History
The station signed on in June 1995 as the market's UPN affiliate. Along with UPN programming, the station ran a general entertainment format, offering vintage off-network sitcoms, talk shows, court shows, and other syndicated shows. WUPL was sold to Cox Enterprises in 1997, which in turn sold the station to Paramount Stations Group, which made WUPL a UPN owned-and-operated station.
Viacom, Paramount Stations Group's parent company, merged with CBS in 2000. Despite Viacom's ownership of WUPL, the market's CBS affiliation remained on WWL-TV, the highest-rated television station in New Orleans and CBS' strongest affiliate for over 20 years. Viacom briefly considered buying WWL-TV, thus creating a duopoly with WUPL. However, after Belo turned down Viacom's offer, Viacom decided instead to sell WUPL to Belo. WUPL and WWL-TV became sister stations under Belo ownership. Before then, WUPL was one of two network O&O's in New Orleans at the time (Tribune-owned WNOL was the other).
On February 9, 2006, CBS Corporation (which took over WUPL after Viacom split into two companies) filed a law suit against Belo Corp. over the failure to close on the sale of WUPL. The deal was slated to close by the end of 2005, but skidded to a halt when Hurricane Katrina devastated the market in late August. On February 26, 2007, Belo announced that they would go forward with the purchase of WUPL from CBS. A Belo press release also said the sale – which has already received FCC approval – "settles litigation between Belo and CBS over the purchase that arose after Hurricane Katrina." At that time, Belo closed on WUPL, and later acquired its low-power repeater, WBXN-CA on channel 18 in New Orleans (previously a separate station, K10NG, affiliated with The Box and later MTV2) on April 20, 2007. In mid-April 2007, Belo moved WUPL's operations into the WWL-TV facility. The URL for the former WUPL website, WUPLTV.com, later served as a redirect to the main page of the WWL-TV website; it now redirects to a separate section of the WWL-TV Web site.
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