WSYX (channel 6) is a television station in Columbus, Ohio, United States, affiliated with ABC, MyNetworkTV and Fox. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside CW affiliate WWHO (channel 53) and operated with WTTE (channel 28). The three stations share studios on Dublin Road, northwest of downtown Columbus; WSYX's transmitter is located in the Franklinton section of the city.
History The station began operations on September 29, 1949, as WTVN, Columbus's second television station."WTVN (TV) start; Lamb station bows September 29." Broadcasting - Telecasting, October 3, 1949, pg. 61. At its launch, the station was owned by Picture Waves Inc., a company controlled by Toledo-based attorney and investor Edward Lamb; Lamb also owned WICU-TV in Erie, Pennsylvania, which went on the air six months earlier. WTVN was an affiliate of the DuMont Television Network at its inception, and was one of only three primary affiliates of that network;"DuMont signs 3 in Ohio." Broadcasting - Telecasting, August 1, 1949, pg. 82. it also carried a secondary affiliation with ABC."WTVN (TV) joins ABC-TV Oct. 1." Broadcasting - Telecasting, September 5, 1949, pg. 60. Channel 6 became a full-time ABC affiliate in 1955, after DuMont closed down its operations. During the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network. The station was first housed within the Lincoln-LeVeque Tower in Downtown Columbus until 1952, when it moved into a new facility on Harmon Avenue in Franklinton. Channel 6's present home, on Dublin Road near the Columbus–Grandview Heights border, has been in operation since 1978.
In March 1953, Picture Waves sold WTVN to Radio Cincinnati, Inc., the broadcasting interests of the Taft family of Cincinnati."Taft buys WTVN for $1.5 million." Broadcasting, January 19, 1953, pg. 56. Unknown"FCC approves WTVN (TV) sale from Lamb to Taft family." Broadcasting, March 2, 1953, pg. 54. The following year, Radio Cincinnati purchased WHKC radio (610 AM) in Columbus from the publishers of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, renaming that station WTVN (AM) and subsequently adding a "-TV" suffix to channel 6's call sign."WHKC bought by WTVN (TV), WKRC interests for $158,000." Broadcasting, April 19, 1954, pg. 7. Radio Cincinnati would later become the Taft Broadcasting Company, and Taft would launch a second radio station in Columbus, WTVN-FM (96.3 FM, now WLVQ), in April 1960.
In the early 1970s, Taft's common ownership of WTVN-TV and WKRC-TV (channel 12) in Cincinnati was given protection under a "grandfather clause" by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from its newly enacted "one-to-a-market" rule. The ordinance prohibited television stations with overlapping signals from sharing common ownership while protecting existing instances. WKRC-TV's signal provided at least secondary coverage to much of the southern portion of the Columbus market. One of WTVN-TV's competitors, Crosley/Avco-owned WLWC (channel 4, now WCMH-TV), was given grandfathered protection through a similar situation with sister stations in Dayton and Cincinnati.
In 1987, Cincinnati financier (and future Cincinnati Reds owner) Carl Lindner acquired a majority of Taft's shares in a hostile takeover, renaming the company Great American Broadcasting, a subsidiary of his Great American Insurance Company. The manner in which the takeover was structured led the FCC to deem it to be an ownership change. As a result, WTVN-TV lost its grandfathered protection and could not be retained by Great American. A group of former Taft Broadcasting shareholders, led by Texas millionaire Robert Bass (who also participated in the hostile takeover), purchased WTVN-TV for their new company, called Anchor Media. The sale closed on August 31, 1987, and the new owners renamed the station WSYX that same day. The change was required as FCC rules at the time prohibited TV and radio stations with separate ownership in the same market from retaining the same base callsign. WTVN and WLVQ remained owned by Great American for several years.
Anchor Media, who also purchased ABC affiliates WLOS in Asheville, North Carolina (in April 1987) and KOVR in Stockton, California (in January 1989), was purchased by River City Broadcasting in 1993. River City was merged into the Sinclair Broadcast Group in 1996. Sinclair owned Columbus' Fox affiliate, WTTE, but could not keep both stations since the FCC did not allow common ownership of two stations in a single market. Sinclair kept the longer-established WSYX and sold WTTE to Glencairn, Ltd., owned by former Sinclair executive Edwin Edwards. However, the Smith family (Sinclair's founding owners) controlled nearly all of Glencairn's stock. In effect, Sinclair now had a duopoly in Columbus in violation of FCC rules. Sinclair and Glenciarn further circumvented the rules by merging WTTE's operations with those of WSYX under a local marketing agreement, with WSYX as the senior partner.
In 2001, after the FCC allowed duopolies, Sinclair tried to acquire Glencairn outright. However, the FCC would not allow Sinclair to repurchase WTTE for two major reasons. First, the FCC did not allow duopolies between two of the four highest-rated stations in a single market. Also, the Columbus market, despite its relatively large size, has only seven full-power stations—too few at the time to legally permit a duopoly. Glencairn was renamed Cunningham Broadcasting but is still effectively owned by Sinclair because nearly all of its stock is owned by trusts controlled by the Smith family. This situation is one of many that has led to allegations that Cunningham is simply a shell corporation used by Sinclair to circumvent FCC ownership rules. Sinclair would later acquire WKRC-TV in 2012, reuniting the station with WSYX.
