WGNT

This article is not to be confused with real life WGNT, the CW affiliate in Norfolk, VA.
 (Channel 55) is an independent station licensed to Buffalo, New York and serving the surrounding area. It airs a general entertainment schedule. It is owned by BIG Media alongside CW affiliate WTWN (Channel 29). WGNT is also the official station of the Buffalo Bills, airing many programs related to the team including preseason games. 
WGNT is best known for its years of ownership under eccentric Pentecostal Swedish-American former McDonalds franchisee Patrick Johansen (1946-1998), who would become a local celebrity due to his entertaining personality and how he expressed his hardline conservative beliefs through long, entertaining rants that would devolve into nonsense. 
== History==
Channel 55 in Buffalo previously belonged to independent station WINF, who signed on in October 1958 and shut down July 1959. Little is known about the station, although their former studios were left abandoned, and until it was demolished in 2017 it was a popular urban exploration spot.
===WFBF and Patrick Johansen ownership===
WFBF signed on at 12 PM on August 5th, 1986, as an independent station. It's callsigns stood for "Fox Buffalo", for an unrealized Fox affiliation. It was originally owned by businessman Patrick Johansen, who had immigrated from Sweden in 1958 as a young 12-year-old boy. The station was unique as it would air some Swedish programming in the overnight hours used as filler. It also aired children's cartoons, mostly from the 60s and 70s. One cartoon showed on WFBF was Moomin. 
The station went through an overhaul in 1988 as Patrick Johansen, formerly a member of the Church of Sweden, flipped to become an Evangelical Christian after attending a Jimmy Swaggart event. WFBF dropped most secular programming, changed its callsign to the present day WGNT and suddenly fired most of its staff. Johansen became Pentecostal in 1990 and the programming on the station changed as such. He would also start to produce his own local programming in the primetime hours called "WGNT Revelations". These would usually consist of Johansen sitting in a big chair by a fireplace in his own house and talking about a variety of topics, ranging from childhood stories from Sweden to his experiences with God to what he ate for lunch. Sometimes, he would eat dinner on camera, and review it. He would also have the station phone lines open to answer questions any viewer had. However, a good amount of these calls was from prank callers attempting to rile Johansen up. In one notorious instance, a prank caller asked him if he knew "these nuts". He would go on a 30-minute diatribe telling the prank caller to "shove the telephone receiver up your butt". 
WGNT joined The WB as a charter member when the network launched on January 11, 1995. However, Johansen, who owned the station, was displeased with the programming lineup, opting to preempt popular shows like Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer with his own productions. In his sermons, he denounced The WB as "satanic propaganda," causing friction with the network. Frustrated by their association with a station owned by a self-proclaimed "Fundamentalist Pentecostal Swedish Christian" who favored airing low-budget, self-produced shows over network programming, The WB sought a new affiliate for years. They eventually partnered with the then-developing WTWN, ending their affiliation with WGNT on New Year's Eve 1999. Johansen, however, did not witness this change, as he died from a heart attack at age 52 on December 17, after refusing medical treatment. During his ownership of WGNT, Johansen garnered a modest following of intrigued viewers, leading to the posthumous production of books and a documentary by the station, celebrating his life as "an entertainer." 
On New Year's Day 1999, WGNT became an affiliate of the American Independent Network, or AIN. During this time, they were owned by Johansen's high school friend David Silver. He would sell the station to TBN later that year, who then sold it again a few months later to Grand Island Broadcasting Inc. (GIB).
GIB would affiliate WGNT with Urban America Television (UATV) in 2001, which lasted two years until it was dropped for reruns of Chinese programs at night, with the remaining schedule being filled with infomercials. After this, the station would rebroadcast MHz Worldview for some time before going dark on June 12th, 2009. 
Channel 55 would re-emerge as an affiliate of Jewlery Television the next year. The station had a hard time finding a permanent affiliation, switching networks 5 times over the next 6 years before going dark in 2016.
GIB filed for bankruptcy in 2016 and sold WGNT to Holo Corp. (now BIG Media) in 2017, making it a sister station to WTWN. The station would go back on the air on September 9th, as an Independent station. 
On April 4, 2017, the FCC announced that WGNT was a winner in the 2016-17 spectrum reallocation auction and in return received $100 million for the frequency. WGNT chose not to resume broadcasting its own signal over their own channel 40, instead entering a channel-sharing agreement with its sister station WTWN, broadcasting on their channel 29. 
== Programming ==
Syndicated programming on WGNT include House M.D., American Dad, Seinfeld, Suits, The Steve Harvey Show, Paternity Court, Divorce Court, and Judge Mathis among others. WGNT airs a movie every weekend at 1 pm entitled "55Buffalo Theater"
WGNT is the official station of the Buffalo Bills, airing preseason games, game highlights, and a post-game show entitled Bills Today. Two former Bills legends, defensive end Chris Kelsay and Pro Bowl wide receiver Eric Moulds, run a bi-weekly show on channel 55 entitled Inside the Bills, in which they and a rotating cast of local personalities and WGNT news staff discuss topics related to the team.
=== News Operation ===
WGNT presently broadcasts 45 hours of locally produced newscasts each week. They are the only station in Buffalo to have a primetime newscast at 8 and 9 PM, which is simulcast on WTWN at 10 and 11 pm. The news operation was launched in 2017 with 35 hours of news a week. Over time, two extra hours a weekday were added for WGNT's specialty Canada Tonight, which focuses on the opposite side of the US-Canadian border. 
==Technical Information==
===Subchannels===
{| class="article-table"
|+Subchannels of WTWN and WGNT
!License
!Channel
!Video
! Aspect
! Short Name
!Programming
|-
| rowspan="3" |WTWN
!29.1
|720p
| rowspan="6" |16:9
|WTWN
|The CW
|-
!29.2
| rowspan="2" |480i
|WTWNMALL
|Infomercials
|-
!29.3
|DABL
|Dabl
|-
| rowspan="3" |WGNT
!55.1
|1080i
|WGNT
|Main WGNT programming
|-
!55.2
| rowspan="2" |480i
|NHK WORLD
|NHK World Japan
|-
!55.3
|BEIN
|beIN Sports Xtra
|-
===Analog Sign-off===
WGNT stopped transmitting on its analog signal, over UHF channel 61, on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 40. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former analog channel 55. 
WGNT went dark on both its analog and digital signal on June 12th, 2009, due to financial reasons. It signed back on its digital signal sometime in May 2010. 
=== Cable Coverage in Canada ===
WGNT is carried on multiple cable systems in Southern Ontario.
Category:BIG Media
]]
Category:Independent television stations
]]
Category:Buffalo, New York
Category:New York
Category:Ontario
Category:Canada
Category:Television channels and stations established in 1986
]]
Category:Former WB affiliates
Category:Channel 55