page_title: WFOX-TV
section_title: Clear Channel ownership
hierarchical_section_title: WFOX-TV / History / Clear Channel ownership
caption_attribution_description: English: Former station logo for WAWS (now WFOX-TV)
context_page_description: WFOX-TV, virtual channel 30, is a Fox-affiliated television station licensed to Jacksonville, Florida, United States. The station is owned by Atlanta-based Cox Media Group, which also operates CBS affiliate WJAX-TV under joint sales and shared services agreements with owner Hoffman Communications. The two stations share studios on Central Parkway and transmitter facilities on Hogan Road, both in Jacksonville's Southside section.
  On cable, WFOX-TV is available on channel 10 on Comcast Xfinity and channel 13 in most outlying areas of the market.
context_section_description: In 1989, Malrite sold the station to the San Antonio-based Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia), which had earlier purchased the first independent station in the nearby Pensacola/Mobile, Alabama market, WPMI-TV (now an NBC affiliate) and was the first television station that Clear Channel ever owned. As was the trend for many Fox affiliates throughout the mid to late 1990s, WAWS began shifting its programming toward talk and reality shows and decreased its reliance on classic sitcoms. In 1995, Clear Channel began managing channel 47—later to become WNFT—under a local marketing agreement; the two stations pooled programming and resources, while running the strongest syndicated programs on WAWS. Clear Channel purchased channel 47, which by that point had become UPN affiliate WTEV-TV, outright in 2000, creating the second television duopoly in the Jacksonville market.
  After WTEV took the CBS affiliation from longtime affiliate WJXT (channel 4), which dropped the network after it demanded that Post-Newsweek Stations reverse compensate CBS to carry its programming and run the entire network schedule in pattern—only allowing pre-emptions for extended local breaking news and severe weather coverage, WAWS took over the local rights to the UPN affiliation on July 15, 2002, airing the network's evening programming on a secondary basis each weeknight from 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. following the station's prime time newscast, as well as its children's program block Disney's One Too, which it aired on Sunday through Friday mornings in addition to its existing carriage of Fox's competing children's block, FoxBox (later known as 4Kids TV), on Saturdays. It also acquired several syndicated sitcoms that WTEV no longer had room to carry on its schedule. The shift made Jacksonville one of the only television markets in the United States where all six major broadcast networks at the time (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, UPN and The WB) collectively held affiliations with only five stations in a six-station market (which remains the case with UPN and The WB's successors The CW and MyNetworkTV in the present day) and the only market in which each of the Big Four network affiliates are controlled by two companies (at the time, the Gannett Company owned NBC affiliate WTLV (channel 12) and ABC affiliate WJXX (channel 25), both of which are now owned by its broadcasting and digital media spin-off Tegna Inc.).
  On January 24, 2006, the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner and CBS Corporation announced that the two companies would respectively shut down UPN and The WB, and enter into a joint venture to form a new "fifth" broadcast television network, The CW, that would initially feature a mix of higher-rated programming from both of its forerunner networks (and assumed the scheduling model and most programming operations of The WB) as well as new content developed specifically for The CW. On February 22, 2006, News Corporation announced the launch of MyNetworkTV, a new "sixth" broadcast network operated by Fox Television Stations and its syndication division Twentieth Television that was created to compete against The CW, as well as to give UPN- and WB-affiliated stations that were not named as charter CW affiliates another option besides converting into independent stations.
  On March 28 of that year, then-owner Media General announced that WB affiliate WJWB (channel 17) would become the market's charter affiliate of The CW (it would later change its call letters to WCWJ). On July 12, Clear Channel confirmed that WAWS would become the Jacksonville area affiliate of MyNetworkTV, which it would carry on a new second digital subchannel. However, until the new second digital subchannel launched, WAWS carried MyNetworkTV programming on its main channel weeknights from 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. in the interim. MyNetworkTV programming moved to WAWS-DT2 once the subchannel signed on in January 2007, airing in the recommended 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. time slot, with programming from the Variety Television Network airing at all other times.
caption: Former logo used from 2001 to April 12, 2009.
exif: {}