History
The District of Columbia's third television station began broadcasting on October 3, 1947 as WTVW, owned by the Washington Star along with WMAL radio (630 AM and 107.3 FM, now WRQX). It was the first Band III VHF station (channels 7-13) in the United States. A few months later, the station renamed itself WMAL-TV after its radio sisters.
WMAL radio had been an affiliate of the NBC Blue Network since 1933, and remained with the network after it was spun off by NBC and evolved into ABC. However, channel 7 started as a CBS station since ABC hadn't gotten into television yet. When ABC launched its television network in 1948, WMAL-TV became ABC's third primary affiliate. It continued to carry some CBS programming until WOIC-TV (later WTOP-TV and now WUSA) signed on in 1949. During the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network.
In 1975 Texas businessman Joseph L. Allbritton, the owner of Washington-based Riggs Bank, purchased the Star along with the WMAL stations. As a condition of the purchase, Allbritton had to break up the newspaper/broadcast combination, which the Federal Communications Commission was seeking to prohibit under its "one-to-a market" rule. WMAL-TV was separated first from its radio sisters when ABC purchased WMAL-AM-FM in March 1977. Upon the radio transfer, channel 7 changed its call letters to the current WJLA-TV, after Allbritton's initials. Allbritton then sold the Star to Time, Inc. in February 1978.
Rumors abounded from the mid-1990s onward that ABC might buy WJLA-TV, thus reuniting it with its former radio sisters. However, ABC sold most of its radio properties, including WMAL and WRQX, to Citadel Broadcasting Corporation in June 2007. Even so, WJLA is still an ABC affiliate to this day under Allbritton because the company has an exclusive affiliation deal with the network. After WJZ-TV in Baltimore switched to CBS in 1995, WJLA became ABC's longest-tenured affiliate.
In December 2007, WJLA began simulcasting WTOP-FM on its "Weather Now" digital sub-channel, though dropped this as of late July 2009.
Read more about this topic: WJLA-TV
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