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WTVX (channel 34) is a television station licensed to Fort Pierce, Florida, United States, serving the West Palm Beach area as an affiliate of The CW. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside CBS affiliate WPEC (channel 12) and two low-power, Class A stations: MyNetworkTV affiliate WTCN-CD (channel 43) and Roar owned-and-operated station WWHB-CD (channel 48). The stations share studios on Fairfield Drive in Mangonia Park; WTVX's transmitter is located southwest of Palm City, Florida.
WTVX was established in Fort Pierce in 1966 and was the third—and successful—attempt to sustain a television station in that city. It was the CBS affiliate for areas north of Palm Beach County. In 1980, a new transmitter facility and substantial power increase added the Palm Beaches to its coverage area. A decade later, a network affiliation shuffle in the West Palm Beach market led to WTVX losing its CBS affiliation. After being spurned by ABC, WTVX became an independent station and shut down its news department. The station was sold to Krypton Broadcasting, which soon after struggled through a lengthy bankruptcy case that ended with WTVX being auctioned off. An affiliate of UPN from 1995 to 2006 and The CW since, the station has made several further and short-lived attempts at local news programming.
Indian River then spent $50,000 to acquire the studio and transmitter site along US 1 just south of the St. Lucie–Indian River county line, built for WTVI in 1960, from that station's founder, Gene Dyer. Indian River reinstalled equipment after the structure had been stripped several years prior.
WTVX went on the air on April 5, 1966, after broadcasting a test pattern since March 24. It immediately affiliated with CBS; previously, cable companies had imported Miami CBS affiliate WTVJ (channel 4). However, WTVX could not air every CBS show immediately because some sponsors withheld their programs from the new station. The new station's 26 kW of effective radiated power did not reach past Martin County. Due to WTVX's weak signal, WTVJ continued to claim the Palm Beaches as part of its primary coverage area; when that station opened a news bureau in West Palm Beach in 1970, 12.4 percent of its audience was said to come from Palm Beach County.
After a sale announcement in 1970 was later labeled "premature", the Minshall and Koblegard families—which by this point owned the entirety of the station—reached a deal in 1977 to sell WTVX to Frank Spain, owner of WTVA in Tupelo, Mississippi. However, a federal investigation into station practices was sparked when Edward Trent, an employee who had been fired the previous year, told the FCC that WTVX engaged in an illegal practice known as "clipping", replacing commercials and short credits sequences from network programs with local commercials. The commission proceeded to designate the renewal of WTVX's broadcast license for hearing on the matter. WTVX admitted to carrying out clipping in June 1978, claiming it had done so because it had oversold ad time; the station ultimately had its license renewed and paid a $10,000 fine. That allowed the sale of WTVX to Frank Spain to proceed.
Although the station came to dominate the Treasure Coast with its improved facilities, the upgraded signal brought an end to a special arrangement. From 1972 to 1979, with the approval of CBS and NBC, WTVX carried Miami Dolphins home games that would have to be blacked out by West Palm Beach stations because their signals reached into the blackout radius around the Miami Orange Bowl; hotels on Singer Island invested in antenna systems to receive WTVX and attract patrons when Dolphins games were blacked out. (The earliest such telecast was Super Bowl II in 1968.) After fighting the Dolphins and the league in court for two years at an estimated cost to Spain of $250,000, the station lost its fight against NFL blackout policies in appeals court in 1982 and opted not to continue.
That January, NBC bought WTVJ, which was contracted to be a CBS affiliate through the end of 1988. CBS then affiliated with and bought WFOR-TV (channel 6), Miami's Fox affiliate, to carry its programming beginning at the start of 1989. Technical limitations stemming from the addition of channel 6 to Miami several years after the other VHF assignments and the need to maintain spacing to WKMG-TV meant that WCIX's transmitter was sited further south than the other Miami stations. This left key areas of Broward County having to rely on translator stations or cable to watch WCIX. CBS feared a loss of service in Broward, and WTVX's signal did not reach this area. After contacting both of the VHF stations in West Palm Beach—NBC affiliate WPTV-TV (channel 5) and ABC affiliate WPEC (channel 12)—it reached a deal with WPEC.
This put ABC in the position of searching for a new affiliate among three stations: WTVX, West Palm Beach Fox affiliate WFLX (channel 29), and WPBF (channel 25), a station whose studios were under construction in Palm Beach Gardens and which was projected to sign on as an independent. Conventional wisdom when the WPEC switch to CBS was announced gave WTVX a strong chance of emerging with the ABC hookup. WTVX was the most established of the three stations and the only one with a functioning news department. Bob Morford, the news director, told his staff in a memo, "The bottom line for WTVX is that we expect we will become the next ABC affiliate for this market." In September, officials from the three stations made presentations to ABC executives in New York. WTVX was seen as being in the lead, with its established operation, but it was not based in West Palm Beach, the largest city in the media market. WFLX had solid ratings and viewership that extended into Broward County, though it had no news department. However, WPBF was cited by media as a "dark horse" and by WPTV's general manager as a "sleeper" because of its proposed technical facilities and the track record of one of its owners, John C. Phipps, in running Tallahassee-area CBS affiliate WCTV, one of the most successful television stations in the country.
In October, ABC handed down its decision: it had selected WPBF, which had offered to pay the first-ever fee to affiliate with a network. Longstanding industry practice called for networks to pay affiliates. The news reverberated with a thud in Fort Pierce; Morford cited his station's location as a disadvantage and believed that ABC was more interested in affiliating with a West Palm Beach–area station instead. The very same officials that just two months prior had stated they had "not even contemplated" life as an independent stared independence straight in the face. Morford declared the 35-person news staff would remain and that the station would reinforce its commitment to local news. Morford noted that, while movies and syndicated shows would be on the new lineup, "the world does not need another movie channel". Meanwhile, Frank Spain put WTVX on the market in November, trying to gauge its value without a network affiliation; he opted not to take the various offers that ranged from $9 to $24 million—half the $49 million value it had as a CBS affiliate.
