WUSA9

WUSA (channel 9) is a television station in Washington, D.C., affiliated with CBS. It is the flagship property of Tegna Inc. (based in the nearby Virginia suburb of McLean). WUSA's studios and transmitter are located at Broadcast House on Wisconsin Avenue in the Tenleytown neighborhood on the northwestern side of Washington. WUSA is the third-largest CBS affiliate by market size (sister station KHOU in Houston being the second-largest and Gray Television's WANF in Atlanta being the largest) that is not owned and operated by the network.

The station's signal is relayed on a low-power digital translator station, W27EI-D, in Moorefield, West Virginia (which is owned by Valley TV Cooperative, Inc.). It also maintains a channel-sharing agreement with Silver Spring, Maryland-licensed WJAL (channel 68, owned by Entravision Communications).

History

Early years (1949–1978)

The station first went on the air on January 11, 1949, as WOIC, and began full-time operations on January 16. The fourth-oldest station in the nation's capital, channel 9 was originally owned by the Bamberger Broadcasting Service, a subsidiary of R. H. Macy and Company. Bamberger also owned WOR-AM- FM in New York City, and was working to put WOR-TV (channel 9, now WWOR-TV in Secaucus, New Jersey) on the air at the same time. Nine days later, WOIC broadcast the first televised American presidential inaugural address, given by President Harry S. Truman. WOIC picked up the CBS affiliation upon signing on, replacing WMAL-TV (channel 7, now WJLA-TV) as the network's Washington outlet. WOIC/WTOP/WUSA has been a CBS affiliate since its inception, and is currently the network's longest-tenured affiliate. However, WOR was a shareholder in the Mutual Radio Network, which had plans to enter television with WOIC and WOR-TV as the flagship stations of its network; these plans never came to fruition. At the start of 1950, Bamberger Broadcasting changed its name to General Teleradio.

In June 1950, a joint venture of CBS and ''The Washington Post'' purchased WOIC from Bamberger/Macy's for $1.4 million. The new owners, WTOP Incorporated (the ''Post'' owned 55%, with CBS holding the remaining 45% stake), changed the station's call sign to WTOP-TV, after its new sister station WTOP radio (then at 1500 AM). Since WTOP took the callsign from the radio partners at the time, the callsign was a coincidence under ownership of the publisher, since they never stood for "Washington Post"; they instead stood for the fact that what was then known as WTOP was "at the top of he city'sradio dial" (WTOP has been known as WFED since 2006, and is now owned by Hubbard Broadcasting, not by the ''Post''). In July 1950, WTOP-TV became the first television station in Washington authorized to broadcast color television in the 405-line field sequential color standard, which was incompatible with the black-and-white 525-line NTSC standard. Color broadcasts continued for nearly 30 months, when regulatory and commercial pressures forced the FCC to rescind its original color standard and begin the process of adopting the 525-line NTSC-3 standard, developed by RCA to be backwards compatible with the existing black-and-white televisions.

In 1954, the WTOP stations moved into a new facility, known as "Broadcast House", at 40th and Brandywine Streets NW in Washington. The building was the first in the country designed as a unified radio and television facility. Its name was in honor of Broadcasting House, home of the BBC
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