Owned and operated by the Ion Media subsidiary of the E. W. Scripps Company, the station maintains transmitter facilities in Pittsburgh's Oakland neighborhood.
Channel 16 was initially activated August 29, 1953, as WENS, Pittsburgh's second UHF television station in the span of a month, with a primary ABC affiliation and secondary clearance of CBS network programs.
In 1955, a tower collapse led to an emergency 46-day channel-sharing operation with WQED channel 13, Pittsburgh's educational television station, in a first-of-its-kind arrangement.
After having fought the award of a second commercial VHF outlet to Pittsburgh, the station reached a settlement with WIIC-TV (now WPXI) in early 1957 and ceased operations on August 31 of that year, one day before WIIC began broadcasting.
Immediately after the directors of WENS met on August 27, 1957, and decided to shutter the station, a delegation contacted WQED and offered the facilities to channel 13.
[12] It took six months from April 1, 1986, until launch on October 16, 1986, to build the station, train the personnel and organize the programming, all of this under the direction of Kenneth Tiven as general manager.
[12] In its return to the air, WQEX's schedule resembled that of a commercial independent station, with themed nights, reruns, movies and British situation comedies (often called "Britcoms"), reflecting a move then by some PBS stations to adopt a more "middlebrow" image appealing to a larger audience than those of cultural and educational-minded viewers (and thus potentially generating more donor income).
This innovation, called "modular production," later became the keystone of several television news channels, including the now-defunct Orange County Newschannel (OCN), which Tiven departed WQEX to start in 1990.
[15] Due to a combination of high costs of continuing national programming production, bloated payroll expenses, and what the station's critics identified as a top-heavy management structure and a long history of mismanagement,[16] WQED's total liabilities at one point had mounted beyond $10 million.
WQED's initial application to take WQEX commercial was rejected outright by the Federal Communications Commission,[17] leaving it to pursue an alternate plan by which the station was almost sold to religious broadcaster Cornerstone Television in 1999.
[25][26] Although the FCC abruptly reversed its position less than a month later[27] removing the condition in response to intense political and legislative pressure (mainly from Republican sympathizers with the Religious Right),[28] Cornerstone withdrew its application and the sale was cancelled, keeping WQEX as a WQED simulcast.
[29] In July 2002, the FCC abandoned its long-held position on instructional content, removing WQEX's non-commercial educational status outright in response to continued claims of economic hardship by WQED[30] – hardships which the station has long blamed not on its own past management practices, but on the local economic situation and the long-term decline of Pittsburgh's industrial base, situations that were plausible in the 1980s and 1990s but had largely subsided by the 2000s.
[43] On September 24, 2020, the Cincinnati-based E. W. Scripps Company announced it would purchase Ion Media Networks for $2.65 billion, with financing from Berkshire Hathaway.
WQEX was one of three stations in the Pittsburgh market to shut down their analog signals on the original transition date, alongside the Sinclair Broadcast Group duopoly of WPGH-TV and WPMY.