WUSA (TV)

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WUSA-TV is a television station affiliated with the CBS network, broadcasting on channel 9 in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. WUSA's transmitter is located in the Tenleytown area of Washington, DC, and its digital television broadcasts are assigned to channel 34.

History

The station officially went on the air on January 11, 1949, as WOIC(TV), and began full-time operations on January 16th. Its original owner was the Bamberger Broadcasting Service, which also owned WOR-AM/FM New York City, and was working to put WOR-TV New York City (now WWOR-TV) on the air at the time. Nine days later, WOIC broadcast the first televised American presidential inaugural address, given by President Harry S. Truman.

In June 1950, WTOP Inc. (55% owned by the Washington Post and 45% owned by the Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. and licensee of WTOP-AM 1500 Washington, DC and WTOP-FM 96.3 Washington, DC) purchased WOIC-TV and changed the call sign to WTOP-TV.

In July 1950, WTOP-TV became the first television station in Washington, DC authorized to broadcast color television in the 441-line CBS Line Sequential color standard, which was incompatible with the black-and-white 525-line NTSC standard. Color broadcasts would continue for nearly 30 months, when regulatory and commercial pressures forced the FCC to rescind it's original color standard and begin the process of adopting the 525-line NTSC-3 standard, developed by RCA to be backwards compatible with the existing black-and-white televisions.

In 1954 WTOP-TV and its sister stations WTOP-AM/FM moved into Broadcast House at 40th & Brandywine Streets, NW in Washington, DC. The building was the first designed as a unified radio and television facility. Its name was in honor of Broadcasting House, home of the BBC in London and a building known well to the President of WTOP Inc. since he had spent much or World War II assigned to the BBC. Previous to the move to Broadcast House, WTOP-AM/FM operated out of The Earle Building (now the Warner Building, home of the Warner Theatre), and WTOP-TV had operated out of the small WOIC studios at 40th & Brandywine. When Broadcast House was completed and the new TV studios inaugurated, the old studio became the garage for Broadcast House and the old Master Control became both Master Control and the transmitter room for the TV station, since Broadcast House had been built around the original, 4-sided WOIC tower. You can still see the building with the tower in the middle at the same location, although it is now an office building and retail store front operated by Douglas Development Corp.

The WTOP-TV tower was well known by Washingtonians for two things. The first was at Christmas time when the tower was strung with Christmas lights and glowed brightly on top of Mt. Reno, the tallest point in the District of Columbia. The second was that the tower, being 4-sided, tended to sway much more than 3-sided towers. In a strong wind the tower could be seen swaying back-and-forth, and during the winter ice from the tower fell quite often on the streets below.

The Post gained full ownership of WTOP Inc. in 1956 when 45% owner CBS was ordered by the Federal Communications Commission to divest itself of its part ownership to comply with the FCC's new 7 station ownership rule. CBS' partial ownership of WTOP-AM and WCCO-AM Minneapolis exceeded the FCC's 7 station limit for AM stations. Upon the consummation of the purchase, the Post merged the WTOP stations with its other stations, WJXT(TV) in Jacksonville and WPLG(TV) in Miami and changed the name of the licensee from "WTOP Inc." to "Post-Newsweek Stations, Inc." The licensee for WTOP-AM/FM/TV became "Post-Newsweek Stations/National Capital Area, Inc."

In 1972 WTOP-TV joined with the Evening Star Broadcasting Company (owned by the Post's rival, the Washington Star and licensee of WMAL-TV channel 7, now WJLA(TV)) to build The Joint Tower, a new and much taller 1040' HAAT (height above average terrain) 3-sided tower across the alley from Broadcast House at 4010 Chesapeake Street, NW. Transmission lines were extended from Broadcast House's transmitter area to the new tower for both WTOP-TV and WHUR(FM) (the former WTOP-FM 96.3, which had been donated by Post-Newsweek to Howard University in 1971 but whose transmitter remained at Broadcast House). The old tower continued to serve as the backup antenna for channel 9 until the station sold Broadcast House in 1996.

In 1974 WTOP-TV adopted the Post-Newsweek TV stations group (WPLG, WJXT, and WFSB Hartford) image campaign slogan of the time , "The One and Only". The moniker was part of a trend toward group identification of stations, with each station being "The One and Only TV (channel #)." Staff members from the "One & Only" period usually refer to themselves as "the one and onlies" as a source of pride. The slogan was dropped from active use in the late 1990s and has not been used as part of an image campaign since the last image campaign in 1996. The slogan no longer appears on the air.

In July 1978 Post-Newsweek exchanged WTOP-TV with the Evening News Association's WWJ-TV (co-owned at the time with Detroit News' and now WDIV(TV)). Upon completion of the swap, WTOP-TV changed it's call letters to WDVM-TV. The new call letters represented the initials of the area it served: D for the District of Columbia, V for Virginia, and M for Maryland. Post-Newsweek and the Evening News Association (ENA) decided to swap their TV stations for fear the FCC would force them to sell the stations at unfavorable terms or revoke their very valuable licenses because the FCC at the time was considering forbidding ownership of newspapers and TV stations in the same market. WDVM would remain an Evening News Association station from 1978 to 1985.

In 1985, Gannett, publisher of USA Today, and many other newspapers, purchased the Evening News Association. On July 4, 1986; Gannett changed the call letters to WUSA-TV both in honor of the station being located in the nation's capital and Gannett's ownership of USA Today. While the station's current call sign is commonly printed as W*USA, the asterisk or star between the W and U is not officially recognized as part of the call sign, as FCC records list the station as WUSA. [1] The star device was used to denote its connection to USA Today. After the Women's United Soccer Assocation (the WUSA) was founded in the late 1990s, the star was replaced on-air with the CBS eye. With the demise of the WUSA and it's Washington, DC team in 2003, the station has begun to use the star again in its logo.

WUSA-TV moved to a new Broadcast House in January, 1992 (finally following WTOP-FM, which had departed except for its transmitter in 1971, and WTOP-AM which departed in 1978 when the Post sold the station after the TV swap). The move to the new and more modern building at 4100 Wisconsin Avenue, NW was tinged with sadness due to the death from a brain tumor of channel 9's popular sportcaster, Glenn Brenner, just days before the move.

WUSA-TV began broadcasting digital television in 1999 on WUSA-DT, channel 34. From the start of transmissions, WUSA-DT carried the HDTV transmissions of the CBS Television Network in the network's chosen standard, 1080i. On May 2, 2005, at 11:00PM EDT, WUSA-DT became the first station in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area to broadcast their local newscasts in HDTV using the 1080i standard.

Personalities

WUSA-TV was the launchpad for several well-known news anchors. Walter Cronkite, Sam Donaldson and Warner Wolf are among WUSA-TV's most successful alumni. Jim Henson also began his career at the station.

Slogans

1974-present: The one and only!

External Link

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