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WMSN-TV (channel 47) is a television station in Madison, Wisconsin, United States, affiliated with the Fox network. Owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, the station has studios on Big Sky Drive on the west side of Madison, and its transmitter is located on South Pleasant View Road in the Junction Ridge neighborhood also on Madison's west side.
The station was originally owned by Channel 47 LP, a group of investors led by Ronald J. Koeppler. On April 1, 1996, Channel 47 LP filed to sell WMSN-TV to Sullivan Broadcasting, owners of the existing Act III Broadcasting stations, for $26.5 million. Sullivan would later sell all of the stations to Sinclair Broadcast Group in a group deal two years later.
After a few months as an independent, the station joined Fox as a charter affiliate on October 9, 1986. Since 1994, as a result of Fox NFL's NFC football package, WMSN has been Madison's primary home for the Green Bay Packers; these broadcasts are routinely the highest-rated programs in the market during football season.
On January 1, 2012, WMSN's news share agreement with WKOW expired after nearly 13 years (WMSN general manager Kerry Johnson termed the split as a "business decision"). On that same date, WMSN began a new news outsourcing agreement with WISC-TV, the Morgan Murphy Media–owned CBS affiliate in Madison; as a result, WISC cancelled its own 9 p.m. weeknight newscast it had produced for its subchannel TVW, "WISC-TV now providing news services for Fox 47," from Wisconsin State Journal, May 1, 2012 making Fox 47 News at 9 the only remaining prime time newscast in the Madison market until WMTV established its own 9 p.m. newscast on its The CW-affiliated subchannel in November 2016. Mirroring its agreement with WKOW, Fox 47 News at 9 originates not from WMSN's studios but from WISC's Raymond Road studios, uses WISC's news staff (except the main news anchors), and employs studio backdrops and Sinclair's standard news graphics that help differentiate the newscasts from those on WISC. It was also during this period with WISC (in February 2016) that Fox 47 News at 9 would move to a full-hour time period each night. Source: ChangingNewscasts.Wordpress.com, posted May 2, 2016
In 2018, Sinclair required all of its television stations to air a message that called out "biased and fake news" and says "national media outlets are publishing these same fake stories without checking facts first." However, because WMSN's newscast is produced by WISC-TV pursuant to the above-mentioned news-share agreement, no such segment was produced for WMSN, and was disclaimed as such on WMSN's social media channels.Anapol, Avery (April 2, 2018). " Sinclair-owned TV station chooses not to air media bias promo". The Hill. WMSN began to carry the second evening hour of Sinclair's The National News Desk upon its debut in 2021, and now also carries the three-hour morning block of that same program.
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In September 2010, WMSN-TV established its first digital subchannel, adding TheCoolTV music video network to subchannel 47.2. The subchannel would go dark in September 2012 at the expiration of Sinclair's carriage agreement with TheCoolTV. In July 2014, the channel was reactivated as an affiliate of GetTV, which would be replaced on Halloween, 2015 by Sinclair-owned sci-fi network Comet.
When it relocated to physical channel 11 in 2010, WMSN would add a third subchannel, 47.3, with content from The Country Network, later known as ZUUS Country. That network would be replaced in 2014 by the action-oriented Grit network. Grit would be replaced on June 1, 2017, by another action network, Sinclair-owned Charge!. On that same date, a fourth subchannel, 47.4, was activated and affiliated with TBD.
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