.
Local productions Some of WJBK's early productions included popular children's shows. ''Milky's Movie Party'' starring Milky the
Clown, played by magician Clarence R. Cummings Jr., was one of the station's first locally produced children's programs from 1950 to 1955. The program featured a mix of
cartoons and
westerns with Cummings performing magic tricks with other acts in front of a live audience. Cummings would eventually take the Milky character to WXYZ-TV and the former WWJ-TV (now WDIV). Other original WJBK children's programs included a
cowboy-themed show with Sagebrush Shorty, played by
ventriloquist Ted Lloyd, with his sidekick dummy Skinny Dugan that aired from 1956 to 1960, featuring a mix of children's activities and various other characters that interacted with Lloyd. After airing first on the former WWJ-TV and CKLW-TV, performer Art Cervi would obtain the
Bozo the Clown franchise for Detroit and perform the character at WJBK beginning in 1975. During its run at the station, the program would be syndicated from WJBK to cities including New York City, Los Angeles,
Las Vegas and
Wichita, Kansas. WJBK also produced one of Detroit's first morning talk shows, ''Ladies' Day with Chuck Bergeson
, which aired from 1952 to 1959. The hour-long show included games, contests, and interviews with the biggest stars of the time including Lucille Ball and Red Skelton. Bergeson also hosted other WJBK shows in the 1950s including Your TV Golf Pro
and The Name Game''.
With This Ring was a nationally syndicated
religious program produced at the studios of WJBK from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s. The weekly 15-minute show hosted by
Roman Catholic priest Raymond Schlinkert featured lectures and advice about marriage and family life. The program was syndicated to several other U.S. commercial stations, usually shown immediately following the station's sign-on or before sign-off on Sundays. WJBK would also produce Sunday
public affairs/interview shows over the years including
Focus Detroit, hosted by reporters Woody Willis and Beverly Payne in 1973;
Sunday in Detroit, hosted by news anchor Kathy O'Brien, would air around 1980 and WJBK business reporter and news anchor Murray Feldman also hosted a Sunday business and financial program in the mid-1990s called
Moneywise. WJBK produced a local version of the syndicated program
PM Magazine from 1978 to the mid-1980s. The show changed titles over the years eventually becoming known as
PM Detroit – it also had various hosts included Ronnie Klemmer, Lorrie Kapp, Gary Cubberly and Mattie Majors. The station would regularly reschedule CBS' daytime game shows and it would also move the soap opera
Guiding Light from its usual network airtime of 3 p.m. ET to 10 a.m., with episodes airing on a
one-day delay. WJBK would also preempt the
CBS late night schedule with syndicated
reruns including
Cheers and late night
movies until the debut of the
Late Show with David Letterman in 1993, when the station cleared the show at 11:35 p.m. After the affiliation switch, WJBK maintained its existing schedule, with the exception of the expansion of its news programming including the move and conversion of its 11 p.m. newscast to an hour-long broadcast at 10 p.m. As Fox offered less network programming, especially during the daytime hours, WJBK would fill its schedule with more syndicated programs and off-network reruns. However, the station, like its fellow former New World stations, never ran the
Fox Kids children's programming block. That block would remain on former Fox affiliate WKBD before eventually moving to
WADL (channel 38) and then WDWB-TV (channel 20, now
WMYD). In 2014, WJBK cleared
Steve Rotfeld Productions'
Xploration Station block, making it the first time the station has ever cleared Fox children's programming.
