History
WKBT launched on August 8, 1954 as sister station to WKBH, a radio station known today as WIZM. (The "T," for "television," replaced the "H" in the call sign to differentiate the stations.) WKBT carried dual affiliation with CBS and ABC, a set-up that continued until 1970, when WKBT became solely a CBS affiliate. WKBT also briefly had secondary affiliations with DuMont (until 1956) and NBC (until 1958).
On April 16, 1965, during the worst of the famous 1965 flood, the downtown La Crosse building that housed both WKBT and WKBH fell victim to fire; WKBT then rebuilt its current building on the same site.
In the 1970s, WKBT was sold to Harold F. Gross, a businessman from Lansing, Michigan who owned WJIM-AM-FM-TV in that city. WKBT and WJIM-TV were sold in the mid-1980s to Unicom Inc, a unit of Forstmann Little, d.b.a. Backe Communications, following a licensing dispute involving WJIM-TV (which changed its call letters to WLNS-TV). Unicom's ownership of the station was short-lived as in 1986 it sold WLNS and WKBT to Young Broadcasting.
In March 2000, Young sold WKBT to Morgan Murphy Stations, whose QueenB Television subsidiary (now Morgan Murphy Media) became the licensee for the station.
In the summer of 2011, WKBT became the first station in the La Crosse/Eau Claire DMA to air newscasts in high definition.
In October 2012, WKBT was in the national spotlight when morning news anchor Jennifer Livingston addressed an e-mailer who criticized her about her weight, and issued an on-air commentary about bullying and being a role model.
Read more about this topic: WKBT-DT
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“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)