WDIV-TV (channel 4), branded Local 4, is a television station in Detroit, Michigan, United States, affiliated with NBC. It serves as the flagship broadcast property of the Graham Media Group subsidiary of Graham Holdings Company. WDIV-TV maintains studio facilities on West Lafayette Boulevard in Detroit, making it the only major television station in the market with offices and studios within the Detroit city limits. Detroit's other television stations are all based in the suburb of Southfield; WDIV's transmitter is, however, located on Greenfield Road in Southfield.
History Early history The station first signed on the air as WWDT on October 23, 1946, for one day of demonstrative programming;WDIV Makes Television History! Travel Back In Time With Local 4 Firsts! (2004). Clickondetroit.com regular programming commenced on March 4, 1947. It was the first television station in Michigan and the tenth station to sign on in the United States overall. The station was originally owned by the Evening News Association, parent company of The Detroit News, along with WWJ radio (AM 950 and FM 97.1, later WXYT-FM). On May 15, 1947, the television station changed its call letters to WWJ-TV to match its radio sisters. Channel 4 has always been an NBC affiliate owing to WWJ radio's longtime affiliation with the NBC Radio Network, but also aired some programs from the DuMont Television Network prior to WJBK-TV (channel 2)'s sign-on in October 1948.
Channel 4 had a number of broadcasting firsts in Michigan including the first telecast of Detroit Tigers, Red Wings and Lions games as well as the state's first televised newscasts. The station's studios were originally located at 600 West Lafayette, across the street from the Detroit News building in downtown Detroit (and next door to its modern studio location). In 1954, the station moved its transmitter from the Penobscot Building in Downtown Detroit to the intersection of Greenfield and Lincoln roads in Southfield. Network programming was broadcast in color starting in 1954. The station began broadcasting its newscasts and other locally produced programs in color in 1960, when it purchased new studio camera equipment.
Over the years, the Evening News Association acquired several other broadcasting outlets, such as KTVY in Oklahoma City, KOLD-TV in Tucson, Arizona, and WALA-TV in Mobile, Alabama. Eventually, the Evening News Association created Universal Communications Corporation as a holding company for its broadcasting interests, with WWJ-AM-FM-TV as the flagship stations.
Trade to The Washington Post Company In 1969, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began to impose restrictions on the common ownership of print and broadcast media in the same market. The combination of the Detroit News and WWJ-AM-FM-TV was given grandfathered protection from the new regulations, but by the mid-to-late 1970s, the Evening News Association was under pressure to break up its Detroit cluster voluntarily. Fearing that an FCC-forced divestiture was imminent, the Evening News Association agreed to trade WWJ-TV to the Washington Post Company in return for that company's flagship station, WTOP-TV. On July 22, 1978, due to an FCC regulation in place at the time that forbade TV and radio stations in the same market but with different ownership groups from sharing the same call signs, channel 4 changed its call letters to WDIV-TV, for "Detroit's IV" (representing the Roman numeral for 4). Additionally, in a series of promotional announcements with news anchor Dwayne X. Riley, the new call letters were said to represent the phrase, "Where Detroit Is Vital". The WWJ-TV call sign was later adopted for use by the former WGPR-TV (channel 62) after its 1995 purchase by CBS, which had acquired WWJ radio in 1989 (CBS sold off its radio unit in 2017); this WWJ-TV is a separate entity not related to WDIV.
Ultimately, the FCC never imposed any limitations on ownership of television stations and newspapers in the same market and the exchange of stations between the Evening News Association (eventually subsumed by the Gannett Company in 1985 and later known as Tegna following the split of the Gannett Company in 2015) and The Washington Post Company (which was renamed Graham Holdings Company following the sale of The Washington Post in 2013) became somewhat unusual in television broadcasting.
In 1982, WDIV moved out of its facility (which had been built in 1936 for WWJ radio and expanded in 1948, and is named the Walker-Roehrig Building) adjacent to the headquarters of the Detroit News and moved one block to its modern broadcast facility at West Lafayette Boulevard. The building has also housed the headquarters of Graham Media Group since 1997; the "Local" branding used by most of the group's stations began at WDIV alongside its acquiring of flagship status in 2000. The station later became available outside the Detroit market when it was selected for inclusion on many Canadian cable providers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. WDIV's signal has been uplinked on C-band satellite since at least 1988. In 2004, the station bolstered local programming by securing broadcast rights to several Detroit Pistons basketball games (Fox Sports Detroit—now called FanDuel Sports Network Detroit—became the Pistons' sole broadcaster in 2008) as well as returning as the host television station for the North American International Auto Show. The station airs the auto show's charity preview, America's Thanksgiving Parade (both in high definition), the Ford Fireworks on the Detroit International Riverfront, and the charity event "The Hob-Nobble Gobble" which is held the Friday before the week of Thanksgiving.
