 | |
| |
|---|---|
| City | Miami, Florida |
| Channels | |
| Branding | WSVN 7; 7 News |
| Programming | |
| Affiliations |
|
| Ownership | |
| Owner | Sunbeam Television Corporation |
| History | |
First air date | July 29, 1956[a] |
Former call signs | WCKT (1956–1983) |
Former channel number(s) |
|
| NBC (1956–1989) | |
Call sign meaning | Channel "Seven"[1] |
| Technical information[2] | |
Licensing authority | FCC |
| Facility ID | 63840 |
| ERP | 158 kW |
| HAAT | 307.1 m (1,008 ft) |
| Transmitter coordinates | 25°58′1″N 80°12′42″W / 25.96694°N 80.21167°W |
| Links | |
Public license information | |
| Website | wsvn |
WSVN (channel 7) is a television station in Miami, Florida, United States, affiliated with the Fox network. Serving as the flagship station of locally based Sunbeam Television, it has studios on the 79th Street Causeway in North Bay Village and a transmitter in Miami Gardens, Florida.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regards WSVN as having signed on for the first time on December 19, 1962 under the call sign WCKT, under Sunbeam ownership. However, the station was the result of a long and contentious legal battle between Sunbeam and three other applicants for the channel 7 allocation in Miami. Biscayne Television Corporation, a three-way partnership including the publishers of the Miami News and Miami Herald signed on a previous WCKT on July 29, 1956, only to be stripped of its license due to ethics violations within the FCC and unethical behavior by its principals during the application process. Sunbeam purchased WCKT's assets and re-launched the station under a new license with uninterrupted service, while claiming the old WCKT's history as its own. The market's NBC affiliate since its inception, WCKT was renamed WSVN in 1983 and became an independent on January 1, 1989, after NBC's purchase of CBS affiliate WTVJ and CBS's purchase of Fox affiliate WCIX-TV initiated a major affiliation switch. It became a major-network affiliate once again in the 1990s when Fox definitively established itself as the nation's fourth network, and is one of the largest Fox affiliates not owned by the network.
With minimal advance preparation after the loss of the NBC affiliation, WSVN relaunched their news department with an emphasis on tabloid journalism under Joel Cheatwood's direction, an unconventional decision initially pilloried by the local media but since been emulated and copied throughout the industry. WSVN's newscasts have attracted national and international attention for aggressive and controversial content and have been credited as an inspiration for the launch of Fox News. Onetime Fox executive Lucie Salhany famously called WSVN "the future of television". Involved with Sunbeam from the company's beginnings until his July 26, 2020, death, chairman Edmund Ansin repeatedly refused offers to sell either WSVN or his Boston stations.
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