WRDC

Channel 28 in Raleigh was initially occupied by WNAO-TV, the first television station in the Raleigh–Durham TV market and North Carolina's first UHF station. Owned by the Sir Walter Television Company, WNAO-TV broadcast from July 12, 1953, to December 31, 1957, primarily as a CBS affiliate with secondary affiliations with other networks. The station was co-owned with WNAO radio (850 AM, now WPTK; and 96.1 FM, now WBBB), which Sir Walter had bought from The News & Observer newspaper after obtaining the television construction permit. As the Raleigh–Durham market received two VHF television stations in 1954 and 1956 (WTVD and WRAL-TV), WNAO-TV, impaired by its UHF channel position, struggled. The station signed off December 31, 1957, and its ownership entered into a joint venture with another dark UHF outlet that was successful in obtaining channel 8 in High Point.

WRDU-TV, a new Durham-licensed station on channel 28 which was completely unrelated to the Raleigh-licensed WNAO-TV, signed on November 4, 1968. The new station had studios located on North Carolina Highway 54 in southern Durham (currently a DaVita Inc. dialysis center), with a transmitter located near Terrell's Mountain in Chatham County, North Carolina. The station was first owned by Triangle Telecasters, headed by Durham businessman Reuben Everett, his wife Katherine and their son, Robinson O. Everett.[2]

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 that network 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 were skeptical about the prospects for a UHF station in 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 (in the same way that WTVD selected the higher-rated CBS and ABC programs when WNAO-TV was in business), leaving WRDU to carry the lower-rated shows as well as NBC's news programming.[3] 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;[4][5] 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. WRDU also 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 a grade B signal in Raleigh itself and rendering it practically unviewable over-the-air in southern and eastern Wake County; a channel 70 translator, later moved to channel 22,[6] went on air in May 1969 to enhance the WRDU service.[7]

However, one problem that could not be blamed on outside factors was Triangle Telecasters' frequent preemption of network shows for syndicated programs, 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,[8] coinciding with a major signal overhaul and new 1,300-foot (400 m) transmitter tower near Apex that brought WPTF-TV signal parity with the UHF stations.[9][6] This was Durham Life's second attempt to get into television. It was one of two applicants for channel 5 in the 1950s and had made rather extensive preparations for its television station, buying cameras and rehearsing announcers.[6] The Federal Communications Commission, however, shocked Durham Life when it awarded the license to the much smaller Capitol Broadcasting, owner of WRAL radio (AM 1240, now WPJL, and 101.5 FM) as WRAL-TV.[6]

In addition to the upgraded signal, Durham Life invested a large amount of money into its new purchase by upgrading the news department and purchasing $500,000 in new equipment. It also added a kids' show entitled Barney's Army, which was hosted by the namesake Aniforms puppet and ran from 1979 to 1983.[10] However, channel 28 was still reeling from the audience-loyalty problems it had inherited from Triangle Telecasters. It did not help that NBC was experiencing the worst of its 1970s ratings slump.

WRAL and WTVD switched affiliations in 1985 after WTVD's owner, Capital Cities Communications, bought ABC, but WPTF saw little windfall from the switch. Even by the mid-late 1980s, with NBC's powerful prime time lineup, WPTF-TV was dead last in the Triangle television ratings. It even trailed WLFL, 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 number of network shows it declined in the 1970s. This did not sit very well with NBC, which has historically been far less tolerant of preemptions than the other networks.

In the summer of 1991, Durham Life exited broadcasting and sold off individual stations to various owners. WPTF-TV was sold to Paul Brissette, who changed the callsign to WRDC on October 25, after the three major cities in the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill), and rebranded the station as "TRI-28". The new ownership made the station profitable almost immediately—only after Brissette laid off virtually the entire news department in a cost-cutting move at the end of July 1991,[11] assuring little to no goodwill from NBC about the future direction of the station. One disgruntled ex-employee bitterly suggested that the station's new WRDC call sign stood for "We Really Don't Care."[12] The station continued to employ a single anchor/reporter to helm local news updates that would air during NBC network shows and syndicated programming; these newsbriefs eventually were discontinued outright in 1994, leaving WRDC without locally based news programming for the station's remaining two years as an NBC affiliate.

