network's then-faltering ratings and an older-skewing programming slate. CBS first entered into discussions with WTMJ-TV for a contract; that station was subsequently eliminated as an option as NBC decided to approach Journal Communications to renew its contract with WTMJ-TV. WISN-TV was automatically eliminated as an option for CBS as it was in the middle of a long-term affiliation agreement between ABC and that station's owner, Hearst Broadcasting. The respective owners of WCGV and WVTV at the time—ABRY Communications and Gaylord Broadcasting (the latter of which had already reached deals to switch two fellow independents, KTVT in Fort Worth and KSTW in Tacoma, to CBS)—also turned the network's offers down. This left the market's lower-rated independents—commercial outlets WJJA (channel 49, now independent station WMLW-TV) and WDJT-TV (channel 58) or religious outlet WVCY-TV (channel 30)—as the only viable options with which CBS could reach an affiliation agreement; WVCY owner VCY America would eliminate itself from the running after the owner of its parent licensee, Vic Eliason (in consultation with the VCY America board), declined a $10 million offer by CBS Inc. to acquire that station directly on grounds that the bid was "unreasonably" below market value in a letter that also objected to racy programming content carried by the major U.S. broadcast networks. WJJA's owner, minister Joel Kinlow, wanted to maintain his station as a training venue for those wanting to know about the broadcasting business, but also did not want the stress of running a network affiliate, and thus also declined an affiliation offer.