Fiktiv USA - WTVF-TV

WTVF, virtual channel 5 (UHF digital channel 36), is a CBS-affiliated television station licensed to Nashville, Tennessee, United States. The station is owned by the E. W. Scripps Company. WTVF's studios are located on James Robertson Parkway in downtown Nashville, and its transmitter is located north of downtown along I-24 near Whites Creek.

WTVF first signed on the air August 6, 1954 as WLAC-TV, originally owned by the Life and Casualty Insurance Company, and Nashville businessmen Guilford Dudley, Al Beaman and Thomas Baker. Life and Casualty's chairman of the board Paul Mountcastle and his investment group also held a majority ownership of WATE-TV, Channel 6, in Knoxville, but the two stations were not considered to be co-owned. Ever since its inception, WLAC-TV's analog signal was short-spaced to Memphis' WMC-TV also on VHF channel 5 (coincidentally, WMC-TV began on channel 4 and was immediately short-spaced to WSM-TV in Nashville, now WSMV). WLAC-TV was owned alongside WLAC radio (1510 AM) and later WLAC-FM (105.9 FM, now WNRQ). The call sign reflected the initials of the insurance company. It immediately took the CBS affiliation from WSIX-TV (channel 8, eventually WKRN-TV on channel 2) because WLAC (AM) had been Nashville's CBS Radio affiliate since 1928. With WLAC-TV, Nashville became one of the smallest cities in the United States to have three fully separate network-affiliated commercial television stations. American General Corporation, a Houston-based insurer, bought L&C and WLAC-AM-FM-TV in the 1960s.

WLAC-TV was sold in 1975 to the Hobby family (owners of KPRC AM-TV and the now-defunct Houston Post), who changed the station's call letters to the current WTVF on December 1 (the call letter change was brought on due to an FCC rule in place at the time forbidding TV and radio stations in the same city, but with different owners from sharing the same call letters). American General/L&C eventually sold WLAC-AM-FM to other interests and the other stations have had several owners over the years. In 1983, the Hobbys reorganized their broadcast holdings as H&C Communications after the Post was sold. Landmark Communications, based in Norfolk, Virginia, bought WTVF from the Hobbys in 1994.

On January 30, 2008, Landmark announced its intention to sell WTVF, along with sister station KLAS-TV in Las Vegas and cable network The Weather Channel. This was followed on July 14, 2008 with an announcement that WTVF would be sold to Bonten Media Group, which already owned 16 broadcast television stations in five states, including at the time WCYB-TV in Bristol, Virginia. However, the deal was called off due to the economic crisis of 2008 as Bonten informed Landmark that it could not close on the purchase after its key financial backer for that purchase, Lehman Brothers, filed for what remains the largest bankruptcy in American history. Although the sale of The Weather Channel and some other assets was eventually completed, Landmark (which changed its name from Landmark Communications to Landmark Media Enterprises in September 2008) took most of its other properties off the market in October 2008. As a result, WTVF and KLAS remained owned by Landmark. WTVF would have become the largest station owned by Bonten, as well as the first CBS affiliate in its portfolio.

On May 1 and 2, 2010, WTVF's newsroom was flooded with three feet (0.91 m) of water, and became non-operational for three months as it was being rebuilt. During the flooding, equipment was hastily moved to other locations around the building to prevent disruption of the station's news operation.

On September 4, 2012, Milwaukee-based Journal Communications announced that it would purchase WTVF from Landmark for $215 million. The FCC approved the sale on October 22, and it was consummated on December 6. With the transaction's completion, WTVF became the largest Journal-owned station by market size (displacing flagship WTMJ-TV, which became the second largest). It also made WTVF the sister station of KLAS-TV's rival, KTNV-TV.

On July 30, 2014, less than two years after Landmark sold the station to Journal, it was announced that Journal Communications would be bought out by the E. W. Scripps Company in an all-stock transaction. Scripps retained the companies' broadcast holdings, including WTVF, and spun off their print holdings into Journal Media Group. This marks the second time that Scripps has owned a Tennessee television station, as it owned WMC-TV in Memphis from its 1948 sign-on until 1993. The FCC approved the deal on December 12, 2014. It was approved by the two companies' shareholders on March 11, 2015, and it closed on April 1.

Syndicated programs broadcast by WTVF include The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Inside Edition, and The Kelly Clarkson Show.

