The station's assignment to Sneedville was necessary in order to use VHF channel 2, also allotted to Nashville and Atlanta; however, this resulted in middling reception in Knoxville and the Tri-Cities.

In the early 1980s, a controversy about the production of a film seen as too favorable to governor Lamar Alexander led to scrutiny of Tennessee's state-owned public television stations.

East Tennessee PBS produces a variety of regional programming in the areas of health, education, and culture.

The Metropolitan Educational Television Council then proposed to the state the establishment of the Sneedville station, to be fed by studios in Knoxville and Johnson City.

[14] The transmitter site was important because every program the Knoxville and Johnson City studios produced would have to be taped and taken to Sneedville for broadcast until microwave links could be established.

[26] WSJK-TV proved a high-volume producer of educational programming and at one point in 1975 had more local shows in production than any other public television station in the United States.

[31][32] One executive in the Department of Education told an Associated Press reporter that he felt the proposed swap would have provided more benefit to WKPT than to the public.

Commercial station WBIR-TV was analyzing building a new tower on Sharp's Ridge and offering space for channel 15 to be located there as well.

[35] Even though the Department of Education agreed to pay for space on the mast, a budget crunch led to the reallocation of funds away from the project.

The year before, general manager Al Curtis had produced a 30-minute documentary on the successful 1978 gubernatorial campaign of Republican Lamar Alexander, The Extra Mile.

However, when the issue came to light, state education commissioner Ed Cox abolished the position and began a formal audit.

The report noted that reception difficulties had led Knox County schools to virtually abandon use of educational television and deemed the construction of a new transmitter "necessary" to provide a quality signal and a self-sustaining community service in Knoxville.

[40] In September 1980, the nine employees in Johnson City were laid off, and the state moved all the equipment to WCTE in Cookeville; that station, which had never had its own studios since going on air, reportedly needed production facilities to qualify for grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

This legislation provided for the transfer of the four Department of Education-owned stations to community entities by 1986 and authorized negotiations as to channel 41 to continue.

[43][44] The East Tennessee Public Communications Council was created as an 18-member community board in 1983 to assume WSJK-TV from the state.

[27] After the state divested itself of WSJK-TV, the East Tennessee Public Communications Council began focusing on building channel 15 in Knoxville.

[51] In February 1987, an FCC administrative law judge awarded the channel to the East Tennessee Public Communications Council on the strength of its more detailed application.

[52] Ultimately, it induced the withdrawal of the other two applications by offering Lincoln Memorial University 30 minutes of programming a week and reimbursing Knoxville Community Broadcasting for its expenses.

The station produces a number of health-related programs, including Yoga Basics with Patty, Fit & Fun with Missy Kane, and The Dr. Bob Show.

[65] The latter began as a health segment on WBIR-TV's Live at Five before becoming its own half-hour program,[66] remaining in production until host Dr. Robert Overholt's death in June 2024.

[67] One of the station's longest-running programs is Scholars' Bowl, a regional high school quiz tournament that first began airing in January 1985.