In case you missed the breaking industry news this afternoon, CBS has announced that come this August, it will be moving its affiliation from Gray’s WANF-TV to CBS-Owned WUPA. If you were counting old school UHF channel numbers, that is a drop from Channel 46 down to Channel 69, though WUPA was repacked to actually transmit on Channel 36 years ago when all those high numbered UHF channels became spectrum for cellular phone service.

If this sounds familar to long-time television followers, it has happened before. CBS moved from it’s long time home in Detroit of WJBK-TV, when New World Communications stunned the television industry in 1995 by moving all of its major market stations from CBS affiliations over to the upstart FOX network. In Detroit, CBS landed on Channel 62, formerly known as WGPR before adopting the legendary WWJ call letters (Those call letters had started on Channel 4 there and lasted until 1978, before that station became WDIV.) WWJ-TV is now better known as “CBS News Detroit” as it appears WUPA will adopt the owned-station branding of “CBS News Atlanta.” That also means that like in Detroit, CBS has to create a local news operation from scratch.

The New World stations exodus from CBS in ‘95 also forced the network to then seek a new home in Atlanta. That was because New World owned WAGA-TV there, and CBS had been on Channel 5 in Atlanta since it signed on the air in 1949. For those of us who grew up in the southeastern United States, CBS was synonymous with the Channel 5 position as the network was carried on that channel position in Atlanta, Nashville (on WLAC-TV, renamed WTVF), Raleigh NC (on WRAL-TV from 1985 to 2016), Mobile, AL (WKRG), and Charleston SC (WCSC-TV.) Much like CBS was on Channel 2 in the largest three markets (NYC, LA and Chicago), it was on the 5-spot on the dial across a good swath of the Southeast.

And then it wasn’t. In Atlanta, the move from WAGA-TV, a strong station in the market, then owned by Storer and competing hard with Cox’s WSB-TV for news ratings leadership. CBS was left scrambling for a new address on the TV dial. It would land on UHF Channel 46, then owned by Tribune Broadcasting and known as WGNX. It was the only network-affilated station that Tribune operated (the newspaper giant owned major market independent stations such as WPIX in New York, KTLA in Los Angeles and WGN-TV in Chicago, the company’s homebase where it owned the Chicago Tribune newspaper.) Tribune didn’t put a ton of money or effort into the station, especially in terms of local news.

The station would be rebranded in 2000, when Tribune unloaded the station to Meredith. WGNX became WGCL-TV, and the CBS station’s news product became known as “Clear News.” In an attempt to redefine what local news might be if it was focused on being “clear” what quickly became clear was that viewers weren’t moving from WSB-TV or WAGA to see this new-fangled version of local news.

In 2021, Meredith sold its TV stations to Atlanta-based Gray Media, which gave the growing operator of stations a network affiliate in it’s hometown. Gray has since pumped a lot of money and effort into the station, which it renamed “Atlanta News First” with the call letters WANF-TV in 2022. The station’s newscasts and ratings have gotten stronger, but as Gray has done in all of its markets, it moved to eliminate any station branding that included the CBS “Eye” logomark. As part of today’s announcements, Gray noted that it had signed a new corporate affiliation agreement that will keep the CBS network on its 52 other CBS stations across the country–and it will move WANF-TV to being a local-news centric independent station, joining the ranks of former network affiliates turned local news focused stations such as WHDH in Boston, WJXT in Jacksonville and soon WPLG in Miami. (We aren’t mentioning WSVN because of its current FOX affiliation and soon adding the new “ABC Miami” operation on its 7-dot-2 subchannel.)

All of today’s news does lead us to wondering whether the highly anticipated relaxing of ownership rules from the Federal Communications Commission, which is expected to jumpstart television station buying and selling, now might include more interest from the network-owned station groups to expand, along with the usual suspects of major group owners Nexstar, Sinclair, Gray, etc. Or was this just a one-off for CBS to move the network in a major market to a station it already owned. Is it worth noting that CBS also owns stations in Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL (WTOG) and Seattle, WA (KSTW) that don’t currently have the CBS network on their air?

We’re checking to see what other squares are open on our bingo card for the rest of 2025.