In 1998, WTVF became the primary home station for the Tennessee Titans, then still known as the Oilers starting with that season, when the rights to air road games of the National Football League's American Football Conference moved to CBS from NBC. In 2014, the first eight weeks of NFL Network's Thursday Night Football were added to WTVF's sports programming roster due to the new partnership between NFL Network and CBS to simulcast that program. WTVF began simulcasting any of the Tennessee Titans' TNF appearances in the late half of the season, beginning with the Tennessee Titans-Jacksonville Jaguars game on Thursday, November 19, 2015. In the 2013 and 2014 seasons, that duty was previously held by Fox affiliate WZTV until the Fox network became the over-the-air broadcaster of most TNF games. All other CBS Sports programming is featured on the station, including their signature broadcasts of college basketball. Since 2018, WZTV broadcasts TNF games as part of Fox's rights to the package.

In the mid-1980s, WTVF also held the local broadcast rights to Southeastern Conference basketball games produced by the Lorimar Sports Network until that syndication service dissolved after the 1985–86 season. Beginning January 1987, when Jefferson-Pilot Teleproductions began syndicating those games, WSMV began serving as the package's Nashville-area rights-holder until WUXP-TV won the local rights for the rest of that package's run.

WTVF airs any Vanderbilt Commodores football games selected for broadcast on the SEC on CBS.

WTVF broadcasts 37 hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with 5½ hours each on Mondays through Saturdays and four hours on Sundays); in addition, the station produces the half-hour news/interview program Talk of the Town on weekdays at 11 a.m. and a weekly sports wrap-up program Sunday Sports Central on Sundays at 10:22 p.m. as part of the 10 p.m. newscast. The station also produces five hours of newscasts each week for NewsChannel 5+ in the form of an hour-long extension of WTVF's weekday morning newscast at 7. Weekday morning newscasts last from 4–7 (not counting the extension on NewsChannel 5+), and the 6 p.m. newscasts last for a full hour. Since February 22, 2014, WTVF's weekend morning newscast started at 5, lasting from 5–9 on Saturday mornings and 5–8 on Sunday mornings.

Talk of the Town, the station's primary mid-day show, premiered on WTVF on March 19, 1984. The show features information about upcoming events around middle Tennessee, interviews with local personalities (some national), as well as some recipes are featured on the show. In April 2014, the station celebrated the show's 30th anniversary by airing pieces of old episodes within the past 30 years of the show's run for a few weeks. With the show still on the air, Talk of The Town was declared the longest locally produced television show in the Nashville television market, and the whole nation. It currently airs every weekday at 11 a.m. on the main channel, with replays at various times on WTVF-DT2/NewsChannel 5+.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the station used the Eyewitness News moniker for its newscasts. The current NewsChannel 5 branding and logo have been in use since August 1989. In 1974, WLAC became the first network affiliate in the country to use Electronic News Gathering (ENG) to bring live field reports to its viewers. On February 2, 2007, WTVF unveiled a new on-air look complete with a new state-of-the-art news set, weather center, and graphics in tandem its official upgrade to high definition newscasts (becoming the 25th television station in the United States to broadcast its local news programming in high definition and one of only four at the time with an HD weather center and system). The new set was built in a separate studio from its existing news set minimizing disruptions of news operations. The old, existing news set is now currently used for some original programs aired on NewsChannel 5+, which is broadcast over WTVF-DT2.

WTVF produces daily 90-second news updates for Univision affiliate WLLC-LP (channel 42). It is the only Spanish-language newscast in Nashville, a market consisting of about 4% Spanish-speaking viewers, a fast-growing audience in the Middle Tennessee area.

Viewers residing in several areas outside of the Nashville media market can view WTVF, depending on the cable provider. Carriage of the station's signal outside the Nashville market is subject to Syndication exclusivity, or SyndEx, where the local CBS affiliate's feed substitutes that of WTVF when network and/or syndicated programming is shown on both stations at the same time period.

WTVF is a significantly viewed station in the Bowling Green, Kentucky DMA, owing to its transmitter being located on the north side of Nashville. As a result, its signal was strong enough to be received in most of that area. For more than five decades, WTVF had a decades-long monopoly in providing CBS programming to certain counties in south-central Kentucky as that area was originally part of the Nashville market until Bowling Green was collapsed into its own market area in 1978. Even after Bowling Green was collapsed into its own market, CBS was still not locally available in that area. This came to an end on February 1, 2007, when Bowling Green area NBC affiliate WNKY launched a new second digital subchannel to serve as that area's own CBS affiliate. In spite of the existence of WNKY-DT2, WTVF remains available on several cable systems in the Bowling Green market. Mediacom cable systems currently carry the station's main channel in the Morgantown (Butler County) and Brownsville (Edmonson County) areas. Charter Spectrum in Bowling Green, along with the on-campus cable system WesternCable at Western Kentucky University, as well as the Glasgow-based cable system of the South Central Rural Telephone Cooperative. The SCRTC in Glasgow also has been piping in WLKY, the CBS/MeTV affiliate in Louisville as a secondary option since 1990 (and before that WHAS-TV which was Louisville's CBS affiliate until then). Many areas of the Bowling Green market can still pick up WTVF via an outdoor antenna. Some users of indoor antennas in southern Kentucky, and the far reaches of the station's coverage area can also pick up the signal thanks to their digital signal upgrade in 2013.