Sports programming Detroit Tigers From the 1950s to the 1970s, WJBK was a pioneer in Detroit sports broadcasting. In 1949, it was the first television station in Michigan to broadcast live Detroit Tigers baseball and Detroit Lions football games. In the 1960s, longtime Tigers broadcaster and former player
George Kell hosted the pregame show
Tigers Warm Up on the field during batting practice. During the
2007 season, the station aired some regular season Tigers games produced by Fox Sports Detroit. In
2025, the Tigers announced that WJBK would simulcast 10 games from
FanDuel Sports Network Detroit (the former Fox Sports Detroit), including the home opener on April 4. WJBK also airs Tigers games nationally through
Fox's MLB package (including the Tigers'
2006 and
2012 World Series appearances); WJBK also aired select Tigers games featured on CBS' MLB coverage from 1990 to 1993.
Detroit Pistons WJBK also televised
Detroit Pistons games from the time that the team's relocated to Detroit from
Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1957, until 1972; the team's games began airing on WKBD-TV the following season. The Pistons would also air on WJBK during nationally televised games on
CBS from 1973 to 1990; WJBK televised both of the first two Pistons NBA Finals championships of 1989 and 1990 (game 5 of the latter series was the last NBA game aired on CBS).
Detroit Red Wings Detroit Red Wings NHL games, produced again by Fox Sports Detroit, would also be aired on the station from
2003 to
2007. In March 2007, WJBK began broadcasting Red Wings games in high definition. A package of five Red Wings games, all simulcasts from FanDuel Sports Network Detroit, would return to the station in
2025. Previously the Red Wings aired on the station various times between 1956 and 1980 through broadcast rights held by
CBS and again from 1995 to 1999 through
Fox's contract with the NHL; this included the team's
Stanley Cup Final victories in
1997 and
1998.
Detroit Lions WJBK has had a long-standing relationship with the NFL's Detroit Lions (first with CBS, now Fox), having carried most of its games since 1956, when CBS started airing NFL games. Except for the first three months of the
1994 season (before the affiliation switch took effect), it has been the unofficial regular-season "home" station of the Lions ever since, including coverage of the team's
Thanksgiving Day home games in odd-numbered years. For the first 15 weeks of the 1994 season, the games aired on lame-duck Fox outlet WKBD. However, regular season home games were subject to the
NFL's local television blackout policy. This occurred five times during the
Lions' winless season of 2008 when five home games were blacked out due to low ticket sales. However, in 2015, the NFL decided to lift the blackout rules on an experimental basis, meaning that Lions games were shown on Channel 2 regardless of ticket sales; this policy was continued the next season in
2016 as well, and has continued indefinitely as of
2019. In previous years, WJBK had also televised Lions preseason games as the flagship station of the
Detroit Lions Television Network and produced pregame and postgame shows. Those preseason broadcast rights were then held by WWJ-TV and then WXYZ-TV until 2015, when WJBK once again became the official preseason station of the Lions as well. As a CBS affiliate, WJBK aired the network's coverage of
Super Bowl XVI, which was hosted locally at the
Pontiac Silverdome. WJBK's sportscasters have also been team play-by-play announcers through the years with
Van Patrick doing Tigers, Lions and
Notre Dame Football games.
Ray Lane would be paired with
Hall of Fame announcer
Ernie Harwell on Tigers' radio broadcasts from 1967 to 1972; and current sports director
Dan Miller performs radio play by play for the Lions.
News operation WJBK currently broadcasts 68½ hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with 11½ hours each weekday and 5½ hours each on Saturdays and Sundays); in regards to the number of hours devoted to news programming, it is the highest local newscast output among all broadcast television stations in the state of Michigan. In addition, WJBK produces a sports highlight program on Sunday nights following the 10 p.m. newscast called
Sports Works (which is also the branding of the sports segments seen within its newscasts); the show is hosted by either WJBK sports director Dan Miller or sports anchor/reporter Woody Woodriffe, and typically features a roundtable discussion with members of the Detroit sports media including
Sean Baligian, formerly of
WDFN (1130 AM);
Bob Wojnowski from the
Detroit News;
Pat Caputo from the
Oakland Press and
WXYT-FM (97.1) and
Tony Ortiz from WXYT-FM. WJBK operates a fleet of
Ford E350 ENG vehicles with
microwave transmission and
video editing capabilities. The station also has (
SNG) mobile
satellite uplink capability. For aerial news coverage, WJBK shares a
Eurocopter AS350BA A-star news
helicopter with WXYZ-TV and WDIV-TV as part of a
Local News Service agreement. The aircraft has
HD video capability and goes by the
call sign "Red Bird" (although WJBK brands the helicopter as "SkyFox"). In 2009, WJBK and WXYZ-TV expanded the LNS agreement to allow the sharing of local news video. In an effort to cut expenses, WJBK and WXYZ's respective owners, Fox and the E. W. Scripps Company, established an LNS in all markets where both companies own stations. The stations pool newsgathering resources and share video during coverage of general news events. While the news department primarily focuses its local news coverage on
southeastern Michigan, it also provides coverage of larger stories in southwestern Ontario, northern Ohio and the rest of Michigan.
