WRDC (channel 28) is a television station licensed to Durham, North Carolina, United States, serving the Research Triangle area as an affiliate of MyNetworkTV.
The two stations share studios in the Highwoods Office Park, just outside downtown Raleigh; WRDC's transmitter is located in Auburn, North Carolina.
The station was co-owned with WNAO radio (850 AM and 96.1 FM)), which Sir Walter had bought from The News & Observer newspaper after obtaining the television construction permit.
The station signed off December 31, 1957, and its owner entered into a joint venture with another dark UHF outlet that was successful in obtaining channel 8 in High Point.
On November 18 of that year, Triangle Telecasters, Inc., a group led by law professor Robinson O. Everett, applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a construction permit to build a new channel 28 station in Durham.
[2] The Everett group competed with a very similarly named company, Durham–Raleigh Telecasters (owned by the same interests that were building WCTU-TV in Charlotte), which also applied for the channel.
In 1966, a columnist for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, opined that WTVD let NBC programs play a "poor second fiddle" to its primary affiliation with CBS.
[10] By November 1969, this situation prompted Triangle Telecasters to petition the FCC for recourse against WTVD taking shows back from them that they had previously rejected.
[11][12] In 1971, the FCC ruled in favor of Triangle Telecasters (in part due to the commission's then-policy of protecting the development of UHF stations), setting a precedent for similar cases elsewhere.
[15] NBC's affiliation with WRDU meant that Triangle television viewers, for the first time, finally saw the full schedules of all three networks on separate stations.
One time WRDU chose not to preempt a network program, it still faced criticism for different reasons; local religious leaders objected to the airing of Franco Zeffirelli's mini-series Jesus of Nazareth, arguing it would offend their beliefs.
[19] This was even though WRDU not only held the local rights to The PTL Club, but frequently preempted NBC programming in order to air Billy Graham crusades.
[23] After two years of negotiations,[24] the Durham Life Insurance Company—which owned WPTF, the Triangle's oldest radio station, and WQDR-FM—bought WRDU-TV from the Everetts in May 1977 and changed its call sign to WPTF-TV on August 14, 1978.
It also added a weekday children's show entitled Barney's Army, which was hosted by the namesake Aniforms puppet and ran from 1979 to 1983, long after the genre had disappeared from most other American stations.
[36] Amid indications that Durham Life was as willing to preempt NBC programming as the Everetts had been despite a more powerful signal, Channel 28 still faced the audience-loyalty problems it had under Triangle Telecasters.
Even the network's few hits at the time, such as Diff'rent Strokes and The Rockford Files, performed poorly for the station,[37] a problem compounded when NBC programming head Fred Silverman's theory of a "living schedule" did not generate the same success as it did at ABC.
By the mid-to-late 1980s, even with NBC's powerful prime time lineup leading the network to first place only two years after finishing last, WPTF-TV remained stubbornly last in the Triangle television ratings.
According to Electronic Media magazine, the network had begun "continuing courtship" of WRAL-TV, a station that rejected the network's overtures out of a desire to avoid a second affiliation switch in three years, going as far as to sweetening the deal by offering the NBC affiliation in Charlotte to Capitol's newly-built WJZY with WRAL, which would in turn resolve NBC's continued issues with WPCQ-TV (now WCNC-TV) in that market.
Full-length evening newscasts returned in 1986,[51] and a year later the company moved WPTF-AM-TV and WQDR to new quarters in the Highwoods office complex costing $1 million.
The 6 p.m. edition of Newsbeat 28 not only saw no improvement on the same low ratings it garnered in the previous decade, but it trailed reruns on WLFL of the former NBC sitcom Gimme a Break!, with WTVD and WRAL maintaining their leads.
[52] The next year, WPTF-TV appeared on the cable system in Fayetteville for the first time, a move cited as key in increasing station circulation and giving it more parity with WRAL and WTVD.
[59] The first signs of trouble came earlier that year when a less severe ice storm still proved strong enough to knock the station off the air for 10 hours so maintenance workers could replace parts of a damaged transmission line.
[62] That same tower was dismantled several years later and then donated to classical radio station WCPE-FM, who reassembled it at a spot near its studios in Wake Forest in 1993.
[63] In 1991, WPTF-TV joined WRAL-TV on a newly built 1,989-foot (606 m) broadcast tower at the latter's previous site, which also housed the signals for WRAL-FM, WQDR-FM, and several local low-power television stations.
[64] In September 1990, channel 28 tried moving the 6 p.m. newscast to 7 p.m., displacing Hard Copy (a rare ratings success for the station) and airing after NBC Nightly News instead of before it, with Cheers reruns taking its old time slot.
[66] On top of that, the whole of Durham Life Broadcasting was suffering bad publicity due to Laurel Smith, general manager of WQDR-FM, facing accusations of sexual harassment by male employees while she was also involved in a child custody case with her ex-husband; a memo by company president Felton P. Coley told employees of the company's radio and TV stations, WPTF-TV included, not to talk about it publicly, a point made moot when she resigned.
Bev W. Landstreet III, an investor from Nashville, Tennessee, and owner of Financial Securities Fund L.P., had been attempting to buy Durham Corporation and its $8.2 billion portfolio of life insurance policies since 1983.
He then formed FSF TV, Inc. to acquire channel 28, with Paul Brissette, a Boca Raton, Florida-based investor and president of Adams Television, as a minority partner.
[74] The call sign was then changed to WRDC on October 25, 1991, after the three major cities in the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill); the station branded as "TRI-28" (later rendered as "TRY-28").
One disgruntled ex-employee bitterly suggested that the station's new call sign stood for "We Really Don't Care",[76] while another compared the situation to the last episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show in which the new owners of the fictional WJM fired all the employees of the nightly newscast except Ted Baxter.