The Glasgow Electric Plant Board also carried WTVF and WSMV as distant CBS and NBC affiliates, respectively. That provider did not drop WTVF or WSMV and its associated subchannels from their lineup until late 2017 when WNKY and WNKY-DT2 claimed market exclusivity on that system.

Mediacom also carries the station's main channel in Caldwell and Crittenden counties, including the communities of Princeton and Marion, both of which are in the Paducah, Kentucky/Cape Girardeau, Missouri/Harrisburg, Illinois media market. The station is also carried on Murray Electric System cable in the Murray area of Calloway County, Kentucky, which is also in the Paducah market. WK&T Telecom also makes WTVF available to its Calloway County customers. WTVF is also carried on cable systems in Muhlenberg and Hopkins Counties, which are in the Evansville, Indiana market.

WTVF is carried on several cable systems in other areas outside of the Nashville market and within the state of Tennessee. In Jackson, Tennessee, for instance, WTVF is currently the only Nashville-based station that is carried on Jackson Energy Authority's E-Plus Broadband Cable Service. Other systems in the Jackson market carry the station, including WK&T Telecom's customers (under the Flite label) in the Trenton area of Gibson County, as well as two of the three northwest Tennessee counties within the Paducah market, namely Weakley and Obion, including the Martin/Dresden and Union City/South Fulton areas, respectively.

The station is also available on cable in the Fayetteville area of Lincoln County, the only Middle Tennessee county that is in the Huntsville, Alabama media market. WTVF's main channel is also carried on cable systems in Fentress County (Jamestown), as well as on Spirit Broadband Cable channel 5 for that provider's customers in Cumberland County, Tennessee (including Crossville and Fairfield Glade), which is in the Knoxville media market.

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WTVF-DT2, branded as NewsChannel 5 Plus or NewsChannel 5+, is the second digital subchannel of WTVF, operating as an independent station. It broadcasts in standard definition on UHF channel 36.4 (or virtual channel 5.2).

NewsChannel 5+ was introduced and launched in September 1996 as an all-news and information cable-only channel for the Nashville area. In addition to locally produced shows and newscast repeats, NewsChannel 5+ also carried programming from All News Channel until that service folded in September 2002. After that point, the channel's programming schedule relies mostly on original content.

NewsChannel 5+ was relaunched as an over-the-air digital sub-channel on June 21, 2009, nine days after the Digital TV transition of 2009, when WTVF began utilizing digital multi-casting on its digital signal. Since then, NewsChannel 5+ is being broadcast on digital channel 5.2. In mid-2014, WTVF-DT2's standard definition picture was upgraded to 16:9 SD widescreen to accommodate widescreen TVs.

WTVF-DT2 features locally produced programming and repeats of local news from the main channel. There is also live gavel-to-gavel coverage of high-profile criminal trials in the Nashville area including those of Paul Dennis Reid, Perry March, Mary Winkler, Lindsey Lowe, as well as the three suspects in the Holly Bobo case, the latter of which gained national attention in the 2010s. WTVF-DT2 goes live during severe weather and will sometimes air local newscasts if CBS programming is preempted on the main channel, such as during the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament, which has been a staple in CBS Sports programming since 1982.

Since the Saturday edition of CBS This Morning does not run on the main channel, it is being carried on WTVF-DT2 on a one-hour delay, so it is being run from 8 to 10 a.m. CT Saturday mornings. CBS Overnight News is also run almost in its entirety during each weekday morning, usually from 1:35 to 3:30 a.m., since the main channel airs certain syndicated programming, and doesn't join the overnight news program until 2:37 a.m. It also carries the full hour of CBS' Face the Nation, since WTVF only shows the first half-hour of the program; the main channel airs religious programming from 10 to 11:00 a.m. Children's educational programming on WTVF-DT2 is a replay of the children's programming block that is run on WTVF-DT3 on Sunday mornings; WTVF-DT2 rebroadcasts that programming on Sunday afternoons.

WTVF-DT2 also replays most, if not all, newscasts and editions of their locally produced show, Talk of the Town. In addition, WTVF-DT2's parent station also produces five hours of newscasts each week for NewsChannel 5+ in the form of an hour-long extension of WTVF's weekday morning newscast airing from 7 to 8 a.m.