On January 1, 1989, the affiliation switch took effect, and WTVX relaunched as a general-entertainment independent with a lineup heavy on syndicated shows and news. The loss of CBS programming cost the station two-thirds of its total-day audience and 60 percent of its prime time audience. WTVX initially moved its late local newscast to 10 p.m., the first such program in the Palm Beach/Treasure Coast market. A Maryland real estate developer obtained an option to buy the station, but no deal was ever reached, and WTVX came off the market for a second time. However, by April 1990, the station was courting three suitors, and though Frank Spain initially backed out at the eleventh hour of a deal with Krypton Broadcasting, the firm, owned by Elvin Feltner of Singer Island, reached an agreement to spend $8 million to purchase WTVX. The purchase was part of a long-term plan to own 12 television stations in Florida. The sale was approved in February 1991 and consummated that April.
In a court-ordered settlement in October 1993, Feltner relinquished all day-to-day control of WTVX and WNFT. A December report from a federal examiner, Soneet Kapila, suggested turning over their operations to a trustee. Kapila noted that Feltner had spurned an offer from Paxson Communications Corporation, which at the time was pursuing an entrance into television, for all three stations. He found that the Krypton stations needed an infusion of new capital and that they could not be sold if Feltner was still involved.
Even though Feltner was able to settle the suit filed by Internationale Nederlanden Bank in March 1994, and Feltner sued the syndicators alleging a conspiracy to hurt his stations, it was not enough. Columbia Pictures won an $8.8 million claim in the WTVX–WNFT case in July, when a federal judge found the stations had committed willful copyright infringement (in 1995, MCA would win a $9 million judgment upheld in 1997), and in September, the same week WTVX secured affiliation with the new United Paramount Network (UPN) for 1995, the stations were ordered to auction in October.
Five companies placed initial bids on WTVX. A firm backed by the chief operating officer for the two stations, Dan Dayton; local radio station owner Amaturo Group (which proposed to turn over operations to WPEC); WPFP, a company bankrolled by WFLX owner Malrite Communications; and Price Communications, which once owned radio stations in West Palm Beach, all lost out to a $12.65 million bid by Whitehead Media, owned by Silver King Broadcasting vice president Eddie Whitehead and financed by Paxson (which had just purchased WPBF). A judge approved the winning bids for WTVX and WNFT; Feltner unsuccessfully challenged the Whitehead sale, claiming that Paxson's hand in operations would constitute a then-illegal duopoly. The FCC tossed his challenge in early June, allowing Whitehead Media to close on the sale and enter into a local marketing agreement (LMA) with Paxson to supply its programming.
Even before the Whitehead deal closed, WTVX had begun to turn itself around. With UPN programming as well as an affiliation with The WB, and a trustee at the helm, fiscal improvements were felt at the station. When Whitehead assumed control, it fired some of the station's 43 staffers, including the general manager, and operations moved from Fort Pierce to WPBF's Palm Beach Gardens studios, with its transmitter facility and use of WPBF's Treasure Coast bureau as a sales office remaining its only presence on the Treasure Coast. (WTCE-TV, the Trinity Broadcasting Network station in Fort Pierce, then occupied the studio building.)
After Paxson decided to shop the two stations to separate acquirers, WTVX was the first to find a buyer: the Paramount Stations Group, which paid $34.3 million. (Because of an overlapping contour with WBFS-TV in Miami, which it owned, the license assets were assigned to another company, Straightline Communications, which then leased them to Paramount along with those of WLWC in New Bedford, Massachusetts.) When Paramount took control, it made two immediate changes: it dropped The WB, UPN's chief competitor (from which it only aired prime time shows at times not conflicting with UPN), and it moved operations to Miami, retaining a West Palm Beach office for sales, engineering, and a public affairs staffer.
In 2000, after the FCC legalized television duopolies, Paramount parent company Viacom merged with CBS, which additionally owned WFOR-TV in Miami, and purchased WTVX outright. All three stations were run from Miami under one general manager. That same year, WB programming returned to WTVX, once again airing in off hours on channel 34; the entire network lineup moved from WWHB-CD to WTVX in April 2002 but returned to WTCN-CD in 2005. When UPN and WB merged to form The CW in 2006, WTVX was among 11 charter CBS-owned stations to be announced as an outlet of the new service.
When WTVX went independent, it initially maintained its newscasts, launching the first 10 p.m. newscast in the West Palm Beach market. However, station management discovered the newscasts attracted an audience incompatible with the rest of WTVX's programming. Ratings fell considerably, and WTVX spent the first several months of the year cutting newscast after newscast (ending up with just 5:30, 6, and 11 p.m. newscasts), while the news staff dropped from 40 to 16 people, and many of those that remained began to look for jobs elsewhere. The weekend newscast was axed in June 1989, and the station then proceeded to shutter its news department altogether on August 4. The market's Big Three affiliates, all based in West Palm Beach, each bought time on WTVX's final broadcast to woo its news viewers and promote their coverage of the Treasure Coast.
Four Points would make a second, short-lived attempt at starting local news using a hybrid approach from 2008 to 2009, sensing an opportunity to provide an alternative to WFLX's newscast. The half-hour CW West Palm News at Ten was produced using local reporters in the market—with a total of 30 West Palm Beach-based staff—and news and weather presenters at KUTV in Salt Lake City.
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In 2022, WWHB-CD's main subchannel began to be officially hosted on WTVX as part of the deployment of ATSC 3.0 (Next Gen TV) on WWHB-CD, though WTVX itself is not broadcast in 3.0.
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