is an owned-and-operated television station of the
News Corporation -owned
Fox Broadcasting Company , based in
Chicago, Illinois . The station operates on channel 32, though it is identified on the air as simply '''"Fox Chicago."''' WFLD is co-owned with
WPWR-TV (channel 50), Chicago's
UPN affiliate. WFLD's transmitter sits on top of the
John Hancock Center . Chicago is the largest market with a Fox station on the UHF dial.
WFLD is a typical Fox station with about 35 to 40 hours a week of news along with syndicated first run talk/court/reality shows, off-network sitcoms, Fox's primetime network programmimg, and sports.
The station began life on
January 4 ,
1966 , from its downtown Chicago studios. Its founding owners were
Field Enterprises , which also owned the ''
Chicago Sun-Times '' and, most notably, the
Marshall Field's department store chain. The station was christened the "Station of Tomorrow" by the ''Sun-Times'' in an April
1966 article because of its innovative technical developments in broadcasting its signal.
Field Enterprises sold a majority ownership in WFLD to
Kaiser Broadcasting in
1972 , and the two companies' new partnership would see WFLD joining Kaiser's stable of
UHF independent stations in
Los Angeles ,
San Francisco ,
Boston ,
Philadelphia ,
Cleveland , and
Detroit . In
1977 , Kaiser ended the partnership by selling its share of the stations back to Field Enterprises. In
1983 , Field sold WFLD to
Metromedia as part of a company-wide liquidation. Metromedia's television stations, including WFLD, were sold to the
News Corporation in
1986 , and they formed the core of the new Fox Broadcasting Company.
WFLD for much of the
1970s and
1980s broadcast
Chicago White Sox games, and later those of the
Chicago Bulls . That was until arch-rival
WGN -TV acquired broadcast rights to both teams in
1990 (Chicago-area attorney and real estate investor
Jerry Reinsdorf owns both franchises). To counter-program against its more established
VHF rivals, Channel 32 offered documentaries, adult dramas, Westerns, and live sports. WFLD was also noteworthy as the longtime home of the local B-movie program ''
Svengoolie '', which currently airs on rival station
WCIU .
- A---S---H_(TV_series)" class="copylinks">M---A---S---H '', '' All In The Family '', and '' Happy Days ''. The station finally beat WGN-TV in the ratings, and the two stations went head to head throughout the 1980s.
Under the new Fox ownership, the station continued to compete aggressively in the market. Now known on-air as ''Fox 32'', the station expanded its news presence as well. In addition to its 9pm newscast, which it has had since the early 1980s, the station started airing a morning newscast called ''Fox Thing in the Morning'' in place of the morning kids block.
The afternoon kids block, which became ''
Fox Kids '' by
1993 , continued on the station, as well as the top-rated off-network sitcoms in the evening. It also added more first-run talk shows and court shows. When Fox ended the weekday kids block in January of 2002, WFLD added more first-run reality and talk shows to the lineup.
In the mid-
1990s , after many years of being known on the air as ''"Fox 32''" (or even ''"Fox Thirty-Two"''), the station rebranded itself as ''"Fox Chicago"'' due to the fact that many Chicagoans watch WFLD via cable (channel 12 or channel three on most area cable systems). Fox purchased WPWR-TV in 2002, and WPWR's operations were integrated into WFLD's facilities in downtown Chicago.
In January 2003, WFLD dropped the Fox Saturday morning cartoon block, now outsourced by Fox to producer "4 Kids TV", and the programs now air on WPWR in the same four-hour time block. In the near future, WFLD will be adding a Saturday morning newscast in its place from 6 to 9 AM (which for now syndicated kid shows and informercials air). WFLD is the first of the original six Fox-owned stations (owned prior to the New World stations purchase) to drop Fox's Saturday children's programming.
WFLD's news operation, ''"Fox News Chicago"'', has less of a
Tabloid feel than the news on other Fox stations. This is probably because
Walter Jacobson , longtime anchor at
WBBM-TV , was its main anchor from
1993 to
2005 . However, it is much flashier than the other news operations in town.
