WCPT-TV and WINT-TV WBXX began operation as
independent WCPT-TV ("Wonderful
Cumberland Plateau Television") on analog channel 55 (716–722 MHz) beginning October 3, 1976, from a tower site on Haley Mountain (Renegade Resort) in Cumberland County, Tennessee. It was owned by Edward M. "Mack" Johnson, who also owned 49% of WSCV AM in Crossville. The studios in Crossville were a former loan office. WCPT-TV produced a nightly local newscast, as well as a three-hour live
Saturday Night Jamboree; much of its syndicated fare came by bus the day after airing on Nashville's
WZTV. Viewers in Cookeville could view the station by translator on channel 23; it also maintained a facility there. The station did look at obtaining an ABC affiliation, but the station needed to serve 1,500 more households to make the arrangement worthwhile. It also tried to move to channel 7 in 1977, which the station opted not to pursue further after meeting with opposition from
WTVK. Initially, WCPT-TV ran a mix of religious shows, some low-budget syndicated movies and westerns, and some cartoons, as well as sporting shows and public affairs programs. By the early 1980s, more movies and drama shows aired as well as cartoons. Channel 55 was sold to Calvin C. Smith, who owned stations in Kentucky, and John A. Cunningham in 1979. In February 1980, citing poor reception and failing equipment, they asked to switch from channel 55 to channel 20, which was reserved as educational, and make 55 the non-commercial allocation for Crossville; this was approved and WCPT-TV was ordered to move to channel 20 effective August 13. Additionally, Smith and Cunningham were approved to increase channel 20's effective radiated power to 2,818kW (it had signed on with just 16) in 1981, but those facilities were never implemented. Still operating at low power, the station became WINT-TV on December 27, 1982, and in 1983, the station was sold mostly to Larry Hudson, with Cunningham retaining 10 percent. In 1988, WINT-TV aired religious programming. In 1995, CW TV, headed by Cynthia Willis, acquired the station for $700,000 by way of Crossville TV,
LP. CW applied to move the transmitter site to Upper Windrock, an outcropping on Buffalo Mountain along the Cumberland Plateau above Oliver Springs, Tennessee, and boost power to 3,630 kW—covering Knoxville.
Becoming WBXX In 1997, the partners in Crossville TV LP sold the license to
ACME Communications. ACME immediately changed the call letters to WBXX-TV, and in October 1997, channel 20 relaunched from its new facilities as Knoxville's affiliate of
The WB. It was the second station for ACME, behind
KWBP in Portland, Oregon, which it had acquired that June. The station also ran select
UPN programming during 2001 and 2002, as that network did not have a Knoxville affiliate at the time. WBXX was consistently one of the highest-rated WB stations in the country, and was recognized as such by The WB network. After being known as "WB20" since signing on, WBXX rebranded as "East Tennessee's WB" in September 2003. When the station took affiliation with The CW, it was renamed "East Tennessee's CW". WBXX rebranded again, to "CW20", in August 2008.
A decade of sales In February 2011, ACME Communications announced a deal to sell the station to
Virginia-based
Lockwood Broadcast Group. The sale was approved by the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on March 21 with the consummation being completed on May 6. From 1998 until 2004, the station aired a series of interstitials during children's programming called
WB 20 Kids Club (later
Dubba Clubba) hosted by
comedian Jackson Bailey (known as "Joe Cool"). The interstitials featured information and contests to viewers in several vignettes each weekday covering topics such as science, biology, conservation, music, and pet care. From 2015 to 2019, WBXX has broadcast
Atlantic Coast Conference football and men's
basketball games syndicated from the
Raycom Sports–operated
ACC Network, some of which were shared with the main channel of
CBS affiliate WVLT-TV. Those games were previously broadcast on
MyNetworkTV affiliate
WVLT-DT2 from 2009 until the end of the 2014–2015 season. On October 1, 2015,
Gray Television announced that it would acquire WBXX-TV from Lockwood. The purchase was made as part of Gray's acquisition of the broadcasting assets of
Schurz Communications; as part of the deal, Lockwood received
KAKE in
Wichita, Kansas (which Gray put up for sale following the deal with Schurz), and paid $11.2 million to Gray. Gray (through WVLT-TV, Inc.) took the operations of the station via
Local Marketing Agreement. The sale was completed on February 1, 2016. On June 25, 2018, Gray Television announced that they would acquire the assets of
Raycom Media, who had been owned
Fox affiliate
WTNZ-TV since 1996 for $3.6 billion. Due to FCC rules, Gray kept the existing duopoly of WVLT-TV and WBXX-TV and sell WTNZ, since WTNZ and WVLT-TV rank among the four highest-rated stations in the Knoxville market in total-day viewership. On August 20, 2018, it was announced that Gray would sell WTNZ to former owner Lockwood Broadcast Group, who owned
WKNX-TV since 2013 in a group deal that see Lockwood to acquire
WFXG-TV in
Augusta,
WPGX-TV in
Panama City and
WDFX-TV in
Dothan. The sale was completed on January 2, 2019. ==Newscasts==