The former "UPN 28" logo, used from 2002 to 2006.

By the mid-1990s, NBC's patience with WRDC was exhausted, and the network became increasingly frustrated with its poor performance in one of the fastest-growing markets in the country. Brissette's waning commitment to local news did not help matters. NBC began to look to move its programming to another station at the end of its affiliation agreement with channel 28. When WNCN (channel 17, formerly WYED-TV), licensed to Goldsboro but located just outside Raleigh in Clayton, boosted its signal to 5 million watts to provide greater coverage to the Triangle market, NBC finally saw an opportunity. WNCN's owner, Outlet Communications, had very good relations with NBC; it 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 new WB Television Network, NBC quickly cut a deal with Outlet to move its Triangle affiliation to WNCN (it eventually purchased Outlet outright, making WNCN an owned-and-operated station for around a decade).

However, NBC remained affiliated with WRDC until September 10, 1995—a month earlier than planned, by mutual agreement between the two stations.[13] Starting that January, WNCN began airing all of the NBC programming that WRDC turned down. WRDC immediately became the UPN affiliate in the market. Even in its final months with NBC, the station branded itself as "UPN 28"; it also delayed UPN's Monday and Tuesday night slates to air on Friday and Saturday nights instead of NBC's weaker prime time lineup,[14] which WNCN aired on those nights until September.[15]

With WRDC now a full-time UPN affiliate, it no longer had a decent amount of programming to preempt. UPN only programmed on Monday and Tuesday nights at the time, and would never air any programming on weekends. 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 ownership limits of the time, WRDC was sold to Glencairn Ltd. Glencairn was owned by Edwin Edwards, a former executive with WLFL's owner, the Sinclair Broadcast Group. The Smith family, founders and owners of Sinclair, held 97% of Glencairn's stock, leading to allegations that Sinclair was using Glencairn to do an end run around FCC rules forbidding television station duopolies. Sinclair further circumvented the rules by taking over WRDC's operations under a local marketing agreement, with WLFL was the senior partner. However, the combined operation was and still is 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 station, as did most of the UPN-affiliated stations that Sinclair either owned or controlled, due to a dispute between UPN and Sinclair. During the dispute, UPN programming was available in the Raleigh market via off-market stations, such as WUPN in Greensboro and WILM-LD in Wilmington, on cable providers in the market and via Dish Network satellite services. 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 prohibit one company to own two of the four highest-rated stations by total viewership in a single market.

On January 24, 2006, Time Warner and CBS Corporation announced that The WB and UPN (which had only used its initials as its official name since 2000) would merge their higher-rated programs onto a new network, The CW.[16][17] 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, which is also owner of the Fox network.[18] 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.

In recent years, WRDC has been carried on cable in multiple areas within the Greensboro and Greenville media markets in North Carolina.[19]

On May 15, 2012, Sinclair and Fox agreed to a five-year affiliation agreement extension for Sinclair's 19 Fox-affiliated stations until 2017. This included an option, that was 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 were included in the Fox purchase option, along with stations in Cincinnati (WSTR-TV), Norfolk (WTVZ) and Las Vegas (KVCW and KVMY).[20] In January 2013, Fox announced that it would not exercise its option to buy any of the Sinclair stations in the four aforementioned markets.[21]

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:

WRDC previously broadcast TheCoolTV on a second digital subchannel, but the network was dropped from all Sinclair stations on August 31, 2012.[23]

WRDC discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 28, on February 17, 2009, five months ahead of the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. It was one of three stations in the Triangle market, along with WLFL and WRAY-TV, that decided to switch on that date, even though the official transition date had been changed to June 12, 2009. Although it had an assigned digital channel that it would move to post-transition that differed from its original digital channel, WRDC continued to broadcast its digital signal on its pre-transition allocation (UHF channel 27). At noon on June 12, the station's digital signal relocated to UHF channel 28.[24]