WLBT

WLBT

Jackson, Mississippi
Branding	WLBT 3 (general) WLBT News (newscasts)
Slogan	On Your Side
Channels	Digital: 30 (UHF) Virtual: 3 (PSIP)
Subchannels	3.1 NBC 3.2 Bounce TV 3.3 This TV
Owner	Raycom Media (WLBT License Subsidiary, LLC)
First air date	December 19, 1953 (current license dates from June 14, 1971)
Call letters' meaning	W Lamar Broadcast Television (former owner)
Sister station(s)	WLOX, WDAM-TV
Former callsigns	WJBT (1953-1954)
Former channel number(s)	Analog: 3 (1953-2009) Digital: 9 (-2009) 7 (2009-2010)
Former affiliations	Secondary: ABC (1953-1970)
Transmitter power	535 kW
Height	624 m
Facility ID	68542
Transmitter coordinates	32°12′49.4″N 90°22′57.4″W
Website	WLBT.com Jackson.ThisTV.com

WLBT, virtual channel 3 (digital channel 30), is the NBC-affiliated television station in Jackson, Mississippi, and it is owned by Raycom Media. WLBT transmits its signal from an antenna, 624 meters in height, located near Raymond.

History

The station was founded on December 19, 1953 as WJBT by Lamar Life Insurance Company. It is Jackson's second-oldest television station, following WJTV (channel 12), which debuted in January 1953. Channel 3 is also Mississippi's third-oldest television station (WTOK-TV in Meridian went on the air three months earlier). A few weeks after its debut, the station was renamed WLBT - which stands for Lamar Broadcasting Television - because the original call letters sounded similar to WJTV.

It has always been an NBC affiliate, though it shared ABC with WJTV until WAPT-TV (channel 16) started broadcasting in 1970. During the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network.

Opposition to civil rights

The station attained notoriety for its aggressive support of racial segregation in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s. Lamar had close ties to the state's white political and business elite and with segregationist groups, such as the White Citizens' Council. It went as far as to coordinate opposition to civil rights with these groups. For instance, the station allowed the WCC to operate a bookstore in the lobby of its studios in downtown Jackson. and the station manager editorialized on the air against the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi in 1962, arguing that states should determine who should and should not be allowed to attend their schools.

For the most part, the station ignored the Civil Rights movement, cutting out coverage of it from the NBC News feed (largely by pretending that technical problems were the cause of interruptions). It also pre-empted NBC programs that even mildly referred to racial justice or featured African American actors prominently. At the same time, it provided a platform on its local newscasts and public affairs programs for individuals advocating resistance to efforts by the federal government to enable African Americans to vote and gain access to basic amenities such as non-segregated public schools. Allegedly, the station sold airtime to the Ku Klux Klan.

Many television stations in the South felt chagrin at network coverage of the Civil Rights movement, especially WBRC-TV in Birmingham, Alabama and WRAL-TV in Raleigh, North Carolina. Although some Southern stations severed their ties with their networks in order to prevent being forced to air coverage of the movement, Channel 3 kept its affiliation with NBC, even though that network historically had an extremely low tolerance towards local pre-emptions at the time. Indeed, many NBC stars, like Bonanza's Pernell Roberts, were speaking out on behalf of civil rights. This was largely because WLBT's only competition was CBS affiliate WJTV, a situation that lasted until 1970, when the market picked up a full-time ABC affiliate in WAPT.

Over the years, NBC, civil rights groups and the United Church of Christ (represented locally by the Woodworth Chapel at nearby Tougaloo College) sent numerous petitions to the Federal Communications Commission to complain of WLBT's flagrant bias. The FCC issued several warnings to Lamar, but these went unheeded. The issue was contested in court, with the United States courts of appeals, in an opinion written by Warren Burger, forcing the FCC to revoke the station's license in 1969. Lamar appealed, but lost in 1971. That June, control of the station was given to a bi-racial, non-profit foundation called "Communications Improvement, Inc." The group promised to make the station a beacon of tolerance. While most WLBT employees were retained, a new group of managers, including some of the first African American television executives in the South, recreated the station as a far more neutral news source.

To this day, WLBT remains one of only two television stations that has ever lost its license for violating FCC regulations on fairness. The other station, WJIM-TV (now WLNS-TV) in Lansing, Michigan, had its license reinstated on appeal.

