WLTX is Columbia's oldest continuously operating television station, going on the air in September 1953 as WNOK-TV on ultra high frequency (UHF) channel 67.

For most of its first four decades on the air, the station was a distant runner-up to WIS. For much of that time, it only offered one daily newscast, even after a substantial power increase in 1985.

However, in the final years of Lewis ownership and after WLTX's purchase by Gannett in 1998, the news department was significantly expanded in facilities, personnel, and newscasts offered.

In the quarter-century since Gannett, now Tegna, acquired the station, it has become the most substantial challenger ever faced by once-dominant WIS and has even overtaken it on occasion.

On August 15, 1951, Palmetto Radio Corporation, owner of WNOK (1230 AM), applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seeking to build a new TV station on channel 10 in Columbia.

[9] When WCOS-TV folded in January 1956 for economic reasons, WNOK-TV acquired its business assets but not its physical plant.

[12] Nearly from the start, Palmetto Radio sought to improve the visibility of its television station by adding a second VHF channel to Columbia.

[12] In 1966, the Hotel Jefferson, which had housed the studios of WNOK radio and television, was sold to the Citizens & Southern National Bank, which announced plans to build an office tower on the site.

[20][21] Following the studio move, Palmetto Radio upgraded the station's effective radiated power, improving its signal, and began producing live local programs in color in 1968.

[24] In 1984, Lewis applied for a nearly five-fold increase in WLTX's effective radiated power from a new tower northeast of Columbia.

[26] It also gave the station primary coverage of outer suburbs like Orangeburg and Newberry; these areas had only received a Grade B signal.

Even that newscast was dropped later in the decade due to low ratings, with the station opting to concentrate on its 6 p.m. dinner-hour news.

As part of that effort, she began gradually scaling up channel 19's news department to a more typical size for a medium-market station.

Gannett brought in Rich O'Dell, an executive from WKYC-TV in Cleveland, as general manager and hired a new news director.

[45] Longtime WLTX personalities, including anchor Gene Upright and weather presenter Camille Bradford Hugg, moved to new off-air jobs or retired.

[46] In August 1999, to accommodate the launch of The Early Show by CBS, WLTX replaced its 7 a.m. morning news with a two-hour broadcast at 5 a.m.[47] At year's end, on December 31, the centerpiece of the strategy debuted on air in the person of former longtime WIS meteorologist Jim Gandy.

[55] The move kept WLTX competitive; its ratings remained behind WIS in total households but sometimes pulled ahead in key demographics with desirable younger viewers.

O'Dell credited WLTX's piloting of Tegna's "Street Squad" community reporting model as a factor in the ratings boost.