WATE-TV (channel 6) is a television station in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States, affiliated with ABC and owned by Nexstar Media Group.

It was signed on by Greater East Tennessee TV, Inc.,[3] owned by local insurance executive Paul Mountcastle and a small group of investors along with WROL AM 950.

At the time, Mountcastle was chairman of the board of the Life and Casualty Insurance Company of Tennessee in Nashville, which signed on WLAC-TV (now WTVF) in that city in 1954.

Channel 6 opted to fill its non-network schedule with local programming, a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandate, and as a result, DuMont was forced to join WTVK on a secondary basis.

At the time, WATE-TV joined other former NBC affiliates WSB-TV in Atlanta, KSTP-TV in Minneapolis–Saint Paul, WRTV in Indianapolis and WSOC-TV in Charlotte who also switched to ABC.

At the time, WATE was the market leader with a strong VHF signal in East Tennessee, Southwestern Virginia, and Southeastern Kentucky.

WTVK's UHF signal on channel 26 was marginal at best in much of the Knoxville area and many viewers in East Tennessee and Southeastern Kentucky treated ABC as though it were a new television network (which it was anything but at the time).

In 1993, Nationwide sold its three ABC-affiliated television stations (WATE, WBAY-TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and WRIC-TV in Richmond, Virginia) to Young Broadcasting.

In the early 1980s, WATE-TV also produced the East Tennessee version of PM Magazine, the syndicated series from Westinghouse-Group W that spotlighted local people and events in the area.

During the month of August, WATE broadcasts Tennessee Titans preseason football games regionally syndicated by sister station and fellow ABC affiliate WKRN-TV in Nashville.

In the late-1960s, it assembled the popular on-air team of news anchor Pete Gardener, weathercaster Margie Ison, and Sports Director Mike Thurman.

Also at this point, it was the first outlet to update its newsroom technology with a switch from film to videotape (i.e. electronic journalism) as well as own-and-operating a live microwave truck to assist in newsgathering purposes.

In 1977, WATE debuted the market's first local newscasts seen on Saturday evenings featuring anchor Art Powell, Kay Elliott providing weather forecasts, and Calvin Sneed with sports.

In 1980, WATE promoted Sneed to become the first African-American to co-anchor weeknight main news broadcasts in East Tennessee,[9][10] which included Chattanooga, Knoxville and Tri-Cities.

The stories seen on-air served as fodder for the next day's coverage assignments pioneering the "follow-up" concept of reporting in modern-day journalism.

Branded as Fox 43 Ten O'Clock News, the nightly thirty-minute show featured a similar format to broadcasts seen on this station except for WTNZ's logo being present in the graphics.

Produced by WBIR, this production offered as an alternative to WTNZ only aired for twelve minutes in an abbreviated format featuring the day's top stories along with an updated weather forecast.

WATE's weekday noon show was cancelled on January 31, 2008, making the station Knoxville's only outlet without a newscast seen in the time period.

In early April 2012, that channel finally upgraded its master control to allow the WATE newscast and some other local and syndicated programming to be broadcast in HD.