In 2004, WSYX (along with other ABC affiliates owned by Sinclair, including sister stations WKEF in Dayton [which had recently switched back to ABC from NBC] as well as WCHS-TV which includes parts of Southern Ohio in its viewing area) preempted the special showing of Saving Private Ryan in late 2004 due to concerns that the FCC would impose a fine on them if they had aired the World War II-set movie due to the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy earlier that year. As ABC affiliates owned by the E. W. Scripps Company also preempted the film (including WEWS-TV in Cleveland and WCPO-TV in Cincinnati), only viewers in the far eastern (WYTV) and northwestern (then-ABC O&O WTVG in Toledo) parts of Ohio were able to view the film. It was later determined that the movie's broadcast was not a violation of FCC regulations.
At one point, WTVN-TV/WSYX was one of five ABC affiliates owned by Taft, owing to a longtime friendship between Taft's chairman Hulbert Taft Jr., and then-ABC president Leonard Goldenson. WSYX is the only one of these stations still affiliated with ABC, the only former Taft station whose ABC affiliation survives that friendship. Following the sale of WCMH-TV by NBC to Media General in 2006 (as well as its subsequent merger with Nexstar Media Group in 2017) as well as WBNS-TV's 2019 sale to Tegna Inc., WSYX currently has the longest active ownership history with one owner among Columbus's "Big Three" affiliates.
Addition of Fox affiliation On January 1, 2021, Sinclair quietly sent a letter to cable and satellite providers saying that it had consolidated the Fox affiliations of stations in markets where it had been on a sister Cunningham or Deerfield-owned station onto Sinclair owned stations, putting those affiliations directly in Sinclair's control. While most markets transitioned on that day, the transition of WTTE-DT1's programming schedule onto WSYX's spectrum would be held off until January 7, as that would be the day WWHO would convert to being the market's ATSC 3.0 lighthouse station, and it would be easier for the transition of all the channels being moved or launched to occur then.
On that day, Sinclair began simulcasting "Fox 28" programming on WSYX-DT3, while moving Antenna TV to the newly created 6.4. WTTE's main signal would eventually carry Sinclair-owned TBD full-time. The simulcast continued until February 3 at 10 a.m., when the "Fox 28" schedule was now only available over-the-air through WSYX-DT3 (WTTE would also become the host of WWHO's main CW schedule in ATSC 1.0 format).
With the move of the "Fox 28" schedule to WSYX-DT3, it became the largest-market subchannel-only Fox affiliate, surpassing Albuquerque, New Mexico's KRQE-DT2 for that distinction, along with the largest station by market size holding two affiliations with the Big Four networks (also ahead of KRQE), though it was surpassed in August 2025 when Fox affiliate WSVN in Miami added the ABC affiliation to its second digital subchannel, replacing decades-long affiliate WPLG. WSYX-DT3 continues to identify as "Fox 28" outside of the change of the call letters for their station identification, though in technicality as WSYX uses physical channel 28, it still properly identifies its channel position.
The switch was contractually proper for cable and satellite providers, who continue to carry Fox programming on all of "Fox 28"'s existing low-number channel positions, while WTTE-DT1's carriage now depends on provider; some carry it as a low-number channel, while others no longer carry any of WTTE's channels.
In April 2021, Antenna TV and Stadium swapped channels, with Stadium moving to 6.4 and Antenna TV moving to WTTE-DT2.
WSYX-DT2
In August 2006, WSYX launched a new second digital subchannel to carry programming from MyNetworkTV. This channel added programming from This TV in the daytime and overnight hours on November 1, 2008; eventually it took up a bulk of the schedule outside of MyNetworkTV programming. For a long time, WSYX-DT2 had been the largest-market subchannel-only MyNetworkTV affiliate, but that all changed on November 17, 2014, when KMOV-DT3 "MyTV St. Louis" signed on. However, WSYX-DT2 remained the largest-market MyNetworkTV affiliate to be paired with another multicast digital network, until January 29, 2019, when the Cleveland market's MyNetworkTV affiliation was transferred from WUAB (which relaunched as a CW-affiliated station) to a late-night offering with MeTV on WOIO-DT2.
Programming News operation
WSYX presently broadcasts 38 hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with six hours each weekday and four hours each on Saturdays and Sundays) on its main signal, as well as hours on WSYX-DT3 (with five hours each weekday, three hours on Saturdays, and hours on Sundays) for a total of hours of locally produced newscasts; in regards to the number of hours devoted to news programming, it is the highest local newscast output among the Columbus market's television stations, though WCMH-TV has the largest output airing on one channel.
Historically, WSYX had been third among Columbus's television news operations, with WBNS the longtime market leader and WCMH having NBC's strength in the 1980s into the 2000s (and NBC ownership in-between) to keep up with WBNS. WSYX has begun to challenge WBNS as Sinclair's ownership has become steady, with WCMH ending up a low-priority station under several new ownerships, and WBNS's local ownership ending in 2019 when the Wolfe family sold off the WBNS stations to Tegna, itself troubled by cost-cutting and shareholder turbulence and forced corporate-wide news imaging that discounted WBNS's local legacy. While WCMH-TV generally carries a straight newscast (as is common among Nexstar stations) and WBNS-TV has been more lifestyle-oriented under Tegna ownership, WSYX has traditionally had more of a watchdog journalism style, long carrying the slogan "On YOUR Side". Since the sale of WBNS-TV to Tegna, WSYX has been in a neck-and-neck race with WCMH-TV as the market leader, dominating in the mornings while being more competitive in other timeslots.