WNYW - History - The Fox Era

The Fox Era

In 1986 Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, who had then-recently bought controlling interest in the 20th Century Fox film studio, purchased the Metromedia television stations, including WNEW-TV. The station's call letters were changed on March 7, 1986 to WNYW and it and the other Metromedia stations formed the cornerstone of the Fox network, with WNYW as the flagship station. Initially, WNYW's schedule changed little, as Fox only aired network programming on weekends. Although it began taking on the look of an O&O in the spring of 1987, channel 5 continued its format of cartoons and sitcoms into the late 1980s.

Murdoch had one local obstacle to overcome before his purchase of channel 5 could become final. The News Corporation had been publishing the New York Post since 1976, and Federal Communications Commission rules of the time did not allow common ownership of newspapers and broadcast licenses in the same city. Murdoch was granted a temporary waiver of this prohibition in order to complete the Metromedia television purchase. Newscorp would sell the Post in 1988, but reacquired the paper five years later with a permanent waiver of the cross-ownership rules.

Starting in the late summer of 1986, WNYW produced the nightly newsmagazine A Current Affair, one of the first shows to be labeled under the tag "tabloid television". Originally a local program, it was first anchored by Maury Povich, formerly of WTTG (and who would later do double-duty, albeit briefly on WNYW's newscasts as an anchor). Within months of its launch, A Current Affair was on the other Fox-owned stations and in 1988 the series went into national syndication, where it remained until its cancellation in 1996.

On August 1, 1988, the station dropped the morning cartoons in favor of a morning newscast called Good Day New York. WNYW became the first Fox-owned station as well as Fox affiliate with a weekday morning newscast, and within five years of its launch it became the top-rated morning show in the New York market. The success of Good Day New York has led to other Fox-owned stations launching morning shows of their own, notably Fox Morning News on WTTG, Fox News in the Morning on WFLD-TV in Chicago and Good Day L.A. on KTTV in Los Angeles. From 1999 to 2001, WNYW was the broadcast home of the New York Yankees, displacing long-time incumbent WPIX (WNYW still airs Yankees games that are part of the Fox network package). This coverage of the Yankees preempted FOX's coverage of NASCAR for a number of races during the 2001 season.

In 1994, the National Football League signed a deal with Fox to air National Football Conference road games. This meant that WNYW has served as the primary station for the New York Giants since that season.

In 2001, Fox bought most of the television interests of Chris-Craft Industries, including WNYW's former rival, WWOR-TV. In the fall of 2001, WNYW dropped the Fox Kids weekday block and moved it to WWOR-TV, where it ran for a few more months before being cancelled at the end of the year. Some office functions have been merged, but most of the stations' operations remain separate. Fox announced plans to merge the two stations' operations in 2004, with WWOR-TV moving from its studios in Secaucus to the Fox Television Center. However, it backed off later in the year under pressure from New Jersey's congressional delegation.

WNYW was the first TV station to break the news of the September 11 attacks. Anchor Jim Ryan with street reporting from Dick Oliver was on the air to deliver the first public report of the event. He broke into a Zoolander commercial at 8:48 a.m. ET. But as a result, the transmitter facilities of WNYW as well as eight other local television stations and several radio stations were destroyed. WNYW has been transmitting its signal from the Empire State Building since. The station had previously transmitted from the Empire State Building until moving to the World Trade Center in the 1970s.

On September 16, 2009 during the 10 p.m. newscast, anchor Ernie Anastos cursed live on air while engaging in banter with chief meteorologist Nick Gregory. The video in which Anastos said to Gregory, "I guess it takes a tough man to make a tender forecast" and then added, "keep fucking that chicken", gained some notoriety when it and multiple other videos of the on-air gaffe were uploaded on YouTube, and made him and WNYW the subject of a joke on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Anastos apologized for the incident the following night's 10 p.m. newscast, saying "I misspoke during last night's broadcast, I apologize for my remarks to anyone who may have been offended."