page_title: WSFX-TV
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: WSFX-TV / History
caption_attribution_description: English: WSFX-TV is the Fox-affiliated television station for North Carolina's Cape Fear region that is licensed to Wilmington.
context_page_description: WSFX-TV, virtual channel 26, is a Fox-affiliated television station licensed to Wilmington, North Carolina, United States and serving the Cape Fear region. The station is owned by American Spirit Media; Gray Television, which owns NBC affiliate WECT, operates WSFX-TV under a shared services agreement. The two outlets share studios on Shipyard Boulevard in Wilmington; WSFX-TV's transmitter is located near Winnabow, North Carolina. On cable, the station is available on Charter Spectrum channel 9 in both standard and high definition.
context_section_description: The station signed on September 24, 1984, as WJKA, a CBS affiliate. It aired an analog signal on UHF channel 26 leasing space on the tower of ABC affiliate WWAY in unincorporated Brunswick County. The station was originally owned by Wilmington Telecasters, a company owned by Robinson and Katherine Everett of Durham. The station originally operated from studios located at 1926 Oleander Drive/US 76 in Wilmington.
  Prior to WJKA's start-up, Wilmington was one of the few markets in the United States without its own CBS affiliate and one of the few in the Eastern Time Zone without full network service. Future sister station WECT had a secondary CBS affiliation until cable arrived in the area in the 1970s while Florence, South Carolina's WBTW covered most of the market with a Grade B signal. From the 1970s until WJKA's sign-on, most local cable systems in the market carried Greenville affiliate WNCT-TV or WBTW while Raleigh affiliate WTVD (now an ABC owned-and-operated station) was carried by some cable providers.
  Channel 26's tenure as a CBS affiliate was far from successful. The station operated on a shoestring budget. It mostly served as a "pass-through" for automated CBS programming, and produced almost no local content. The fact that WNCT and WBTW provided at least Grade B coverage to some parts of the market did not help matters either. Further complicating matters, Raleigh's WRAL-TV (now an NBC affiliate), which had been available on cable in Wilmington for decades, switched from ABC to CBS a year after WJKA's sign-on. This move forced the fledgling station to compete against three of the strongest CBS affiliates in the Southeastern United States. Under those circumstances, WJKA barely registered as a blip in the local Nielsen ratings against rivals WECT and WWAY.
  In 1994, WJKA along with sister station KECY-TV in El Centro, California–Yuma, Arizona switched their affiliations to Fox; while this occurred shortly after CBS lost broadcasting rights of the NFL's National Football Conference to Fox and before the inaugural season of the Carolina Panthers the following year, the change followed several disputes between Robinson O. Everett and CBS (including one over a planned upgrade of KECY's translator in Palm Springs to a full-power station). On September 18, channel 26 changed its call letters to the current WSFX-TV.
  Before the switch, Wilmington was the only portion of North Carolina (and one of the few in the Eastern Time Zone) without an over-the-air Fox affiliate of its own. Until this point in time, the area's cable systems piped in the national Foxnet service or WLFL in Raleigh. As a result of WSFX's affiliation switch, Wilmington did not have an over-the-air CBS affiliate until March 2000 when low-powered UPN affiliate WILM-LP switched its primary affiliation to CBS. During that time, cable systems supplemented the area with either WRAL, WNCT, or WBTW.
  On paper, the loss of CBS should have put channel 26 in serious jeopardy. Fox had just begun airing a full week's worth of programming just a season earlier, but then as now, does not produce any daytime programming. WSFX thus now faced having to buy an additional 10 hours of programming per day. However, the move to Fox rejuvenated the station. Its main competition was now WLFL. Within a few years, it was one of the strongest small-market Fox affiliates in the country. Until 1996, WSFX also doubled as the Fox affiliate for the Florence–Myrtle Beach, South Carolina market which did not have its own affiliate (some cable systems in the Myrtle Beach area imported WACH from Columbia, South Carolina prior to WSFX's switch to Fox). In fact, the current call letters stand for SuperFoX, referring to its on-air name at the time and relatively wide coverage area. Since the station's over-the-air signal does not reach Florence, the Pee Dee area had to rely on cable for Fox programming until WGSE-TV (now WFXB) in Myrtle Beach took the affiliation.
  In 2003, Everett sold the station to Southeastern Media Holdings. Raycom Media then took over WSFX's operations through a shared ser
caption: Fox Wilmington logo on side of studio building
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