On April 15, 2005, former WDIV employee John Owens was shot in the station's lobby by Epifanio Rivas Jr., a man with a history of harassing WDIV employees. Rivas was charged with attempted murder, while Owens remained in the hospital in critical but stable condition. On November 21, 2006, Wayne County Circuit Court Judge James Callahan sentenced Rivas to 16 to 32 years in prison for the shooting; he was also sentenced to two years for a felony firearm conviction. In December 2008, WDIV began streaming its newscasts online as part of a redesign of the station's website. On June 21, 2010, The 52nd Annual Target Fireworks were produced and aired entirely in high definition. On August 6, 2010, WDIV-TV and WXYZ-TV (channel 7) became the first stations in Detroit to offer Mobile DTV feeds.
On the evening of April 14, 2011, a suitcase containing a suspected improvised explosive device was left in the WDIV studio lobby after the person who planted the device was denied entry by the station's security guard, prompting the Detroit Police Bomb Squad to evacuate the studio as well as the Doubletree Hotel across the street. That night's 11 p.m. newscast was broadcast from the corner of Lafayette and Howard streets; the evacuation resulted in master control operations being inaccessible, preventing the broadcast or editing of news stories, and the broadcast of commercials. The station's virtual channel temporarily reverted to 45.1 (the station's physical digital channel), with HD content downconverted to 720p. The device was detonated minutes later, with police giving the all-clear at 11:15 p.m. for the news crew to re-enter the studio.
Upon re-entering the studio, anchor Devin Scillian explained that WDIV has a policy of not immediately reporting bomb threats unless there is a true threat of an explosion or loss of life. However, because staff was barred access into the studio for the 11 p.m. newscast, an explanation as to why they were on the street, broadcasting from the station's mobile truck instead of the studio, needed to be given. The news was first reported by the Twitter and Facebook accounts of WDIV's news staff; WJBK, WXYZ-TV and WMYD (channel 20) reported on the situation while during the lockout, before the WDIV mobile truck could return to the studios from its assignments. A sweater and some empty soda cans were later found in the briefcase which was left by a homeless man that had followed a WDIV employee in for warmth and coffee; the man was brought to Detroit Receiving Hospital for observation the next day. The Detroit Police Department and Post-Newsweek's management said that no charges would be filed, calling it "just a big misunderstanding".
Programming WDIV-TV is one of the few television stations in the United States to have aired Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! from the beginning of their respective syndication runs in 1983 and 1984. Because of this, the programs did not air on CBC owned-and-operated station CBET-DT in Windsor during the years the Canadian network carried the game shows; they were removed from the CBC schedule in 2012.
Programming preemptions In the 1970s and 1980s, WDIV preempted one to two hours of NBC's daytime programming every day. The station also refused to air Late Night with David Letterman and its successor, Late Night with Conan O'Brien at 12:35 a.m. for many years, and initially did not clear the Letterman-era program at all. Instead, until 1999, the station opted to rebroadcast The Jenny Jones Show in that timeslot, along with off-network syndicated programs such as Barney Miller.
During the 1978–79 season, it aired This Morning, a locally based talk show hosted by Cathie Mann, in place of the game shows Card Sharks and All Star Secrets, while for many years, NBC's 12:30 p.m. programming was preempted in favor of a newscast. During the 1983–84 season, the newscast was expanded to an hour, preempting NBC's noon programming (most notably Super Password). That season, WDIV also preempted the 1983 revival of Dream House in favor of the much more popular syndicated game show Tic-Tac-Dough.
From its debut until September 9, 2022, WDIV has also delayed the fourth hour of Today (which nationally airs at 10 am), airing it generally at 11 am, save for a period from 2013 to 2015 when it aired at 2 p.m. after the launch their own local talk show Live in the D. In its place, WDIV has aired The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The Ricki Lake Show and Rachael Ray at 10 am, with Live in the D airing in that timeslot.
The station did not carry NBC's late night rerun of the fourth hour of Today until 2019, preferring to carry an encore of the 11 p.m. newscast, paid programming, and a second run of Inside Edition. The Today encore was dropped sometime during the COVID-19 pandemic, returning to the previous schedule. Along with all other Post-Newsweek stations, WDIV refused to air any of NBC's televised poker programming, including Poker After Dark, the National Heads-Up Poker Championship and Face the Ace.
From 1999 to 2002, WDIV did not clear the soap opera Passions at 2 p.m. Instead, it aired on WADL (channel 38) at noon on a day-behind basis, while WDIV aired daytime talk shows at 2 p.m.; Houston sister station KPRC-TV did this as well until August 30, 2004, when it became the last NBC station to carry Passions at 2 p.m. These two stations were the only NBC affiliate holdouts to the show; the issue was rendered moot when NBC canceled the soap opera in 2007. WDIV, KPRC-TV and Bonneville International–owned NBC affiliate KSL-TV in Salt Lake City also never carried Sunset Beach; the soap was seen, respectively, on WKBD, KTXH and KOOG (at the time, the former two were UPN affiliates and the latter was a WB affiliate).
NBC programming is preempted for special events, including the annual Ford Fireworks and America's Thanksgiving Parade (whose coverage preempts the live Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade broadcast on the station, the latter's afternoon rebroadcast is additionally preempted with Graham-produced filler programs, syndicated shows, and infomercials). On most national holidays, scheduled programming is typically preempted, aside from sports and select NBC prime time programming such as movies or specials.
Local programs and personalities