WLBT today

WLBT was one of the first television stations in the South to devote a significant block of airtime and dedicated personnel to the production of local investigative, documentary style news. Probe was a 30 minute program that aired weekly. It garnered numerous awards, including a George Foster Peabody award in 1976 for a segment called "Power Politics in Mississippi."

On January 9, 1980, Communications Improvement sold WLBT to TV-3, Inc., a group of five companies who had competed for the license. In 1984, Frank Melton (who later became mayor of Jackson) formed Civic Communications and bought WLBT.

From 1982 to 1991, the station operated a low-powered satellite in Meridian, Mississippi, WLBM; that station is now a stand-alone station, WGBC. In 2000, Melton sold the station to Liberty Corporation, who in turn merged with Raycom Media in 2006.

Tower tragedy

On Thursday, October 23, 1997, three Canadian men from Canada's LeBlanc & Royal were preparing to replace the guy wires of WLBT's 1,999-foot (609 m) transmission tower near Raymond when the tower collapsed, killing them all. The workers were at the 1,500-foot (460 m) level and held on to the tower as it fell.

The tower's collapse knocked WLBT and the local PBS/Mississippi ETV Network affiliate WMPN off the air for several hours. WLBT was able to resume broadcasting on a 100-foot (30 m) secondary tower, which only reached about half of its normal viewing area until a new 2,000-foot (610 m) tower was completed in 1999.

The 1,999-foot (609 m) tower was actually the second WLBT transmission tower to fall at their Raymond site. WLBT's original transmission tower collapsed on March 3, 1966 when the Candlestick Park Tornado, one of only two F5 tornadoes in Mississippi's history struck the tower and transmitter building. WLBT engineers salvaged what they could of the transmitter and operated on the same stand by tower as it would operate with later after the second tower collapse. When the 1,999-foot (609 m) replacement tower was completed later in 1966, the new tower was one of the tallest structures east of the Mississippi River and was in service until the second collapse in 1997.

Digital television

The station's digital signal is multiplexed.

WLBT-DT

WLBT's digital signal on UHF 30 is multiplex:

Channel	Aspect	Display	Programming
3.1	16:9	1080i	Main WLBT programming / NBC
3.2	4:3	480i	Bounce TV
3.3			This TV

Post-analog shutdown

WLBT shut down its analog signal on June 12, 2009, as part of the DTV transition in the United States. The station moved its digital broadcasts to channel 7 using PSIP to display WLBT's virtual channel as 3.

On January 14, 2010, WLBT moved to UHF channel 30, because of viewers having difficulty receiving their signal on VHF Channel 7. Some stations solved the problem with a power increase, but WLBT could not due to potential interference to another station.

News operation

Since the 1970s, WLBT's news department has been quite aggressive. Beginning more than 15 years after the creation of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, formed by the Mississippi Legislature in 1956 in reaction to the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, WLBT investigated the Commission's activities.^{[citation needed]} For most of the last 30 years, WLBT has been the dominant news station in Jackson. WLBT's Skycopter 3 is the only news helicopter in Mississippi.

WLBT launced a weekday afternoon 4 p.m. newscast in March 2008; this was the first of its kind in the Jackson, Mississippi television market.

As of October 2010, WLBT broadcasts its local newscasts in high definition, becoming the second television station in the Jackson market to produce its newscasts in HD.

News/station presentation

Newscast titles

• NewsCenter 3 (1970s)
• WLBT News (1980s–present)

Notable alumni

Previous notable staffers at WLBT included Nanette Workman, who appeared on WLBT in the 1950s before embarking on a successful musical career in Quebec and France.

See also

• Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement

Further reading

• Kay Mills (2004). Changing channels: the civil rights case that transformed television. Univ. Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-57806-519-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=EWiF9nUqeeYC. Retrieved 30 August 2011. 
• Steven D. Classen (2004). Watching Jim Crow: the struggles over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-3341-8. http://books.google.com/books?id=weUaD1ZqIsMC. Retrieved 30 August 2011. 

External links

• WLBT.com (Official WLBT-TV Website)
• Jackson.ThisTV.com (Official This TV Jackson Website)
• On the Front Lines: Television and African-American Issues From the Museum of Television & Radio; includes info on WLBT in the 1960s
• Query the FCC's TV station database for WLBT
• BIAfn's Media Web Database -- Information on WLBT-TV