WHBQ-TV (channel 13) is a television station in Memphis, Tennessee, United States, affiliated with the Fox network and owned by Imagicomm Communications.

[2] In 1955, General Tire purchased RKO Radio Pictures in order to give its television stations a programming source outside of network content and locally produced shows.

The regulatory pressure on RKO General continued unabated until 1987, when an FCC administrative law judge ruled the company unfit to be a broadcast licensee due to its rampant dishonesty.

Adams was in severe financial straits by 1994, and sold the station to the Communications Corporation of America; the sale was finalized on August 17 of that year.

News Corporation's purchase of channel 13 built on this, and was in part positioning to have a station in a market that was, at the time, in contention for landing an NFL team,[3] as Fox had just gained the broadcast rights to the league's National Football Conference division in 1994, although the NFL spent only one year in Memphis when the then-Tennessee Oilers moved from Houston to the Liberty Bowl before settling in Nashville and becoming the Titans.

[10] On March 29, 2022, Cox Media Group announced it would sell WHBQ-TV and 17 other stations to Imagicomm Communications, an affiliate of the parent company of the INSP cable channel, for $488 million;[11] the sale was completed on August 1.

In some cases, the preemptions occurred because RKO General was skeptical of airing subject matter deemed even mildly controversial (presumably to keep from offending viewers in Memphis' more conservative suburbs and the surrounding rural areas).

[14] When Soap proved to be a runaway hit for the network, channel 13 acquiesced and allowed the series to be rerun in the late night hours during the summer.

For instance, in 1972, WHBQ-TV (whose AM sister was a Top 40 powerhouse at the time) stunned viewers in the Mid-South by dropping American Bandstand (and, with it, weaker and low-rated cartoons that aired in the 11 a.m. slot; the ABC Weekend Special, which took that spot in 1977, would not be cleared until 1980) in favor of airing a 90-minute live professional wrestling program, hosted by Russell, that was previously a fixture on late Saturday afternoons when it first premiered in 1958, until it moved to the Saturday 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. slot.

The preemption kept Memphians from seeing homegrown talent perform on the show, such as The Sylvers, Al Green, Isaac Hayes, Anita Ward, The Staple Singers and Rick Dees, who was hired by WHBQ radio as its new morning host during his "Disco Duck" days in late 1976; that song failed to garner any airplay on any of the radio stations in Memphis, including WHBQ-AM, because Dees was still employed at rival WMPS (then at 680 AM) at the time.

Other popular shows that WHBQ-TV held out until later (when they became major out-of-the-box hits on ABC) included Dark Shadows (which featured actor Don Briscoe, who would later reside and died in Memphis), S.W.A.T., Kids Are People Too, and The Bionic Woman.

In 1980, the station was criticized for carrying paid religious programming instead of ABC's coverage of the United States men's hockey team's gold medal victory over Finland in the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York.

There were several attempts to resurrect the character, though a retired Watson Davis refused all offers, the sole exception being promos for the syndicated run of Dark Shadows, when it was acquired by WHBQ in April 1982.

Disc jockey George Klein hosted Talent Party, an afternoon rock-and-roll series aimed at Memphis' teenage audience, and gave many garage bands their first television appearances; Talent Party was very successful, with ratings that were so high that it regularly beat the nationally top-rated CBS soap opera The Edge of Night on WREC/WREG.

WHBQ's newscasts, for many years, had been branded as Eyewitness News and stayed true to that format's element of including casual banter between anchors and reporters, along with using the "Cool Hand Luke" music package that was used by ABC's owned-and-operated stations.

WHBQ had a number of highly-visible anchors and reporters during the 1970s and 1980s, including Ed Craig, Tom Bearden, Marge Thrasher, Fran Fawcett, Jim Jaggers and Charlie B. Watson.

On August 3, 2013, WHBQ launched a two-hour Saturday edition of Good Morning Memphis, airing from 6 to 8 a.m. On July 6, 2014, WHBQ expanded its weekend morning newscasts to Sundays, also airing from 6 to 8 a.m.[18] The station's signal is multiplexed: WHBQ-TV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over VHF channel 13, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television.