TV-2 Eyewitness News Through much of the 1960s and 1970s WJBK's
TV-2 Eyewitness News dominated the newscast ratings in the Detroit market. This began with
news anchor Jac LeGoff and grew when LeGoff was paired with newscaster John Kelly. Other popular longtime Detroit television personalities including Joe Weaver,
Jerry Hodak, Van Patrick and Marilyn Turner would also be a part of WJBK's ratings success. The station's ratings would begin to wane in the mid-1970s after then-ABC O&O WXYZ-TV hired away WJBK's and
WWJ-TV's top talent, including Kelly and Turner and eventually LeGoff and Hodak. However, by 1980, the station's news ratings steeply declined with the growing dominance of WXYZ. Also by this time WDIV's new owners,
Post-Newsweek Stations, were making aggressive changes to bolster its station's image and ratings from third place. By 1982, management at WJBK replaced most of the staff, which sank the station's news ratings further into third place, from where it would almost never recover.
Mornings WJBK had a tradition of producing its own morning news shows instead of airing CBS' morning news programs, beginning with a 7:30 a.m. newscast in 1969. The newscast would soon expand to an hour starting at 7 am. It became a mix of news, interviews and features and would be renamed
Good Morning, Detroit and eventually moved to 8 am. On Wednesday, May 6, 2015, WJBK's morning show became the subject of notoriety for a
blooper, wherein an anchor hoped the middle day of the week, which is often referred to as "
hump day", would have clear skies, and turn out to be a "
dry hump day". In the fall of 2018, WJBK begin expanding its current morning newscasts to 8 hours with addition of half-hour starting at 4 am. On September 19, 2022,
Fox 2 News Morning expanded to noon, with the midday newscast pushed back into the noon hour.
Ratings As of February 2012, WJBK's
Fox 2 News Morning has consistently remained the Detroit market's highest-rated local morning newscast (6–7 a.m., 4.5 rating/17 share). After years of faltering at a distant third against WDIV and WXYZ, WJBK began to make gains in its audience growth in other newscasts. While WDIV continued to have the most-watched evening and late newscasts, WJBK's 10 p.m. news (7.5 rating/12 share) remains the highest-rated prime time newscast in
Metro Detroit. Its early evening 5 and 5:30 p.m. newscasts (6.0/13) have surpassed WXYZ-TV's longtime dominant 5 p.m. newscast (5.8/13) for second place, while WJBK's 6 p.m. newscast (5.1/10) has become a very close third moving within one rating point to WXYZ's newscast in that timeslot (6.1/12). Since debuting in 2007, WJBK's 11 p.m. newscast
Newsedge has been in third place overall (5.0 rating/9 share).
Notable current on-air staff •
Dan Miller – sports director; also
SportsWorks host •
Lee Thomas – entertainment reporter •
Rob Wolchek – "Problem Solvers" investigative and "Hall of Shame" feature reporter
Notable former on-air staff •
Bill Bonds – news anchor and interviewer (1995–1998) •
Ray Lane – sports anchor (1961–1982) •
Joseph "J. P." McCarthy – interview show host (occasionally from 1972 to 1986) ==Technical information==