WFXT (channel 25) is a television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, affiliated with the Fox network and owned by Cox Media Group.

After being awarded a construction permit to build the station from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in June 1972, CBN targeted the new channel 25 to begin operations within one year.

WXNE-TV's early programming format was targeted at a family audience, consisting of older syndicated reruns and a decent amount of religious programming—including CBN's flagship show, The 700 Club, hosted by the ministry's founder Pat Robertson.

Most notably, in 1980, WXNE took over production of the weekday bowling program Candlepins for Cash, which had just been canceled by CBS affiliate WNAC-TV (channel 7, now WHDH) after seven seasons.

[3] That August, News Corporation announced that it would purchase channel 25,[4] with plans to make it an owned-and-operated station of its Fox Broadcasting Company.

Fox instead contracted Boston radio station WMRE (1510 AM, now WMEX) to carry the audio portion of The Late Show in the interim.

Besides adding The Late Show to the schedule, airings of The 700 Club were cut to once a day, and the daily broadcast of the Roman Catholic Mass was moved to an earlier timeslot.

The station's schedule, however, was largely unchanged at the outset, aside from the removal of several older sitcoms that soon resurfaced on WQTV (channel 68, now WBPX-TV).

However, in 1988, the station did manage to buy two popular weekday syndicated shows away from WNEV—Hollywood Squares (the then-current John Davidson version) and Entertainment Tonight—when the CBS affiliate phased them off its schedule, due to other programming commitments.

WFXT aired Squares through its 1989 cancellation; it carried ET weeknights at 7 p.m., as the lead-in to A Current Affair, until selling the show back to WHDH-TV (the former WNEV) in 1990.

[12] The Celtics made WFXT the NBA team's flagship station starting with the 1990–91 season, following the expiration of its existing contract with WLVI-TV.

Nonetheless, under Celtics ownership, WFXT finally began to acquire stronger programming, becoming a serious competitor to WSBK and WLVI for the first time.

[16] That October, Fox obtained a 10-year option to repurchase the station as early as 1995, and immediately announced that it would not seek a waiver to own both channel 25 and the Herald;[17] News Corporation sold the newspaper to its publisher, Pat Purcell, in February 1994, clearing the way for a potential purchase of WFXT.

On July 21, 2006, News Corporation announced that Derry, New Hampshire–based WZMY-TV (channel 50, now WWJE-DT) would become the market's MyNetworkTV affiliate when the network began operations on September 5, 2006.

On October 12, 2007, Comcast began blacking out Fox prime time and sports programming from WFXT on its systems in Bristol County due to an invocation of the FCC's network non-duplication rule by WNAC-TV, the Fox affiliate in Providence, Rhode Island, leaving only channel 25's syndicated programs and newscasts available in that area.

In November 2014, shortly after the closure of the sale, WFXT was briefly pulled from Verizon FiOS in the Boston area for a week due to a discrepancy in contract negotiations.

[34] On October 27, 2015, WFXT dropped the Fox O&O-style branding and introduced a new logo and on-air appearance; the logo was criticized by some viewers for its simplified appearance—omitting the standard Fox network logo in favor of an italicized Helvetica logotype—and received national attention when Larry Potash, anchor of the Morning News on WGN-TV in Chicago, criticized the change as a move by station-hired consultants to help bring in viewers who defected from WFXT's newscasts following the departure of longtime evening anchor Maria Stephanos earlier that year (Stephanos would join WCVB-TV in 2016).

Owing to Fox's exclusive coverage of the World Series since 2000, WFXT has carried every Red Sox championship in the television era (2004, 2007, 2013, and 2018).

It also served as the team's primary over-the-air broadcaster for three seasons from 2000 to 2002 as the flagship station of the "Fox 25 Red Sox Television Network".

Kahn lasted a year in this role before she was hired by ABC affiliate WCVB-TV (channel 5); Lila Orbach replaced her as anchor.

[61] One year later, Applegate left WFXT to become co-anchor of Good Day New York on then-sister station WNYW[62] and was replaced by former WHDH and WBZ-TV anchor Kim Carrigan.

Concurrent with the debut of the morning newscast, WFXT unveiled a 90,000 square feet (8,400 m2) newsroom similar to that of WHDH, which also serves as the station's news set;[61] it remains in use to this day.

Channel 25 also opened a news bureau on Beacon Hill near the State House in downtown Boston, which serves as an interview location for Massachusetts lawmakers as well as a home base for weekday morning commentator Doug "V.B."

The station's signal is multiplexed: The Fox subchannel is offered in ATSC 3.0 (NextGen TV) format from the transmitter of WUNI.

[76] WFXT's analog signal began malfunctioning on November 1, 2008, as a result of a failing transmission line, forcing the station to reduce its power.

Many Boston area residents complained about poor reception from WFXT's digital signal compared to the market's other major television stations.

This was due to the fact that the transmitter previously operated at a reduced power output of 78 kilowatts[55] from an antenna mounted below one of the tines of the Candelabra tower in Needham.

WFXT's vice president of engineering Bill Holbrook stated publicly[81] that the digital signal would not reach full power until August 2009, when installation of a new antenna and transmitter was expected to be completed.