WRC-TV (channel 4) is a television station in Washington, D.C., serving as the market's NBC outlet. It is owned and operated by the network's NBC Owned Television Stations division alongside Class A Telemundo outlet WZDC-CD (channel 44). WRC-TV and WZDC-CD share studios on Nebraska Avenue in the Tenleytown neighborhood of Northwest Washington. Through a channel sharing agreement, the stations transmit using WRC-TV's spectrum from a tower adjacent to their studios.
History
The station traces its roots to experimental television station W3XNB, which was put on the air by the Radio Corporation of America, the then-parent company of NBC, in 1939. A construction permit with the commercial callsign WNBW (standing for "NBC Washington") was first issued on channel 3 (60–66 MHz, numbered channel 2 prior to 1946) on December 23, 1941. NBC requested this permit to be cancelled on June 29, 1942; later, the channel 3 allocation was reassigned to Harrisonburg, Virginia, on which the former Shennandoah Valley Broadcasting Company launched WSVA-TV (now WHSV-TV) in 1953.
On June 27, 1947, WNBW was re-licensed on channel 4 and signed on the air. Channel 4 is the second-oldest commercially licensed television station in Washington, after WTTG (channel 5), which signed on seven months earlier in December 1946. WNBW was also the second of the five original NBC-owned television stations to sign-on, behind WNBT in New York City and ahead of WNBQ in Chicago, WNBK in Cleveland and KNBH in Los Angeles. The station was operated alongside WRC radio (980 AM, now WTEM, and 93.9 FM, now WKYS).
On October 18, 1954, the television station's callsign changed to the present WRC-TV to match its radio sisters. The new calls reflected NBC's ownership at the time by RCA. It has retained its "-TV" suffix to this day, nearly four decades after the radio stations were sold off and changed call letters. The WNBW call sign was later used for the NBC affiliate in Gainesville, Florida, since the station's launch in 2008.
In 1955, while in college and serving as a puppeteer on a WRC-TV program, Jim Henson was asked to create a puppet show for the station. The series he created, Sam and Friends, was the first series to feature the Muppets, and launched the Jim Henson Company.
The second presidential debate between candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon was broadcast from the station's studios on October 7, 1960. David Brinkley's Washington segment of the Huntley-Brinkley Report originated at WRC-TV between 1956 and 1970, as did Washington reports or commentaries by Brinkley or John Chancellor on NBC Nightly News in the 1970s.
The earliest color videotape in existence is a recording of the dedication of WRC-TV's Washington studios on May 22, 1958. President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke at the event, introduced by NBC President Robert W. Sarnoff. Before Eisenhower spoke, Sarnoff pushed a button, which converted the previously black and white signal into color. It was also the first time a U.S. president had been videotaped in color.
At the time of its sign-on, channel 4 was one of two wholly network-owned stations in Washington, the other being DuMont's WTTG. DuMont was shut down in 1956, and for the next 30 years, WRC-TV was Washington's only network owned-and-operated station.
From the opening of its Nebraska Avenue facility in 1958 through 2020, WRC-TV housed NBC News' Washington bureau, out of which the network's long-running political affairs program Meet the Press was based. In January 2021, NBC News moved the bureau near Capitol Hill.
Telemundo affiliation
In September 2017, NBC announced they were to launch a new Telemundo owned-and-operated station based out of WRC-TV. ZGS Communications, owner of Washington's existing Telemundo affiliate WZDC-CD (channel 25), sold the station's channel allocation in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s 2017–18 incentive auction, accepting a $66 million payout to turn off its signal and continue operations by sharing the channel of another station. A Telemundo spokesperson stated that the sale of WZDC's spectrum "gave us the ability to take back the Telemundo affiliation for this market," without elaborating what that meant. NBC later purchased WZDC-CD with the intention of moving its over-the-air signal to that of WRC-TV through a channel-sharing agreement.