One was made by Leon Crosby, who owned KEMO-TV in San Francisco and had filed for three other stations across the country; his lawyer, Lauren Colby, described the proposal as for a "relatively low-powered, relatively modest community-oriented operation".
[3] However, it made up for that in political power: one of the five partners was Hugh Gregg, a former governor of New Hampshire, who had been thinking about filing for a station for some time but was spurred into action by the Crosby application, wanting to see the new outlet owned by local interests.
The FCC granted the NH Channel 21 application on April 15, 1981, after Crosby opted to pull out,[6] and the company announced work would start on building the transmitter on Fort Mountain near Epsom.
[7] However, by 1983, the Gregg consortium had abandoned its plans and sold the construction permit to NHTV 21 Inc., owned by Bob and Frances Shaine and John S. Gikas, in a deal filed with the FCC the next year.
[9] After opposition dissuaded the station from setting up shop in the city's South End, a site on Hall Street was identified and approved to construct a studio.
It commissioned a study that found that, in the Concord area, CBS was a poor third-place finisher and that an affiliation with channel 21 would make $2 million a year in profit for the network and increase its audience.
[31] Of the more than 2 million households in the Boston area of dominant influence in 1988, 311,100 came from the six included counties in southern New Hampshire; on its own, this would have been the 80th-ranked ADI, ahead of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
[29] In Keene, WNHT started a signature-collecting campaign and enlisted letters of support from Governor John Sununu and representative Judd Gregg (son of station founder Hugh) to try and convince Paragon Cable to offer the station to the local system's 10,000 subscribers, but the system refused to bump the CBS affiliate in Hartford, Connecticut, to make room or to pay the out-of-market copyright fees that would be required to add channel 21.
[36] By late February 1989, the slow advertising market had caught up with channel 21: it cut back some local newscasts, axed its Sunday morning public affairs show, and laid off 15 staffers.
On March 31, 1989, Flatley announced that WNHT would go off the air, with some of its staff and equipment being absorbed by WNDS, at the time up for auction without much interest from buyers; general manager Ron Pulera declared that the ratings "have now painfully shown us that there is no market for this type of station".
[42] The closure of WNHT, which had already lost $3 million in 1988 and was set to do the same in 1989, took the CBS network by surprise and revealed a series of miscalculations by Flatley as to the size of the advertising market.
[49] The Mindich deal won FCC approval but fell apart in negotiations, and in 1992, Flatley sold channel 21 to New England Television, Inc., a company headed by Wilson Hickham; the station would likely have aired religious programming.
[53] In late June 1995, the BU purchase of WNHT was approved by the FCC;[54] channel 21, renamed WNBU, returned that fall as a full-time repeater of the Boston outlet with no studio presence.